By title

By author

Mo Willems

• The Complete Peanuts
• Charles M. Schulz

• The gold standard of comic strips. Fun for everyone; except Charlie Brown, who seems a little down on his luck.

• George and Martha: The Complete Stories of Two Best Friends Collector’s Edition
• James Marshall

• Lessons learned include: just because you've got a best friend doesn't mean you have to pour pea soup in your shoes. I try to re-read this before I start making new book.

• The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
• Bill Watterson

• When Hobbes is wise, Calvin is a stinker. When Hobbes is hungry, Calvin is in trouble.

• Go, Dog, Go!
• Philip D. Eastman

• A dog party in a tree? Wait for me, I’ve got to get my hat!

• Cul De Sac, This Exit

• The best comic strip you've never heard of. Alice and her family walk in the footsteps of Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, only sideways.

• Children at Play, A Cul-de-Sac Collection

Jason Reynolds

• The Young Landlords
• Walter Dean Myers

• It's a brilliantly gritty story about a bunch of kids who get swindled into taking over a slum building. Super creative, yet totally feasible in New York City.

• Kira-Kira
• Cynthia Kadohata

• The story takes place in the sixties in the segregated south. Black people know where they stand. White people know where they stand. But what about a Japanese family?

• Noggin
• John Corey Whaley

• Smart and hilarious story about a young man who is dying and his parents decide to cryogenically freeze his head. A few years later, he's back from the dead. And he's still in high school.

• The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
• Walter Mosley

• One of the gems that flew under the radar because Mosely is so prolific. But it's a sweet, yet biting story about an elder man, Ptolemy Grey, suffering from dementia.

• Erasure
• Percival Everett

• It's a weird book about a stuffy writer and his hatred for the industry. His frustration with his agent wanting him to write a "sellable" book pushes him to pen "street fiction" just as a middle finger to the corporate publishing structure. Madness ensues, and it's downright hilarious.

Michael Northrop

• Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal
• Ben Macintyre

• "Fantastic World War II nonfiction: a high-stakes British spy thriller that just happens to be true."

• Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made
• Stephan Pastis

• "Hilarious, endearing, and includes a polar bear - what more do you want? This book made me wish I could draw (or at least doodle really well)."

• Tales of H.P. Lovecraft
• H.P. Lovecraft

• "Lovecraft's stories are profoundly weird, insanely good, and they changed horror writing forever, and for the better (which is to say, weirder)."

• Rumble Fish
• S.E. Hinton

• "A short, tough book that hits hard and leaves a mark. Not as famous as The Outsiders, but it had just as big of an impact on me. It was the first novel I reread when I decided to write YA."

   

• A Separate Peace
• John Knowles

• "Darn near perfect: a little masterpiece that quietly tackles the big questions."

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• Homeland
• R.A. Salvatore

• "The first fifty pages of the Dark Elf Trilogy have enough swordplay and plot twists to make you gasp."

• The Tin Woodman of Oz
• L. Frank Baum

• "All the Oz books, actually. But I liked the Tin Woodsman the most, so this is the book I'm listing. Let's not psychoanalyze."

• The Belgariad
• David Eddings

• Also, The Mallorean. "When I was the new kid in school, the characters in these books were my buds. Funny, courageous, and there's 1000 pages worth of them."

• The Princess Bride
• William Goldman

• "Funny and clever and full of heart."

• Dragonlance: Chronicles and Legends

• by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. "I started with the computer game and then turned to the books. Lots of gods and glowy magic and giant spiders rearing in pain! Awesome."

Sam Potts

• Lou Gehrig, Boy of the Sandlots
• Guernsey Van Riper Jr.

• I think this is the first book I ever picked out on my own and read by myself. I'm pretty sure it is. I can tell you this for sure: Lou Gehrig always has been and always will be my favorite baseball player. And I'm from Boston, so that's saying something about the influence of this book.

• What Do People Do All Day?
• Richard Scarry

• Before there was the Internet, there was What Do People Do All Day? to describe the whole world and everything in it. Still hours of fun to explore every page.

• Stuart Little
• E.B. White

• He wears a sweater and sails a boat and drives a car and gets dumped on a garbage barge. Oh, and he's a mouse.

• Paddle To The Sea
• Holling C. Holling

• An adventure story starring a carved wooden boat that travels all the way across Canda. A carved wooden boat? you say. That's right: a carved wooden boat! I wished I could be that boat.

• The Great Brain, Great Brain Series
• John D. Fitzgerald

• This book and the other Great Brain books that followed are a handy how-to guide in the arts of scheming, swindling, cheating, and being a younger brother.

• Tintin Adventures (Series)
• Herge

• We just called them "Tintins." I'd say, "Do you have any new Tintins?" and my friend Jamie would say, "I just finished The Black Island. You can borrow it but you have to give it back." YOu always had to give them ack because these books are precious.

• Dubliners
• James Joyce

• Yeah it's James Joyce, but so what? He ain't so tough. The beauty of these stories is in their simplicity. You'll be able to taste the peas with vinegar and pepper in "Two Gallants." Read this when your friends are reading Catcher in the Rye. (And read that one, too.)

• Ficciones
• Jorge Luis Borges

• A character named Borges comes across an encyclopedia of a fictional land. Pierre Menard rewrites bits of Don Quixote verbatim, by coincidence. Funes remembers everything that happened, ever. Amazing. Worth re-reading about every five years or so.

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Essays and Arguments
• David Foster Wallace

• If you get far enough to read about the toilets in the title essay, you'll probably go on to read every word Wallace ever wrote. This book also contains the most terrifying description of baton-twirling you could ever read.

• Anatomy of a Typeface
• Anthony Lawson

• For the serious typographer as well as the font enthusiast: histories of all the classic typefaces from the days when fonts weighed about 50 pounds (because they were made out of lead). Simply indispensable.