Ten Books Every Child Should Own

Authored by Gavin McGuire on October 30, 2012

Posted in: Archive

UPDATE: The vote has ended! Over 13,000 people cast their ballots for their favorite children’s book, and we’ve announced the winner! Thanks to everyone who participated!

We’ve updated this blog post with the complete list of titles, for posterity’s sake.

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At First Book, our mission is to provide new, high-quality books to children from low-income families. We’ve gotten pretty good at it over the last twenty years. In fact, we’re about to distribute our 100 millionth book, and we want YOU to help us choose what it should be.

We know that books are critical to turning kids into readers and helping them become success stories – in school and in life. So we’ve put together a list of ten amazing books that we think every child should own as they grow up.

A Wrinkle in Time (Macmillan)
Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type (Simon & Schuster)
Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Abrams)
Eating the Alphabet (Houghton Mifflin)
Green Eggs and Ham (Random House)
Guess How Much I Love You (Candlewick Press)
Martin’s Big Words (Disney Publishing Worldwide)
The Snowy Day (Puffin)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Hachette)
Where the Wild Things Are (HarperCollins)

These aren’t just some of our favorites. These books are some of the all-time best-selling titles available on the First Book Marketplace, a website available exclusively to educators and program leaders that work with kids in need.

Voting begins today, Oct. 29, and continues through Nov. 9. To vote, visit firstbook.org/vote.

The winning title will be announced on Nov. 15.

In addition to the voting website, copies of all ten books will be available as a special package to all of the 40,000 schools and programs that make up the First Book network.

Anyone who works with kids in need is eligible to get books from First Book. In addition to the First Book Marketplace, where over 3,000 titles are available at low cost, First Book also regularly distributes large quantities of brand-new books donated by publishers, free of charge. To sign up, visit First Book on the web.