100 books like Harold's Fairy Tale

I dare you to read this book with a straight face!

This is a super fun classic collection of silly poetry that will tickle funny bones young and old. The simple line drawings tip the humor scale of each poem. The book is thick, 176 pages of rhyming nonsense. Just what the doctor ordered to put seriousness on the back burner and enjoy a giggle with friends and family.

This book is not about supply chain, but it is about dragons, and it definitely talks about a behind-the-scenes phenomenon that we see in the world. This is one of those lessons-wrapped-in-a-story books that I think are so effective… you don’t know you’re learning a universal truth about human nature until it jumps up cutely and breathes fire in your face.

In this case, the truth is that refusing to recognize the reality of an unpleasant situation will only make it worse. It’s better to name the dragon in the room and discuss it courageously instead of making blanket statements about why it doesn’t and can’t exist. At the end of the day, acknowledging our shared reality and talking about our struggles is something we can all get better at... because we, like dragons, just want to be seen.

A fact lost in their massive success in children’s books is that Stan and Jan Berenstain started as cartoonists.

In the 1940s and 1950s their work appeared in the likes of the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and McCall’s, and they had a series of best-selling “cartoon essay” books. Their famous bears debuted in 1962 as part of Beginner Books, a line created by Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, Helen Palmer Geisel, and Phyllis Cerf.

With 1978’s The Spooky Old Tree, The Berenstains created the quintessential early reader, using repetition and predictability, prepositional phrases, rich visuals, and high drama to captivate their young audience (and their parents). “Do they dare? Yes. They dare.”

Shrek! was a book before it was ever a wildly successful film franchise, but the book bears almost no resemblance to the movies.

Yes, William Steig’s ogre is both vile and reviled, and he has a donkey for a friend, but the story itself is very straightforward, detailing Shrek’s rampage across the countryside on his way to meet a “stunningly ugly princess” with whom he can live “horribly ever after.”

Steig had been a celebrated New Yorker cartoonist for almost four decades when he produced his first children’s book in 1968. He wrote and drew Shrek! when he was in his early 80s. He breaks the cardinal rule of using simple language, but makes up for it with fun-to-read-aloud choices in vocabulary and sentence structure, such as “The irascible dragon was preparing to separate Shrek from his noggin.”

A new take on the classic “Jack and the Beanstalk.” In this incredible graphic novel, Jack is a rambunctious young boy with a younger autistic sister named Maddy. During a visit to a fair, Jack trades his Mom’s car keys for a box of seeds. Together, Maddy and Jack plant a garden that actually results in attacking vegetables. Attacking with swords!

The character development is really excellent, and this first book ends on a cliffhanger. I love the drawing style and definitely recommend this series.

Tiffany Aching comes from a long line of sheepherders and seems to be an ordinary 12-year-old – until the day she sees something odd in the water, goes home and fetches her mother’s frying pan, puts her baby brother next to the brook and clobbers the monster that tries to snatch him. Tiffany, it seems, is a witch, and not your average witch either. With the help of the Wee Free Men, “Pictsies” who refuse to bow to the rule of the Queen of Faerie, she must journey into that dangerous realm to rescue the son of the local baron – upsetting all her village’s deeply held ideas about heroes and witches.

Every child should grow up with a neighbor like Miss Tillie to run to for support. She’s just the right mix of confidante and responsible adult. Starting with the art on the endpapers—nine gorgeous children, each with a different hairstyle, alternating with images of different plants—and ending with vibrant colors in the garden when the little girl sees the beauty in both short and long hair, this book reminds us to take a look inside & be happy with what we’ve got—and to take care of it along the way.

Not only does this book provide a translation of a nearly 1,000-year-old text on garden design – the oldest such text existing in the world, but it also includes extensive annotation and a carefully researched introduction to the cultural and historic influences on the development of Japanese gardens. This is a delightful combination of the technical detail and practical advice of the classic text with the author-translators’ descriptive explanation.

My favorite garden style is the Japanese garden. It is a simple refined style that is so peaceful and over the years I have learned that you don’t need to turn the whole yard into a Japanese garden. What I do now is use elements of this style in various parts of the garden. The book, Japanese Gardening, will provide you with great insight into various styles of Japanese gardening and make it easy for you to do the same. Add a Japanese walkway into a normal garden and make it special. Or use some of the minimalistic plants to add a calming feeling. This book will give you many great ideas.

This is a book that I have read and reread several times. The author is not a garden writer but a professor of Italian literature at Stanford University, and Gardens is a unique work in garden literature. Harrison’s essay – erudite, thoughtful, and fascinating – examines the urge to garden throughout history. The book takes you on a journey to all gardens – real and imagined – from the Garden of Eden to the Garden School of Epicurus and the homeless gardens in New York City, to Versailles and the Paradise gardens of Islam. With its wide-ranging topics and cultural references, the book invites repeated readings, especially when I want to think more deeply about what gardening reveals about our human condition.