Fans pick 100 books like One Grain of Rice

Big numbers are just as amazing to kids as dinosaurs, and for the same reason. They’re so incredibly huge that they boggle the mind. This book helps kids comprehend big numbers using everyday objects and scenarios. If a million kids sat on each other’s shoulders, how high would they be able to reach? How long would it take to count to a million? Once they master a million, your kid will be well on their way to tackling quadrillions, nonillions, and, heaven help us, decillions!

Tangrams are ancient Chinese puzzles made of up to seven interlocking geometric shapes. As Grandfather Tang assembles his polygons, the animals he creates spring to life. You’ll be astonished to learn all the creatures you can make with a square, a parallelogram, and five triangles. Wooden or plastic tangram puzzles are easy (and inexpensive) to find online, but be sure to help your child make their own out of paper so they can get solid, hands-on experience seeing how they can transform a square into so many different shapes.

The imagination of a child should be nourished and fed–growing up, this book did just that for me. I could relate to the protagonist in the sense that I loved to learn–and to this day, I am a sponge for knowledge–but I was easily bored with the mundane, often creating worlds that led to my becoming an author.

This was probably one of the earliest works to cultivate that. The characters are rooted in real-life comparisons and still live in the back of my mind. It continues to resonate with me today because despite some tropes being beaten into the ground, this novel took simple concepts, like talking dogs and numbers and letters at war, and made them have a fantasy life of their own.

Among my children’s bedtime stories The Number Devil was a favourite. It’s about a boy who finds his school maths lesson dull and pointless. One night in his dreams he gets visited by the Number Devil, who introduces him to the astonishing patterns to be found in numbers. By making the lead character a maths-sceptic, the author carries the reader along so that we are all drawn into the hidden beauty of mathematics. The book has wonderful colour illustrations, which adds to its charm. Parents love it too.

I love how this short story collection traverses time but not location—the setting is the northeastern state of Meghalaya while the stories span 150 years. In these fifteen tales, folklore mixes with modern life and myth is steeped in the mundane. The result? The reader journeys through a rich smorgasbord of a multi-faceted Meghalaya and its people. Given the tendency to clump the seven northeastern states together, this book helps us view one of those states distinctively.

This is a non-fiction classic about ‘tiger culture’ of a remote part of India where tigers do not fear humans as they do elsewhere: in fact, they even hunt down and eat dozens of people every year in this giant Sundarbans swamp where natural prey is scarce. Montgomery is brilliantly evocative while bringing to life both nature and humans of the swamp, making the book a NY Times best-seller. The local culture, where tigers are loathed, feared, and revered as deities—all at the same—is portrayed stunningly. These habitats, tiger behaviors, and local cultures are strikingly different from the ones I describe in my book. Montgomery views the tiger through a filter of human culture, whereas I do so through a filter of hard ecology. Yet, we admire each other’s work because we are both under the spell of the same tiger.   

I went to the book launch in support of this author and had the pleasure of meeting him in person. I had not known much of his work previously but that has never stopped me from accepting an invitation to attend. I got the book home and made a start and was hooked by his elegant writing style. This is a book of short horror stories, each beautifully crafted, and inspirational as well as enjoyable. Collected works are a hard thing to get right, and Paulsen makes it look easy. 

Why garden at all? Isn't it a lot of work? I can always count on The Talking Vegetables, a retelling of a traditional African story, to delight toddlers and preschoolers. They revel in Spider's laziness as he shirks helping neighbors grow food at the community garden, and are just as delighted when he gets his comeuppance as the insulted vegetables refuse to let him get away without contributing to the team effort.

I recommend this Little Golden book because it would be a great avenue for discussion with adults and kids about the importance of self-reliance, hard work, and sharing. I think that what is taught about sharing resources among those who only contributed is not correct in all cases though. Some people may not be able to contribute because of their own personal circumstances (like due to their financial status, and health condition) but that doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve to have the right to those resources. Aside from the morals being taught, this book has very pretty illustrations. I have the 1942 version but the 2001 version of the story looks great as well. 

Cornish Folk Tales takes the reader on a journey into the heart of Cornish Storytelling.

I have listened to Mike O’Connor many times and he is a master storyteller. I love the Cornish Droll telling tradition; droll tellers went from place to place telling tales for a bed and a bite to eat. The narrators of Cornish Folk Tales, blind droll teller Anthony James and his guide young Jamie are a perfect combination.

Mike O’Connor, through Anthony tells the tales with anecdotes, music, history, and Cornish language. This book taught me how to approach folklore retelling in an accessible way.

Reading I felt myself beside the firesides of Cornwall, listening to tales of dragons, mermaids, giants, and saints; puzzling over riddles, and learning about Cornish traditions and music