A Very Few Excellent Books for Those Wishing to Pursue
a Charlotte Mason Education

• Why Another Booklist
• For the youngest Children
• Children 6-12
• Poetry, et.al.

Why Another Booklist?

There are many good booklists available (CE's 1000 Good Books List, Sonlight, Wholeheart Ministries, Books Children Love, Honey for a Child's Heart, etc), but it was felt that there was a need for a more concise list that would address Charlotte Mason's standards and separate the truly excellent from the good but less necessary books. A shorter list of only the very best books might be less intimidating to sift through as well. Since Charlotte Mason used living books for nature study and geography, there are some suitable books for those purposes included here.

This was a task that none of the participants (Karen Glass, Susan Craven, and Leslie Laurio) felt particularly qualified for and it is expected that more titles will be added as yet-undiscovered treasures are found that would benefit children learning in a CM style.

Many of these books are not light or easy reading, and there may be a couple that parents either choose not to read for one reason or another or can't find. However, if 90 percent of these books are read by (or to) children up to age 12 and supplemented with other worthy books from the many other good booklists, they will be getting an excellent education. After age 12, the CE 1000 Good Books list is sufficient and complete enough for Charlotte Mason students.

Some of these books may be unfamiliar and some may wonder why certain books are listed as necessary while other well-known books that other homeschoolers use are not included. Each title was deliberately and carefully considered with the thought that each book must be nothing less than a tried-and-true classic and meet the high standards for excellence in literary quality that Charlotte Mason herself would have insisted upon, keeping in mind books that have infiltrated the general culture, and which are often referred to in other books. Charlotte Mason was very clear that a child "should have no book which is not a child's classic." (Vol. 1 p. 232)

It will immediately be obvious that the list of books for prereaders is conspicuously short. After reading Charlotte's words: "Guard the nursery; let nothing in that has not the true literary flavor; let the children grow up on a few books read over and over, and let them have none, the reading of which does not cost an appreciable mental effort." (Vol. 5, p. 215) "Away with books, and "reading to"-- for the first five or six years of life. The endless succession of storybooks, scenes, shifting like a panorama before the child's vision, is a mental and moral dissipation..." (Vol. 5 p. 216), it was observed that, with very few exceptions, there are not many picture books that can genuinely be considered "great." Children who are fed on a diet of books rich in content from the start will have an easier time moving on to Kipling, Scott, Dickens and Shakespeare.

If these books seem too difficult for children, it must be remembered that Charlotte Mason used such books in her own schools. And young minds can be trained and acclimated to these books which nourish them with ideas. "They must be educated up to it...delight in a fine thought, well set, does not come by nature....to turn out men and women with enough exact knowledge for the occasion of life and with wits on the alert for chances of promotion, that is what most schools pretend to, and, indeed, do, accomplish. ..a classical education does more, turns out men with intellects cultivated *and* trained, who are awake to every refinement of thought, and yet ready for action." (Vol. 5 pg 213)

These are CM-type books that should not be missing from a child's education, books that will help to build up a child's mind in preparation to read the 100 Great Books. There is a high standard expected in a CM education, although the gaps can be filled in with lighter, wholesome reading from the many various other homeschool booklists. However, the lighter reading should not be allowed to edge out the best books.

Poetry on this booklist was limited to the great poets who seemed to exemplify Charlotte Mason's view of poetry as food for the soul: "Poetry is, perhaps, the most searching and intimate of our teachers...Poetry supplies us with tools for the modeling of our lives, and the use of these we must get at for ourselves... What we digest we assimilate, take into ourselves, so that it is part and parcel of us, and no longer separable." (Vol. 4 pg 71-72) "The best thoughts of the best minds taking form as literature, and at its highest as poetry, or as poetry rendered in the plastic forms of art." (Vol. 4 p 157)

Books that are linked are available free, online.

Youngest Children:

The Bible (getting children used to the flow of the KJV is a good idea)
Aesop for Children illustrated by Milo Winter
Mother Goose with nice illustrations, such as by Kate Greenaway
James Herriot's Treasury for Children by James Herriot
Now We Are Six/ When We Were Very Young by A. A. Milne
Winnie the Pooh/ The House on Pooh Corner By A. A. Milne
Beatrix Potter books (Peter Rabbit, etc)
Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson

Poems and Prayers for the Very Young by Martha G. Alexander is a nice, inexpensive first poetry book.
Egermeier's Bible Story Book by Elsie Ergermeier
Mother West Wind's Children and others by Thornton Burgess

Children 6-12:

Aesop's Fables
Little Women and others by Louisa M. Alcott
Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Anderson
Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard Atwater
Peter Pan by James M. Barrie
Wonderful Wizard of Oz and others by Frank Baum
Songs of Innocence by William Blake
Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink
Age of Fable and others by Thomas Bulfinch
Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford
Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Abraham Lincoln and others by Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire
Daniel Boone by James Daugherty
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Poetry of Walter De La Mare
Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens (for older children)
Child's History of England by Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist Charles Dickens
Poetry of Emily Dickinson
Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge
Elizabeth Enright's books
Poetry of Eugene Field
Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes
Geneveive Foster History books (George Washington's World, John Smith's World, etc)
Parables from Nature by Margaret Gatty
Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank Gilbreth
Old Yeller by Fred Gipson
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm (also called Household Stories)
Story of the Romans and others by H. A. Guerber
Complete Peterkin Papers by Lucretia Hale
Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Wonder Book For Boys and Girls by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry
St. George and the Dragon by Margaret Hodges (a retelling of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen)
Books by Holling C. Holling (Paddle to the Sea, Pagoo, etc)
Prisoners of the Tower by Brooke Hunt
Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
Sketch Book by Washington Irving (also called Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon)
Rasselas by Samuel Johnson (for older children)
Heroes of Asgard by A. & E. Keary
Eothen by Alexander Kinglake (geography)
Water Babies by Charles Kingsley
Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley
Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley (nature)
Heroes by Charles Kingsley
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling
Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
Lassie Come Home by Eric Knight
Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb
Tales of the Arabian Nights by Andrew Lang
Blue Fairy Book and others by Andrew Lang
Yellow Fairy Book by Andrew Lang
Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang
Red Fairy Book by Andrew Lang
Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
Missionary Travels by David Livingstone
Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting
Call of the Wild by Jack London
Secrets of the Woods by William J. Long (nature study)
The School of the Woods by William J. Long
The Little Brother of the Bear by William J. Long
Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
At the Back of the North Wind and others by George MacDonald
Anne of Green Gables and others by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Gentle Ben by Walt Morey
Five Children and It and others by Edith Nesbit
The Borrowers by Mary Norton
Plutarch's Lives by Plutarch (Thomas North's transl. is preferred, but not online or as readily available as Arthur Clough's)
Pollyanna by Eleanor Porter
Otto of the Silver Hand by Howard Pyle
Story of King Arthur and His Knights by Howard Pyle
Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle
Old Peter's Russian Tales by Arthur Ransome
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
Sing Song by Christina Rossetti
King of the Golden River by John Ruskin
Bambi by Felix Salten
Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott Scott
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
Rolf in the Woods by Ernest Thompson Seton
Wild Animals I Have Known and others by Ernest Thompson Seton (nature)
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
Five Little Peppers by Margaret Sidney
Heidi by Joanna Spyri
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Penrod by Booth Tarkington (for older children, humorous story of an American boy and his dog, written in 1914)
Lad and other dog stories by Albert Payson Terhune
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain
The Story of Mankind by Hendrick Van Loon (history, preferred over Hillyer's A Child's History of the World for broader ages)
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and othes by Jules Verne
Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin
The "Little House" books by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
Poetry of William Wordsworth
The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss

Poetry by William Blake, Walter De La Mare, Emily Dickinson, Eugene Field, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Christina Rossetti and William Wordsworth can be found in poetry anthologies such as Favorite Poems Old and New by Helen Ferris.

Many of these are classics that should be in most public libraries.

Dover Books also sells many of these titles. They sell facsimile editions Howard Pyle's books, Christina Rossetti's Sing Song, William Blake's Songs of Innocence, with the original artwork. They also sell many classics books for one or two dollars, such as Favorite Poems of Childhood, which contains many classic poems. For a catalog, write to Dover Publications, 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola NY 11501-3582. They do not take phone orders or requests.