5 Timeless Books to Enchant Kids

Reading a good book opens your mind, makes you grow, it’s like meeting a new travel companion and exploring new paths together.

Discovering the pleasure of reading, from childhood is very important and the benefits, as many educators and psychologists claim, are many: from enriching your vocabulary to increasing your ability to concentrate and analyze, to improving your self-esteem and confidence, and above all to open your spirit. In short, the sooner we start reading, the better. Familyandmedia has selected five books for you to read to your children. They will be their new travel companions. If you haven’t read them yet, it’s not too late to start the journey. Happy reading!

The Little Prince Mondadori, year 2015, pp. 136

Harcourt, Inc 2000, pp. 98

Mariner Books, 2001, pp. 96

The brief review cannot but begin with the book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which has marked entire generations of young readers. This is a poetic and philosophical tale for children but also suitable for adults. The Little Prince travels the world in search of friends, meets the author in the desert and tells him about his itinerary in which each stage takes on the symbolic value of a life lesson. One phrase above all will remain engraved in the mind and heart of the reader: “The essential is invisible to the eye”.

Who among us has never stopped for a moment to reflect that the most important things and the things we really need are those we never notice? To always keep on our bedside table.

Harry Potter Salani Publishing House, year 2011, pp. 302

Bloomsbury Childrens, 2014, pp. 352

Salamandra, 1999, pp. 256

Rivers of ink have been spilled over the years on the Harry Potter saga, in addition to having given life to a very successful series of films for the cinema. I won’t waste your time telling you the plot. But I want to quote one of his sentences: “It is the choices we make, Harry, that show who we really are, much more than our abilities”. A saga that teaches us to be brave in life, to learn to make choices from an early age, whether they are right or wrong, because the important thing is to always know how to find your own path. Definitely worth reading.

Treasure Island Adelphi, 1998, pp. 293

Qualitas Classics, 2016, pp. 238

Guerra e Paz, 2016, pp. 288

I remember reading it for the first time as a child in winter, in bed with a fever, almost as if Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel could heal me better and even before the syrup. A classic, we know. Perhaps from another time or suitable for generations of kids who are no longer with us. But reading this book will be a life lesson for kids: the strong moral and emotional ambiguity that accompanies its characters makes it terribly real, true, current. Who among us, like the protagonists of the novel, has never felt complex, protean, at times heroic and generous, at times negligent and seduced by evil? This is Stevenson’s great merit: to catapult us into a place that never really existed but that is found within the depths of the soul of each of us. Enlightening as well as captivating.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas BUR, 2008, pp. 211

David Fickling Books, 2006, pp. 224

Salamandra, 2008, pp. 224

A 2006 novel by Irish writer John Boyne, which has been translated into 32 countries and was the inspiration for a recent film. A book, set during the Holocaust in Germany, that offers a unique perspective on the effects of prejudice, hatred and violence on innocent people, especially children. Through the eyes of an imaginative eight-year-old German boy, who is kept in the dark about the reality of war, we witness a forbidden friendship that develops between Bruno, the son of a Nazi commander, and Shmuel, a Jewish boy imprisoned in a concentration camp. Although the two are physically separated by a barbed wire fence, their lives become inexorably linked. A strong punch in the stomach, that makes you think and move.

Tales on the Telephone RCS Media Group, 2015, pp. 168

Harrap, 1965, pp. 108

Juventud, 2012, pp. 144

I conclude our review with a book by Gianni Rodari, one of the most beloved authors not only by children, but by readers of all ages. The protagonist of these tales is a man from Varese, the accountant Bianchi, who travels around Italy as a pharmaceutical representative, but never forgets his little daughter who can’t sleep and for this reason, every evening, at nine o’clock sharp, he calls her on the phone and tells her a tale. It is said that the stories of the accountant Bianchi were so moving that even the switchboard operators (it was another era!) stopped working to listen to them on the radio. Timeless tales, by a master who taught us that “imagination is part of us like reason: looking inside imagination is a way like any other to look inside ourselves