Important Children's Books

I've seen many lists lately of good books for children.  Most of them have some of the books my siblings and I grew up loving, and that were very important for the foundations of a love of literature, but most miss some of what I consider the essentials.  So, I'm starting my own list.  Thus far it is VERY roughly categorized by "age" or rather readiness.  I am not including a lot of books that I think are decent, or even quite good, but rather the ones that I think are the most important, in terms of a good literary foundation, and perhaps a few that are nostalgically important to me.  I plan to continue to add to this, and when I have time, even put in links to the books.  

For Little Ones:

Little Golden Books

• The Friendly Book
• Scuffy the Tugboat
• Busy Timmy
• The Tawny Scrawny Lion
• The Saggy Baggy Elephant
• Pretty much anything illustrated by Eloise Wilkin

The Maggie B

The Little Moon Theater

Make Way for Ducklings

One Morning in Maine

Blueberries for Sal

The Frances books

Molly Brett books

Good Night Moon

The Runaway Bunny

Mother Goose

A Children's Garden of Versus by Robert Louis Stevenson

Frog and Toad series

The Seamstress of Salsburg

Winnie the Pooh and other A.A. Milne

A Sick Day for Amos McGee

Ready for a little bit more:

The Brambly Hedge series

Thornton W. Burgess

• Old Mother West Wind and many many others

The Chronicles of Narnia

Mary Poppins series

The Little House of the Prairie - Laura Ingalls Wilder (except for The First Four Years)

The Wind in the Willows

Bambi

Pippi Longstocking

Peter Pan

Getting bigger:

George McDonald

Frances Hodgeson Burnett

• The Secret Garden
• 
  

Anne of Green Gables series

Louisa May Alcott

• Little Women and others

The King of Ireland's Son

The Sword in the Stone

The REAL Grimms Fairy Tales

Heidi (and sequels)

Caddie Woodlawn

Corrie Ten Boom

The Black Stallion

Black Beauty

The Incredible Journey

National Velvet

Linnets and Valerians

Tolkien- The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy

The Jungle Book (Kipling)