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>>25211425
Elaborate on your claim.

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yes

>>25211425
Harold Bloom suggests this one over Harry Potter, why?

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>>25211432
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn may be the greatest depiction of a spiritual experience ever writ.
>Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror—indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy—but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend, and saw him at his side, cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.
>Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.
>"Rat!" he found breath to whisper, shaking. "Are you afraid?"
>"Afraid?" murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. "Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!"
>Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

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>blocks your path
Nothing personal, kid

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and through the Looking Glass.

Should I read it as an adult? I bought it from a thrift store a few months ago for a friends kid, but after flipping through it I decided I didn't want to give it away as my own child shall instead get it some day.

Is it worth reading as an adult? I bought it from a thrift store a few months ago for a friends kid, but after flipping through it I decided I didn't want to give it away as my own child shall instead get it some day.

>>25211546
Both shit

What of the Willows in the Wind?

>>25212474
What was his wind policy?

>>25212473
Soulless

>>25211546
this, alice annihilates every other contender

>>25212149
>>25212145
as long as it includes the piper at the gates of dawn chapter (many versions omit it) then yes

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>>25212730
Looks like I'll be giving it a read.

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>>25211425
I like Winnie-the-Pooh better. It has humour like no other children’s book I’ve read to my kids.

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Hold it right there bucko

>>25212979
Is it worth it to read? I can purchase it with the excuse of “I’m actually just reading it to see if it’s quality for my future kids” but unironically read it

>>25212730
Any way to know which edition has it before buying it? Also, why omit that chapter?

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>>25211425

>>25211425
It’s pretty good yeah. There’s some very fun stuff in there and some scary things but also some very good descriptions of empathy between the characters and immense loyalty amongst friends despite their flaws. It’s really a lovely story

>>25213017
>Any way to know which edition has it before buying it?
Try to find some pictures of the chapter index of said edition i guess before purchasing (assuming you're buying it online if you're in person you can just look yourself)
>Also, why omit that chapter?
Because it's a side narrative to the main story and because it features the god pan some people have deemed it not suitable for kids or whatever

>>25211447
I don't know if this dethrones The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I don't know because I can't make it past the first sentence. This is for children? Rocket scientist children?

>>25213180
I read it when I was 8 and I’m not a rocket scientist

>>25213172
Some people are weirdly insecure. It’s a fantasy setting

>>25213184
Geez, you could have been one even at 8. >There’s a smile on the flea, on the fly, on the wart, on the frog, on the bump, on the log, in the hole in the bottom of the sea.
That's more my speed. Still is.

>>25213017
Oh yeah both of them that and The House at Pooh Corner. You can pick them up used for very cheap.

>>25213199
That’s more poetry than prose, it’s nice. Makes me imagine happening upon a place where all those things are gazed upon and reflect back my own mood like a positive feedback loop. It’s good to go exploring, even back to familiar places

>>25211447
Amazing chapter. Structurally you can see it's just a stop-gap: Toad has been cast into prison, and he can't escape immediately, or there is no sense of peril and no sense of triumph (and no time for the Wild Wooders to work their mischief). But it's nothing like what you would expect for a filler chapter. The whole book has existed inside a comfy Anglican-church universe and then you get this sudden pagan blast.

>>25212145
Why not. One the that all the best children's books have in common is that adults can still enjoy them. (Lewis Carroll's books in particular, since they are rather sly treatises on logic.)

>>25211425
true

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Can you guys recommend me some books for toddlers with interesting folk/mythology stories.
Some that I've found:
>Jangles (Author is the same guy who wrote A Bad Case of the Stripes)
>The Cloud Spinner
>King Midas and the Golden Touch by Demi
>Mummy Cat
>Romulus and Remus by Anne Rockwell
>How the Chipmunk Got His Stripes

>>25211432
that one chapter, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn".

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>>25214967
These are first-rate but perhaps hard to get hold of these days.

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>>25214967
Also this (with similar caveat re. availability).

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>>25211425
Pic related is a kids book written by Yasunari Kawabata of all people and it’s pretty good.

>>25212979
>Winnie-the-Pooh

>>25211546
>Alice

There's room for everything. Apart from anything else, in terms of the difficulty of the language, chronologically, it surely goes Pooh —> Alice —> Wind.

>>25215038
But Pooh and Alice lack a spiritual numinous connection with nature that Grahame possessed in spades. It even shows in his other writing
>Of pulpiteers and parents it is called Original Sin: a term wherewith they brand whatever frisks and butts with rude goatish horns against accepted maxims and trim theories of education. In the abstract, of course, this fitful stirring of the old yeast is no more sin than a natural craving for a seat on a high stool, for the inscription—now horizontal, and now vertical—of figures, is sin. But the deskmen command a temporary majority: for the short while they shall hold the cards they have the right to call the game. And so—since we must bow to the storm—let the one thing be labelled Sin, and the other Salvation—for a season: ourselves forgetting never that it is all a matter of nomenclature. What we have now first to note is that this original Waft from the Garden asserts itself most vigorously in the Child. This it is that thrusts the small boy out under the naked heavens, to enact a sorry and shivering Crusoe on an islet in the duck-pond. This it is that sends the little girl footing it after the gipsy’s van, oblivious of lessons, puddings, the embrace maternal, the paternal smack; hearing naught save the faint, far bugle-summons to the pre-historic little savage that thrills and answers in the tingling blood of her; seeing only a troop of dusky, dull-eyed guides along that shining highway to the dim land east o’ the sun and west o’ the moon: where freedom is, and you can wander and breathe, and at night tame street lamps there are none—only the hunter’s fires, and the eyes of lions, and the mysterious stars. In later years it is stifled and gagged—buried deep, a green turf at the head of it, and on its heart a stone; but it lives, it breathes, it lurks, it will up and out when ’tis looked for least. That stockbroker, some brief summers gone, who was missed from his wonted place one settling-day! a goodly portly man, i’ faith: and had a villa and a steam launch at Surbiton: and was versed in the esoteric humours of the House. Who could have thought that the Hunter lay hid in him? Yet, after many weeks, they found him in a wild nook of Hampshire. Ragged, sun-burnt, the nocturnal haystack calling aloud from his frayed and weather-stained duds, his trousers tucked, he was tickling trout with godless native urchins; and when they would have won him to himself with honied whispers of American Rails, he answered but with babble of green fields. He is back in his wonted corner now: quite cured, apparently, and tractable. And yet—let the sun shine too wantonly in Throgmorton Street, let an errant zephyr, quick with the warm South, fan but his cheek too wooingly on his way to the station; and will he not once more snap his chain and away? Ay, truly: and next time he will not be caught.