Andrew Solomon

Grossly underappreciated, this is in my view the best of all children’s books—wildly, passionately imaginative, gently moral, and quintessentially American both in its diction and in a certain rough-hewn but kindly common sense. I also choose it because it was read to me by my father when I was a little boy, and it became for some time our private world, and so rereading it always carries me back to a very happy stage when I was more innocent than I knew: I associate it with love.