Perhaps the best "best of" list I've seen this season. Some of these are new to me, and they're all beautiful.

"It is an error … to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large," J. R. R. Tolkien wrote in his superb meditation on fantasy and why there's no such thing as writing "for children," intimating that books able to captivate children's imagination aren't "children's books" but simply really good books.