The E.B. White Read Aloud Award Books

The E.B. White Read Aloud Award was named for the author of Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan — three books that a parent can read aloud for weeks without resenting them. Booksellers created the award in 2004 for exactly that quality, and it has been given by the Association of Booksellers for Children and its successor, the ABC Children's Group of the American Booksellers Association. A picture book category ran from the start, and a category for older readers was added in 2006. Titles are nominated by independent bookstores and voted on by ABC member booksellers, which makes it a rare award decided by the people who watch families choose books at the counter.

Its criteria are about performance rather than literary merit in the abstract: a book should stand up to being read over and over, its artwork should carry to the back of a group, it should leave room for the reader to act it out, and it should be, in the ABA's phrase, "free of excessively squirmy moments." Young adult titles have been nominated and never won, on the committee's judgment that they do not work for a mixed-age group listening together. That makes this the most directly useful list here for bedtime rotation or a classroom read-aloud slot.

The ABA's winners list ends in 2019, the last year the award was presented. It is a closed shelf rather than a growing one — sixteen years of picture books and read-aloud novels selected on a single, unusually concrete question.

Information from the American Booksellers Association.