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Once upon a time, books served as the de facto refuge of the “physically weak” child. For animation legend, Hayao Miyazaki, above, they offered an escape from the grimmer realities of post-World War II Japan.

Many of the 50 favorites he selected for a 2010 exhibition honoring publisher Iwanami Shoten‘s “Boy’s Books” series are time-tested Western classics.

Loners and orphans–The Little Prince, The Secret Garden—figure prominently, as do talking animals (The Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle).

And while it may be a co*monly-held publishing belief that boys won’t read stories about girls, the young Miyazaki seemed to have no such bias, ranking Heidi and Laura Ingalls Wilder right alongside Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island’s pirates.

Several of the titles that made the cut were ones he could only have encountered as a grown up, including 1967’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and When Marnie Was There, the latter eventually serving as source material for a Studio Ghibli movie, as did Miyazaki’s top pick, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers.

We invite you to take a nostalgic stroll through Miyazaki’s best-loved children’s books. Readers, how many have you read?

Hayao Miyazaki’s Top 50 Children’s Books

1. The Borrowers — Mary Norton


2. The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


3. Children of Noisy Village — Astrid Lindgren


4. When Marnie Was There — Joan G. Robinson


5. Swallows and Amazons — Arthur Ransome


6. The Flying Classroom — Erich Kästner


7. There Were Five of Us — Karel Poláček


8. What the Neighbours Did, and Other Stories — Ann Philippa Pearce


9. Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates — Mary Mapes Dodge


10. The Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett


11. Eagle of The Ninth — Rosemary Sutcliff


12. The Treasure of the Nibelungs — Gustav Schalk


13. The Three Musketeers — Alexandre Dumas, père


14. A Wizard of Earthsea — Ursula K. Le Guin


15. Les Princes du Vent — Michel-Aime Baudouy


16. The Flambards Series — K. M. Peyton


17. Souvenirs entomologiques — Jean Henri Fabre


18. The Long Winter — Laura Ingalls Wilder


19. A Norwegian Farm — Marie Hamsun


20. Heidi — Johanna Spyri


21. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — Mark Twain


22. Little Lord Fauntleroy — Frances Hodgson Burnett


23. Tistou of the Green Thumbs — Maurice Druon


24. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle


25. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler — E. L. Konigsburg


26. The Otterbury Incident — Cecil Day-Lewis


27. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll


28. The Little Bookroom — Eleanor Farjeon


29. The Forest is Alive or Twelve Months — Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak


30. The Restaurant of Many Orders — Kenji Miyazawa


31. Winnie-the-Pooh — A. A. Milne


32. Nihon Ryōiki — Kyokai


33. Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio — Pu Songling


34. Nine Fairy Tales: And One More Thrown in For Good Measure — Karel Čapek


35. The Man Who Has Planted Welsh Onions — Kim So-un


36. Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe


37. The Hobbit — J. R. R. Tolkien


38. Journey to the West — Wu Cheng’en


39. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — Jules Verne


40. The Adventures of the Little Onion — Gianni Rodari


41. Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson


42. The Ship that Flew — Hilda Winifred Lewis


43. The Wind in the Willows — Kenneth Grahame


44. The Little Humpbacked Horse — Pyotr Pavlovich Yershov (Ershoff)


45. The Little White Horse — Elizabeth Goudge


46. The Rose and the Ring — William Makepeace Thackeray


47. The Radium Woman — Eleanor Doorly


48. City Neighbor, The Story of Jane Addams — Clara Ingram Judson


49. Ivan the Fool — Leo Tolstoy


50. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle — Hugh Lofting

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  She’ll be appearing onstage in New York City this June as one of the clowns in Paul David Young’s Faust 3. Follow her @AyunHalliday.