101 Books to Read Before You Grow Up (Revised Edition)

Bianca Schulze's reading guide is really two books in one: a curated list of 101 recommendations spanning picture books through middle grade, and an interactive journal with space to log personal ratings and notes as a kid works through them. This revised edition, out in September 2025 from Walter Foster Jr, updates the original list to fold in more diverse voices and graphic novels, reflecting how much the landscape of kids' books has shifted since the first edition. Each entry comes with a short summary and a fun fact about the book or its author, so browsing the list is its own small reading experience before a single book even gets picked up.

The catalog lists it for ages 6 to 10, though the recommendations themselves range wider, which means a kid can keep returning to it over several years rather than aging out after one pass. The blank space for personal notes and ratings is the detail that turns this from a static list into something a child actually writes in, tracking their own reading instead of just following someone else's picks. It gives a family building a reading habit something to work from directly - a curated set of 101 options to hand a kid, rather than one more scroll through algorithm-generated suggestions.