The Little Engine That Could
"I think I can, I think I can, I think I can..." Discover the inspiring story of the Little Blue Engine as she makes her way over the mountain in this beloved classic—the perfect gift to celebrate the special milestones in your life, from graduations to birthdays and more! The kindness and determination of the Little Blue Engine have inspired millions of children around the world since the story was first published in 1930. Cherished by readers for over ninety years, The Little Engine That Could is a classic tale of the little engine that, despite her size, triumphantly pulls a train full of wonderful things to the children waiting on the other side of a mountain.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
14mentions
12people
2008–2026years
43% recommend21% neutral36% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Man I'm sad you weren't happy with your books. I'll say it doesn't match my experience.
Of course, your child is supposed to get books for FIVE YEARS and their point-of-development is also relevant... meaning yeah some are kinda rudimentary... obviously.
Some of my favorite books to read aloud to my child were from there.
Classics are in there...
But some surprise wins:- *Goodnight Moon*, where on your 10th reading you're still noticing little artistic differences from page to page - *Little Engine That Could*, everyone knows this classic and I think it's always the last book they send.
... So many more. I'm just riffing off of old happy memories here. I guess my point is that there are diamonds in there. Keep digging.- My wife loved reading *Love, Mouserella* as theatrically as possible - I loved the art of *Where's my T-R-U-C-K?!* and sought out both the artist and the author because of it - I loved reading *Cool Time Song* in a gravelly African accent (I imagined Ofeibea Quist-Arcton - a gal that used to speak on NPR sometimes - reading it... go listen to her voice. Such a great voice.) - The Mine-O-Saur, Roly Poly Pangolin, - The "Llama-Llama" books. - Do anthropomorphic trains count? The Little Engine That Could.
- list of (most of) the books mentioned in this thread so far. I tried reading every comment but used chatGPT instead.
1. The Big Rich - Texas oil boom.
2. Barbarians at the Gate - Private equity origins.
3. Masters of Doom - John Carmack and Id Software.
4. Einstein by Walter Isaacson - Einstein's discoveries.
5. Houdini!!! - The escape artist and magician.
6. The Double Helix - DNA discovery.
7. Stress Test by Tim Geithner - Financial crisis.
8. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - Concentration camp survival.
9. The Chariots of Apollo - NASA's space program.
10. Across the Airless Wilds by Earl Swift - Development of the moon buggy.
11. Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox - Apollo missions.
12. The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr - Food supply chains.
13. The Prize by Daniel Yergin - Oil industry evolution.
14. Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson - Ambitious wreck divers.
15. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes - Manhattan Project.
16. American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin - Robert Oppenheimer.
17. Conquistador by Buddy Levy - Hernán Cortés and the Aztecs.
18. Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - Water infrastructure in the American West.
19. The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - The invention of flight.
20. Walt Disney by Neal Gabler - Vision and innovation in entertainment.
21. Tuxedo Park by Jennet Conant - Invention of radar.
22. Insisting on the Impossible - Edwin Land and instant photography.
23. The Logic of Failure - Understanding and avoiding failure.
24. The Big Short by Michael Lewis - 2008 financial crisis.
25. The Box by Marc Levinson - Shipping container revolution.
26. Latitude by Nicholas Crane - Cartography innovations.
27. When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance - Space startups.
28. The Founders by Jimmy Soni - PayPal's early days.
29. The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester - Precision engineering.
30. The Little Engine That Could - Children's classic.
31. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - Success mechanics.
32. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight - Founding of Nike.
33. Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin - Building LIGO.
34. Freedom’s Forge - WWII industry mobilization.
35. Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes - Electrification by Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse.
36. The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough - Panama Canal construction.
37. Annapurna by Maurice Herzog - Climbing a Himalayan peak.
38. Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder - Data General engineers.
39. Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary - Development of Windows NT.
40. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand - WWII survival.
41. The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder - Defining the meter.
42. The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll - Tracking a hacker.
43. The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel - Srinivasa Ramanujan.
44. The Power Broker by Robert Caro - Robert Moses and New York infrastructure.
45. How Big Things Get Done - Large-scale project execution.
46. Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik - Xerox PARC.
47. Built by Roma Agrawal - Civil engineering insights.
48. The Will to Keep Winning by Daigo Umehara - Competitive gaming.
49. Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold - Low-temperature physics.
50. Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins - Apollo 11.
- Ones regarded as "classics" are a great filter. And there are so many at this point that you're unlikely to need many others. Like, you don't need 300 picture books [EDIT: Full disclosure, we probably do have 300 picture books, but we have a problem with books]. 50-80 is plenty and you can fill that many with classics, no problem, not even close to running out.
You can also just go flip through a few dozen at the library. You don't have to buy all your books, and you can use the library to find decent ones you might want to have around all the time. Also, just ask the librarians, like, "what's a good children's book with dinosaurs?" or whatever. Or look out for the ones they're highlighting with placement.
[FURTHER EDIT] Here's a new parents starter pack I guess, why not:
1) Suess — Hop on Pop, The Sleep Book, Horton Hears a Who!, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, The Lorax, et c. They almost all read smoothly despite all the gibberish (reading clunkily aloud is a real problem with books—I've had "easy" children's books that were hard to read aloud and "hard" books that were actually pretty easy to read aloud, like Woolf's To the Lighthouse [you can read literally anything to kids who are too young to focus well on pictures, or if they're in the bath or otherwise unable to really look at the book anyway—I'm no specialist in child development but I'd assume just hearing language-noises is all they really need, then; three-for-three remarkably-early talkers with sky-high working vocabularies before 18 months, so, dunno if that helped, but it must not have hurt, though I suspect it's mostly luck/genetics])
2) Madeline. Classic for a reason.
3) Wild About Books (reads great, lots of fun visuals; I had this damn thing memorized at one point, didn't even need to look at the text)
4) Alice in Wonderland and The Jungle Book are good read-alouds that aren't picture books.
5) How the Sun Was Brought Back to the Sky — good entry in the "quest with repetitive steps and a character picked up each time" genre, which is a whole thing in picture books. See also Room on the Broom, which is also quite good and reads well. In fact, maybe prefer that one.
6) Lots of the early Golden Books that aren't licensed properties—The Little Engine that Could, et c.
7) Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel
8) The Velveteen Rabbit (beware—it'll make the room a tad dusty)
9) Mother Goose nursery rhymes, enough exposure that they won't miss references to them, at least (I suspect we're losing these as a cultural touchstone, but enough references hang around from past media that they're good to be familiar with—I'd wager what's replacing them and a bunch of other classics is Disney shit, which has overwhelmed kids' media and brain-space). Popular collections of these are readily available used, they're everywhere.
10) D'Aulaires' Norse and Greek Myths books. Read-aloud early on as they're not picture books (but they have pictures), later they can make good books for the kids to read themselves, if they're into this stuff.
There are dozens to hundreds of other good ones, but those are a decent start. You'll probably regret few or none of those purchases.
[EDIT ONCE MORE] If you want older-school but not academic-level-of-old-school versions of fairy tales (good for reasons similar to Mother Goose, above) and don't require them to be picture books, just get the first couple of Lang's color-named Fairy Books—"Blue" and "Red" cover a lot of ground. Later spinoff entries are great if you want to familiarize kids with other oft-referenced-in-Western-culture stuff like saint and knight tales—The Red Romance Book, The Red Book of Heroes, The Book of Saints and Heroes, British-tinged folk and history tales in the two "True Story" books. It's a long series and some entries pull in tales from a wide variety of non-Western cultures—you won't exhaust this series in a kid's early childhood, most likely.
- The Little Engine That Could
- "The Little Engine That Could" and "Everybody Poops"
