Our new building is going to have a beautiful, capacious ibrary, mostly designed for children, but with plenty for teens and adults too. The most exciting thing is that we have a budget of 14 lakhs just for the books!

Rupa Bishnoi and I traveled to Delhi to shop. We visited the Bookaroo Children’s Literature Festival, Swati Roy‘s incredible Eureka Bookstore, Delhi’s only bookstore exclusively for children and The Bookstore Inc, a “curated” shop featuring hundreds of my favorite authors. We staggered back home with a few thousand books and we’re still on the prowl.

I was a voracious reader as a child and it’s thrilling to be able to choose beautiful hard cover editions of books I loved so much I practically know them by heart, even now, 60 years after reading them. I re-read Volume 4 of The Chronicles of Narnia on the train back to Dehradun and yesterday, I finished rereading Mary Poppins. The Betsy-Tacy series is calling my name now (not to be confused with the B Is For Betsy series which will be next.

I love children’s stories for the clarity of the moral questions they address, the charm of animals that speak and doors that open into other worlds, for the way they convince us readers of the importance of courage, the power of fidelity and the grace of transformation (which turns out to be offered to even the most odious of characters. Even Donald Trump could be saved.)

If you had a Rs 14 lakh budget, what childhood favorites would YOU buy? Please share your lists!