A childrens book about father and his son and daughter hopping versus a book about how life and decision made during it are insignificant set during the invasion of the USSR in 1986 Prague. Fair enough, no?

I'm thinking the next should be:
The Iliad versus Green Eggs and Ham

"Insignificant"? And yet there is the space for a full-blown love story amid all the insignificance, no? No happy endings here any more than there are ever happy endings in reality - but all the insignificance did not take away from the reality of the protagonists feelings for each other...

Incidentily I think the Illiad (and the odyssey, for that matter) are great books for eight, ten, twelve-year olds. They have heroes and monsters, giants, pirates, battles, honor, betrayal - all the things kids crave for in a story. The good vs evil line is always clear and unambiguous, the protagonists always innocent victims of forces greater than themselves. Everything a pre-teen can relate to.

Get yourself a decent translation and start reading it to your ten-year-old billionaire grandson for nighttime and you'll find him transfixed...

Agreed, I began reading the classics at about eight. Iliad, Odyssey, Sinbad; along with Tarzan, Pellucidar, Conan and other supposedly non-classical literature.

Yep. Yep. Well, aside from the brutal violence and the sexual relationships with anything that has, say, even a chance of being a living being (ok, pretty harmless seeing as most Greek and Roman gods and goddesses didn't even care about that...), 'n stuff.