When it comes to building a meaningful home library, there’s no one-size-fits-all list—but there are timeless principles that can guide the process.
Whether you’re starting from scratch or refining a well-loved collection, the goal is the same: to fill your shelves with books that nourish the moral imagination, tell the truth beautifully, and stand the test of time.
Your Library, Your Legacy
Rather than giving you a prescribed list, our mission is to help you refine the selection process and ultimately put the reins in your hands. With Biblioguides, you have access to a powerful set of tools to help you research, preview, and select the books that best fit your family’s values and vision.
Here’s how you can get started building your family's home library:
Step 1: Choose Some Starting Categories
Think about the age of your children and their interests as well as your family values—what do you hope will fill your children's imaginations? Here are some ideas to get you started. You can always add more categories later, so just come up with a few to start.
- Picture books that inspire wonder
- Picture books that celebrate different cultures
- First chapter books with gentle adventure
- Living history for young readers
- Beautifully illustrated fairy tales and folk tales
- Nature and science books that nurture a love for God's creation
- Classic fiction stories that have stood the test of time
- Biographies that inspire
Step 2: Use Biblioguides to Explore
This is where the fun begins. The research is half the joy—because you’re discovering books with intention. You can use our Advanced Search, browse our genres, or look at some of our book lists to get ideas.
You'll then want to explore the book pages for books that catch your eye so that you can read the descriptions, review the example pages, look at any content considerations, read reviews, and view the tags to determine which books are a good fit for your family. The tags are a great way to go down further rabbit trails since you can click on each one to see all the books on Biblioguides with that tag.
Step 3: Build Your Personal Booklist
As you explore, start building custom lists in Biblioguides of 3–5 titles in each category that fit your family’s culture and values. Then you can determine if you need to budget for slowly adding these titles to your home library. You can start looking for them at thrift stories or online or you can decide that audiobooks would be best for some titles or reading them online at Internet Archive. You'll find options for acquiring and reading each book on the Biblioguides book pages.
You don’t need shelves full of books overnight. Just a handful of deeply good books can be enough to begin. Re-read them. Talk about them. Let them shape your family’s shared imagination.
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