Two of these were written in the same Oxford pub
THE HOBBIT and NARNIA came out of a group called the Inklings, who met on Tuesday mornings in the back room of the Eagle and Child on St Giles' in Oxford, and on Thursday evenings in Lewis's college rooms, to read work aloud to each other and argue about it.
Tolkien read chapters of what became The Lord of the Rings to them over roughly a decade. Lewis was the one who kept telling him to finish it, and Tolkien later said that without that pressure he never would have. The favour was not entirely returned — Tolkien disliked NARNIA and said so. The pub is still there, and the back room is still called the Rabbit Room.
Most of these began with one particular child
This turns out to be the single most common origin story in children's literature. Alice was told to Alice Liddell on a boat. PINOCCHIO began as a newspaper serial, but Wind in the Willows was letters to Kenneth Grahame's son, Winnie-the-Pooh was built around Christopher Robin Milne's actual toys, and Percy Jackson was invented at bedtime for Rick Riordan's son.
It shows in the writing. Books made for one known listener tend to be funnier, ruder and more specific than books written for a market, because the author is getting live feedback from someone who will say when it is boring. The trade-off is that the real child sometimes paid for it later, which Christopher Robin Milne wrote about at length.
The monsters are younger than you would think
DRACULA is 1897 and FRANKENSTEIN is 1818, which makes the two most recognisable monsters in the world about two hundred years old between them — far younger than the folklore they came out of, and both fixed in their modern shape by a single novel each.
Older still are the two in this grid that are not novels at all. The ODYSSEY and BEOWULF were composed for performance and passed on by voice for generations before anyone wrote them down. BEOWULF survives in exactly one manuscript, which was singed in a house fire in 1731 and very nearly did not survive at all. The entire poem exists because one damaged book was pulled out of a burning library.
What is on these shelves
Fantasy: THE HOBBIT, NARNIA, ERAGON, REDWALL, INKHEART, STARDUST and DUNE. Spooky: GOOSEBUMPS, CORALINE, DRACULA. School-bag staples: MATILDA, HOLES, HATCHET, WONDER, HEIDI, OLIVER Twist, TWILIGHT. Plus GATSBY and PINOCCHIO.
PINOCCHIO repays a look at the original. In Carlo Collodi's Italian serial he is a thoroughly unpleasant character who kills the talking cricket with a hammer in chapter four, and the story was meant to end with him hanged from an oak tree — readers complained so loudly that Collodi was made to carry on writing and produce the ending everyone knows.
Long books, and why they got long
DUNE runs to about 190,000 words and was rejected by roughly twenty publishers before a company best known for car repair manuals took it. FRANKENSTEIN is a third of that length. Neither is the right size; length in fiction is mostly a function of how books were sold at the time.
Victorian novels were padded towards three volumes because circulating libraries charged by the volume. Paperbacks made short novels viable. Fantasy grew enormous in the 1990s partly because Tolkien had established that readers would accept it. The shelf you are looking at is shaped by printing costs as much as by storytelling, which is a slightly deflating thing to know and entirely true.