Charlotte's Web was first read to me by my mother. I can still remember the moment when, having caught the tremor in her voice, I looked up, saw her face, and realised with great shock that clever, generous Charlotte might die. It was the first book in which I experienced the death of a character; I don't think I'd understood such a thing was even possible and I know I couldn't have managed Little Women, much less the relentless Tess of the D'urbervilles, all those years later if Charlotte's Web hadn't toughened me up. Of all the responses I've gotten to We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, I was most pleased by a reviewer who identified Charlotte's Web as its progenitor. The tradition of great non-human characters has always been a potent oneand it was and continues to be an important book to me.

Of course, I must be careful insisting on Charlotte's non-human character. Children's books are filled with humans in animal guise. They take bedtime baths, hear bedtime stories, and kiss their parents goodnight. They play peaceably, predator and prey, in the great fictional kingdoms, or sometimes, as in Charlotte's Web, they try very hard not to be killed and eaten. Perhaps as a result, it's been easy for our culture to think of sympathy for our fellow creatures as a childish thing. You grow up, and however you might wish it otherwise, fewer and fewer of the books you read feature non-human characters. Of those that do, some remain more human than others.

As a quick aside , I note that the great writer Jonathan Lethem, in reference to Dickens' Dombey and Son, has encouraged the reader to imagine Dickens' characters as though they were animals – "clever, eccentric badgers", wily foxes and cats – and all in Victorian costume. The only thing that prevents Dickens from being the greatest animal novelist of all time, Lethem argues, is the lack of animals.

Here is my list of some favorite books with animal characters, in roughly the order in which I encountered them.

Chosen not only, (but mostly) for Mr Toad – the character who thinks well of himself for reasons inexplicable to those around him – but also for the philosophical Ratty and the gentle Mole. The book begins slowly, but ends in fisticuffs!

Merlin's tutelage consists of lessons in which young Arthur becomes a series of other animals – birds, ants, fish – in order to learn about ethics and politics. The creatures Arthur meets in his childhood are all there, advising and encouraging, at the transcendent moment when he pulls the sword from the stone.

An epic rabbit adventure with a cast of remarkable characters: Fiver, the oracle, Hazel, the thinker and leader, and Bigwig, the warrior. Adams employs many of the science-fiction pleasures of inventive world building as well as a struggle against invasive totalitarianism. For a while, I had a certain fluency in the Lapine language, but this has grown rusty with disuse.

I am including this because it is a great and consequential book, though it really has little to do with non-humans and is full of pig slander.

Gregory Peck stars as Captain Ahab in the film adaptation of Herman Melville's novel Moby- Dick. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Warner Bros

Perhaps the greatest non-human character book of all time. Funnier than I expected when I finally read it after years of pretending I already had. The white whale functions in the book as many things to many people, including the implacable and mindless maw of nature, but its final reckoning with the Pequod at least leaves open the possibility of intelligent self-preservation or even a focused revenge.

Women all over the world are turning into animals – orangutans, bears, and snapping turtles – but the central character of Emshwiller's book, Pooch, is a dog becoming a woman. This picaresque follows the adventures of an innocent abroad in a dangerous world. Comic, magical and ultimately extremely big-hearted.

I've chosen this book to represent the many in which animals solve mysteries, in this case, the murder of a shepherd is slowly unraveled by the flock of sheep he left behind. Admirable efforts are made to keep the logic sheep-like throughout.

A capacious and audacious novel about the world of horseracing, which includes several horse narrators – Froney's Sis, Epic Steam, Residual – but my favorite is Justa Bob, a gelding with a good attitude despite his long, hard fall down.

A story within a story, as an elderly princess in Heian-era Japan recounts the more adventurous life of a cat who becomes for a time a cat-like woman. Johnson deals often with non-human characters, but this a particularly lovely example of her work, and contains wonderfully imagined, if unlikely, details of cat culture.

A loose retelling of Hamlet, but set on a dog breeding farm in Wisconsin in the 70s. The role of Ophelia is taken on very touchingly by the gifted canine and occasional point of view character, Almondine. A review in the Chicago Tribune identified Wroblewski's book as "easily the best work of fiction ever written about dogs". A bold claim, but also a defensible one.