Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Greg Heffley keeps a JOURNAL, not a diary: he wants to be very clear on that for when he’s rich and famous. In the meantime, however, he’s stuck in middle school with the rest of the kids.

Greg has to deal with everything from avoiding moldy cheese to fighting with his best friend, Rowley, to trying to fit in and not attract the wrong kind of attention from school bullies. With an older brother who picks on him and a younger brother who could get away with anything, Greg has a lot to deal with outside the school too. But even though middle school is full of social pitfalls, mean kids, and mistakes, Greg is ready to push through it all and keep going.

Choose between two amazing narrators when you listen to the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, with Ramon De Ocampo and Dan Russell lending their voices to bring Greg’s journals to life. Both men perfectly carry the struggles of an unpopular pre-teen through to the listener, and it’s easy to finish one audiobook and be immediately ready for the next.

Jeff Kinney knew he wanted to be cartoonist while working on the campus newspaper as a student at the University of Maryland in the early 1990s. After college, he struggled to get his comic strip syndicated. In 1998, he came up with the idea for a story about a middle-school weakling. In 2004, the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series started as a serial book on FunBrain, an educational website for kids, with new pages, full of Greg’s handwriting and drawings, added each day. After its online success, Kinney brought the idea to a publisher in New York. The Diary of a Wimpy Kid made its hardcover print debut in 2007.

The Diary of a Wimpy Kid series has been a fixture on the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly best seller lists, and gone on to win many awards, including two Children’s Choice Book Awards and six Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards for Favorite Book. Greg Heffley’s adventures have been translated into more than 60 languages, and the first, second, fourth, and ninth installments have been adapted into successful films. There are now more than 200 million copies of the series in print worldwide.