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Diary of a Wimpy Kid Books in Order
Below is the complete list of Diary of a Wimpy Kid books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series by Jeff Kinney.
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Diary of a Wimpy Kid Series
- Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2007)
Buy on Amazon - Rodrick Rules (2008)
Buy on Amazon - The Last Straw (2009)
Buy on Amazon - Dog Days (2009)
Buy on Amazon - The Ugly Truth (2010)
Buy on Amazon - Cabin Fever (2010)
Buy on Amazon - The Third Wheel (2012)
Buy on Amazon - Hard Luck (2013)
Buy on Amazon - The Long Haul (2014)
Buy on Amazon - Old School (2015)
Buy on Amazon - Double Down (2016)
Buy on Amazon - The Getaway (2017)
Buy on Amazon - The Meltdown (2018)
Buy on Amazon - Wrecking Ball (2019)
Buy on Amazon - The Deep End (2020)
Buy on Amazon - Big Shot (2021)
Buy on Amazon - Diper Överlöde (2022)
Buy on Amazon - No Brainer (2023)
Buy on Amazon - Hot Mess (2024)
Buy on Amazon - Partypooper (2025)
Buy on Amazon - Fight or Flight (2026)
Buy on Amazon
Wimpy Kid Non-Fiction Series
- Diary of a Wimpy Kit Do-It-Yourself Book (2008)
Buy on Amazon - The Wimpy Kid Movie Diary (2010)
Buy on Amazon - Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book Journal (2013)
Buy on Amazon - Greetings from Wherever You Are (2014)
Buy on Amazon
Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid Series
- Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid (2019)
Buy on Amazon - Rowley Jefferson’s Awesome Friendly Adventure (2020)
Buy on Amazon - Rowley Jefferson’s Awesome Friendly Spooky Stories (2021)
Buy on Amazon
About Diary of a Wimpy Kid Series
Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series is one of the most durable children’s publishing successes of the last two decades, but its appeal is easier to explain than its scale. On the official series site, the books are described as Greg Heffley’s record of the trials and triumphs of friendship, family life, and middle school, and that really is the core of it. Greg is not a fantasy hero, a child detective, or a chosen one. He is a kid with a large ego, shaky judgment, and a gift for making ordinary problems worse. That is what makes the books work. They turn the humiliations of growing up into comedy without pretending childhood is especially noble.
Publication order matters here because, even though each book has its own central disaster, the series is not completely static. Greg’s family, friendships, school life, and running grudges carry forward, and part of the fun is watching certain patterns repeat in new ways. The books are episodic, but they also build a familiar comic world: Rowley, Rodrick, Manny, Greg’s parents, the dreaded Cheese Touch, and the endless small humiliations of being Greg Heffley. Read in order, the series feels less like a pile of interchangeable joke books and more like a long comic portrait of one kid’s stubborn refusal to become wiser as quickly as life keeps demanding it.
The series also has a very specific formal identity. Kinney’s mix of handwritten-style text and cartoon drawings is not just a visual gimmick. It controls the pacing, sharpens the punchlines, and lets Greg’s voice feel immediate in a way that a more conventional middle-grade novel would not. These books read quickly, but that quickness is part of the craft. Kinney wanted to be a cartoonist before becoming a children’s author, and that background helps explain why the books feel so precisely timed on the page. Greg’s narration depends on visual undercutting: what he says, what the drawing reveals, and the gap between how he sees himself and how ridiculous he actually looks.
Another reason publication order is the best fit is that the series is still ongoing. The official Wimpy Kid site currently presents Hot Mess as book 19 and Partypooper as book 20, released on October 21, 2025. That matters because the series is no longer just a nostalgic early-2000s phenomenon. It is an active long-running children’s sequence that has kept finding new situations for Greg while preserving the same comic personality that made the first book work. The world expands only gradually, but the staying power comes from consistency: Greg remains recognizably Greg, even as each new book finds a fresh angle on family chaos, school embarrassment, vacations, hobbies, or social disaster.
What makes Diary of a Wimpy Kid last, though, is not just the format or the jokes. It is the exact tone Kinney found. The books are funny without becoming sweet in a fake way. Greg is selfish, jealous, lazy, and often hilariously wrong about himself, but he is never so cruel or unreal that the series loses its grounding. Readers recognize the social panic underneath the jokes: wanting to look cool, wanting things to go your way, wanting to avoid embarrassment, wanting life to be easier than it is. Greg is exaggerated, but not by much. That is why the books feel so re-readable. They are not really about school plots or single incidents. They are about the permanent comic indignity of being a kid who thinks he deserves better treatment from the universe than the universe plans to give him.
For readers who already have the list above, the best way to think about Diary of a Wimpy Kid is as one long-running comic record of Greg Heffley’s talent for turning normal childhood into avoidable catastrophe. Read in publication order, the series lets its running jokes, family patterns, and character rhythms build naturally. The books may look light, and they are wonderfully easy to read, but the structure is stronger than it first appears. Kinney created a voice, a format, and a comic worldview that can keep carrying Greg forward, one bad idea at a time.
Series: Diary of a Wimpy Kid