Last summer I posted a machine-gun list of some of my favorite kids' books. A couple weeks back x_h00ine emailed to ask for recommendations, and I'd been thinking of supplementing the original list anyway, so here goes:

The Little Bear series is a little twee, but it was a favorite of mine growing up and I'm still susceptible to its sweetness. There's an undercurrent of scariness to some of the stories that three-year-olds still find thrilling, too. The books are by Else Holmelund Minarik, who Wikipedia tells me is a Queens College graduate from back in the day. Illustrations are by the pre-Wild Things Maurice Sendak.

I'm a big fan of the Olivia books, a new series about a city-kid piglet and her family. Olivia's got real moxie, her relationships with her parents and younger siblings are lovingly rendered, and the illustrations are expressive and gorgeous.

The Ella books are another series about a young anthropomorphic animal-girl --- in this case an elephant. I've only ever read one, Ella Sets the Stage, in which E signs up as stage manager of her school talent show because she's too shy to perform. The premise suggests a heavy-handed "problem" book, and I suppose that's kind of what it is, but the author and illustrator both have a lovely light touch. It's a lovely, warm story, and the elephants' world --- an island town of onion domes and impossibly high bridges --- is tremendously inviting.

Christopher Bing's picture-book version of Casey at the Bat is well executed, and the poem itself is a favorite of mine. It reads aloud beautifully, and it's got all sorts of bits of business to draw a preschooler in --- our Casey used to love to smack the page when I got to the part about her namesake pounding "with cruel violence his bat upon the plate."

Another piece of vintage grown-up culture I'd encourage exploring with kids is The Family of Man, the catalog of the 1955 Museum of Modern Art photography exhibit. If you've never come across the book --- and there are many millions of copies in print, so you probably have --- it's an album of scenes of ordinary life around the world. The book is organized thematically, with sections on work, food, birth, death, play, ritual, and so on. It's got a Life magazine aesthetic and a liberal 1950s sensibility, but for my money there are plenty of worse aesthetics, and worse sensibilities, than those. There's very little text, so the experience of reading and discussing it is different every time.

The Little Lit series is sort of a juvenile version of the RAW collections from the 1980s --- anthologies of short cartoon stories by first-class artists. Art Spiegelman is co-editor of the series, and his love for comix history shines through --- the collection we have includes a run of the old Barnaby strip, which was created by the author of Harold and the Purple Crayon. This one is targeted at a slightly older audience than the others I've mentioned --- Casey's just aging into it now.

Tags: kids' books

So Casey and I sort of sputtered to a halt on the Narnia series a while back, midway through Dawn Treader. Haven't assayed any big-kid books since then, unless you count Junie B.

But a couple of weeks ago some kids in the building were having a sale on the sidewalk, and one of the things they were unloading was a boxed set of the Little House on the Prairie books. I'd never read any of them, but I've heard good things, and a full set for five bucks was too good to pass up.

I didn't make a big deal of them when I brought them home, but Casey noticed them on a shelf and made enquiries. I told her what they were about, and she was intrigued. When I asked if she'd be interested in reading them she said yes.

We started in on Little House in the Big Woods the night before last. She was bathed and in her jammies early, so we had extra reading time, and made use of it --- it took us half an hour to get four pages in.

Some of that time was squandered on gooniness, but most of it was devoted to filling her in on background stuff --- everything about the Ingalls' lives is completely alien to her experience, beginning with the idea of living in a forest. We had to go over the lack of electricity and cars and television ("that's bad"), the fact that they didn't live in a town, the lack of indoor plumbing.

She was intrigued by the concept of an outhouse, though when I told her that they dug a hole in the ground for the pee and poop to drop down into, she was momentarily concerned that the waste would hit the roof of a subway car. You can see why the early pages took so long.

We're picking up speed, though, and getting into it.

Tags: casey, kids' books

So yesterday's Times had an intriguing article about a set of kids' books I'd never heard of before --- the "Junie B. Jones" series, by Barbara Park. Junie B. is a kindergartener (first grader in the more recent books), who, according to the article, "is prone to troublemaking, often calls people names and isn’t averse to talking back to her teachers."

So far so good, right? And when I read that the books have become the focus of controversy because Junie B., the narrator, writes in a kid's voice --- complete with grammatical ideosyncracies like "most prettiest" --- I decided that this was something worth checking out. I was going to the library anyway, so while I was there I picked up Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus, the first book in the series.

Casey and I read the book yesterday afternoon, and I must say it has its moments:

And so then I ran to another room across the hall. Only that stupid door was locked, too!

"Hey! Who did all this dumb locking?" I asked.

Then I started jiggling up and down. 'Cause I was having a little bit of a problem, that's why. The kind of a problem that's called personal.

And it's about going to the potty.

There's a nice jazzy rhythm to that, and a ring of truth in the narrative voice. Junie B. is a recognizable, if exaggerated, five-year-old --- a kid who licks her shoes to make them shiny and who tries out the zippers on the backpack of the kid sitting next to her.

Unfortunately, she's also an obnoxious, bullying creep.

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Tags: casey, kids' books, parenting

Over at Feministe, a guest blogger asked for kid-book recommendations yesterday. I restricted my reply to picture books, since that's what's in heavy rotation around here these days, but here's what popped into my head:

Two Little Trains by Margaret Wise Brown (of Goodnight Moon fame) is a gorgeous, wistful text, and it’s recently been reissued with beautiful new illustrations. Makes me itch to take a road trip every time I read it.

Mo Willems’ Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! is funny and snarky and great to read aloud. I may like it more than the kid does, tho.

An oldie from my youth that I’ve fallen back in love with is Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb, a jazzy, snappy book with great drawings of hepcat simians.

I haven’t seen our family’s copy of Old MacDonald Had an Apartment House in months, and I’m jonesing. It’s the story of a big-city super who turns his tenement, apartment by apartment, into a farm. Again, gorgeously illustrated.

Ezra Jack Keats’ stuff makes me swoon, and as a New York City kid raised in the seventies, his The Snowy Day is like a madeleine to me. It’s like watching Summer of Sam, except … you know, different.

Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now! is my favorite Seuss book. Seriously.

I have no idea whether Who Needs Donuts? by Mark Alan Stamaty (of the “Washingtoon” strip) is still in print, but it’s a lush, deranged fable about love and greed and donuts.

And you know what? Spike Lee’s Please, Baby Please is actually pretty damn good.

(I've blogged about Two Little Trains and Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! before.)

What's on your list?

Tags: kids' books

I stumbled across the Emberley pad yesterday afternoon, just where I'd stashed it. Five Casey drawings follow, four of them Narnia-themed.

Caution: Graphic content, and Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe spoilers!

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Tags: casey, kids' books

This sheet of drawings is something Casey ginned up while the family was stuck in a long meeting where she had to be very quiet. It's the first page of about half a dozen, and though I like the others even better I can't find the originals and the rest of the photos turned out blurry. (If I find them, I'll post them.)

Anyway, Ed Emberley is a children's book illustrator, and these drawings are C2's renditions of some of the pages in Ed Emberley's Drawing Book of Animals, a 1970 how-to-draw book of his. It's just fabulous stuff --- every animal in the book is constructed from a few simple shapes, easy to draw, but full of life and personality.

Tags: casey, kids' books, photos

So we're going to be finished with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in a few days, and it's going to be time to retrieve the next Narnia book from the library. Only I get the impression that which one is next is a matter of some dispute.

Those of you who've read the books, do you recommend the publishing order, the apparent chronological order, or something else?

One restriction: Whichever one we read next has to have Lucy in it. Casey's been very clear on that point.

Tags: kids' books

"Call me shallow," one toddler says to another in one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons, "but I like Goodnight Moon."

Me too. And every time I stumble across another of Margaret Wise Brown's books, I find I like that one as well.

C1, C2, and I went to the library today, and wound up browsing the 'B' shelf of the picturebook section, looking --- on C2's orders --- for Arthur books that featured his little sister DW. We didn't find any of those, but we did find this, a new edition of Brown's 1949 Two Little Trains.

Two Little Trains begins like this:

Two little trains went down the track,
Two little trains went West.
Puff, Puff, Puff and Chug, Chug, Chug,
Two little trains to the West.

One little train was a streamlined train,
Puff, Puff, Puff to the West.
One little train was a little old train,
Chug, Chug, Chug to the West.

Look down, look down
That long steel track,
That long steel track
To the West.

In the original, it turns out, the streamlined train was captained by a boy, and the chug-chug train by a girl. The illustrations were in pastel shades of blue and pink to match. So it's understandable that a few years back HarperCollins commissioned Leo and Diane Dillon to put together a new version.

The new version stands beautifully on its own. In it, the streamlined train is a real train and the chug-chug train is a toy, and the two head West on parallel journeys --- one across the continent, the other through the home of the child who owns it. The paintings are crisp and inventive and gorgeous.

Over at Amazon, a reader review of the book includes the following passage:

Part of the problem, I think, is the actual word choice which is a little odd in places. For example, in describing the effects of weather, Wise says that the rain makes the trains darker, and the snow makes them furry. Sort of abstract for a 3 year old. Still this is a minor point when compared to the reference to a 'black man singing in the West.' Surely a reference to a variety of music that is beyond most young children's comprehension.

Um, okay. For the record, here are the pages in question:

The rain came down on the two little trains,
On the two little trains going West,
And it made them darker, and wet and shiny,
As they went on their way to the West.

The snow came down
And covered the ground,
And the two little trains going West.
And they got white and furry,
And still in a hurry
They puffed and chugged to the West.

The moon shone down on a gleaming track,
And the two little trains going West;
And they hurried along and heard the song
Of a black man singing in the West.

Look down, look down that long steel track
Where you and I must go;
That long steel track and strong cross bars,
Before we travel home.

"I love it," says Casey.

Me too.

Tags: kids' books, parenting

Ailsa's comment this morning on the Giving Tree launched me Googleward in search of anything Silverstein might have said over the years about what he intended the book as, and what he thought of it in retrospect.

I didn't find that, but I did find this --- a roundtable discussion of the book by "the members of the Symposium on 'The Ethics of Everyday Life.'" The short essays collected there are, like (as I'm learning) any collection of responses to The Giving Tree, mind-bogglingly divergent in their response to the book. Some of them are just mind-boggling. But I couldn't not share with you this take, from bioethicist Mary Ann Glendon:

The tree, says Glendon, is "a terrible mother --- a masochist who, quite predictably, has raised a sociopath."

Um, yeah. Wow.

Tags: kids' books, parenting, pop culture

Still in New Orleans. Lots to talk about when I get back. But in the meantime...

Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree. Genius? Misognyist? Both? Neither?

Have at it.

Update: More here.

Tags: gender, kids' books