November 2011

Hiya faithful readers (i.e. very chartable people I know and can easily guilt into reading stuff) – sorry for the delay in posting over the past two weeks. You can normally expect much, much more regular content updates, but I’m still getting used to balancing family, holidays, work, freelance work, house work, other freelance work, and, you know, sleeping and eating.

New posts will start again tomorrow, but, in the meantime, I wanted to share with you two really great links with some fantastic book recommendations.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

An illustration from "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" by Brian Selznick

The first link comes from the very cool site Gwarlingo. It’s Brian Selznick, the amazing author-illustrator responsible for The Invention of Hugo Cabret (a home library must-own and the basis for the new Martin Scorsese movie, Hugo) recommending twenty of his favorite kids’ books of all time. The article itself gives a very cool introduction to Selznick’s works – his new book, Wonderstruck, is supposed to be epic – and Selznick’s recommendations are extremely strong.

Some are no-brainers (Where the Wild Things Are should be issued to new parents by their OBY/GYN), and some are revelations. (I’ve heard a lot about Remy Charlip, but haven’t read any of his books. However, after this article, I’m officially tracking down his works at our local library now.)

The second link is related to my article about the importance of coffee table books earlier this month. That article was inspired by a book review from BoingBoing contributor Maggie Koerth-Baker. And, as a follow-up to said article, Ms. Koerth-Baker posted a link to a very cool article on The Smithsonian.com – 10 Great Science Books for Kids. They recommend a nice selection for titles for different ages. The only one we’ve read is 11 Experiments That Failed by Jenny Offill and Nancy Carpenter and it’s a HUGE favorite of ours, a wickedly funny take on a kid using the scientific method in her everyday life.

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Every time I read a new book to my daughter at bedtime, there’s always this unspoken hope that the book will really connect with my small, trapped-under-her-covers audience and maybe become a recurring favorite. At the most, I’m hoping for a big smile, a “that was good!” affirmation, or perhaps even the highest compliment she can pay – a pre-emptive request to read the book again tomorrow night. But, very, very rarely do I get a really BIG, really explosive reaction to a bedtime book, and, when that actually happens, it is a rare and wondrous thing to behold. And I got that precious over-the-top reaction just the other night when we sat down to read Press Here by Hervé Tullet.

Press Here

If you're using an iPad, go ahead and try pressing this to see if anything happens. It won't, but give it a shot.

It was a monster hit, a sensation. We literally had to read it three times before she’d even let me take it out of her hands.

And it’s a fairly amazing book because it doesn’t wow its audience with a story or with particularly flashy illustrations, but rather it draws readers in with interactivity, with humor, and with that drive that comes with all printed books – the drive to see what happens next, to see what’s happening on the next page.

While discussing Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret a few years ago (which is another astonishing read that you should definitely include in your home library), Roger Sutton, the editor in chief of Horn Book Magazine, wrote this eloquent description of the power of page-turns that has stuck with me ever since.

A page-turn can be a surprise sprung by the reader, a powerful narrative element that physically involves us in the story. It tells us what power is particular to books. As far as I can figure, the printed book is the only medium that requires such a manipulation of gravity and that asks us, repeatedly, to go on.

Hervé Tullet definitely understands the power of the page-turn surprise, and Press Here utilizes page-turns exceedingly well, using every post-turn reveal to transform his picture book into a living, breathing interactive experience. [read the rest of the post…]

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The Big Idea

Coffee table books are a MUST for any home library

Some of my favorite book reviews come from Boing Boing, a tech-focused culture blog that you’ve probably already heard of and that I’ll sound like an idiot if I try to explain any further. It’s a wonderful online hub for news and commentary, featuring contributors that write intelligently and passionately about a wide range of subjects. One of those subjects, from time to time, is books and, as I should’ve expected, their book reviews are as intelligent and passionate as the rest of the blog.

Last week, Maggie Koerth-Baker, penned a great review of a new National Geographic coffee table book called The Big Idea: How Breakthroughs of the Past Shape the Future, and there was a passage in her review about the impact that coffee table books can have on kids that I absolutely adore. She wrote:

I still think kids and coffee table books go together like peanut butter and jelly. In late grade school and junior high, you’re at an age where you still enjoy picture books but are looking for a bigger, deeper view of the world than most picture books provide. Coffee table books bridge that gap, offering grown-up perspectives in kid-friendly packages. Whether the topic is art, architecture, history, culture, or science—coffee table books can be a kid’s first step into a subject they’ll come to love as an adult.

I could NOT agree with Maggie more, and I totally heart her for describing something that I rant about every few months in way more eloquent terms than I ever could.

OK, this blog is all about giving advice about building a home library, right? So, here is one of my top five favorite pieces of advice to give parents who are trying to put together a collection of books for their children: Make sure that your kid – whether they’re 2 or 12 years old – has access to a big variety of coffee table books. [read the rest of the post…]

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Little Red Hen

Hey, have you guys read a version of "The Little Red Hen" that was better than Paul Galdone's?

As I mentioned yesterday, if you’re looking for excellent editions of classic folk tales to share with your kids, you can’t do better than the works of Paul Galdone and James Marshall. Both are prolific author-illustrators who have published multiple retellings of some of the most famous stories in the world, but they’ve always found ways to present those stories in really compelling and clever ways.

Trust me. These books will very clearly show you the difference that a skilled author brings to retelling a “classic” tale, even something as familiar as Little Red Riding Hood or The Billy Goats Gruff. Since most folktales are in the public domain, you can find a lot of really cheap, poorly executed picture books of these stories all over the place. (Your local dollar store is probably full of them.)  Take any of those PD versions and hold them against the works of Galdone and Marshall and the difference will be as glaring as the difference between a potato and an iPod.

As a brief sample of the amazing folktale awesomeness that these authors so consistently deliver, sit back and enjoy these animated presentations of Marshall’s The Three Little Pigs and Galdone’s Little Red Hen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPFPWFjY_kE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr-yQGD9eAA

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Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales

Strangely enough, this is NOT a great gift idea for a baby.

One of the most daunting tasks I’ve found in building a home library is figuring out some sort of comprehensive way to introduce fairy tales and folk tales to your child. Because I’m a completist. If I start a series of novels, I have to read ALL OF THEM, even if I start hating the series after volume three.  The same goes for TV shows, movie series, and comic books. And, if I do eventually abandon whatever series I’m reading or watching, I spend lazy afternoons on the internet keeping up with spoilers, so I know what’s going on, even if… you know, I now profess to hate it. (So many hours I’ve spent on Wikipedia reading Uncanny X-Men spoilers and I haven’t bought an issue since the 1990s.) It’s just how I’m wired.

So, as a completist, when I started buying books for my daughter before she was born, I was very cognizant of the fact that it was up to me, as her father, to introduce her to the world of folklore and I didn’t want to leave any gaps in her education. One of the THE first books I ever bought her was a copy of The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, illustrated by Josef Scharl, which was NUTS – literally nuts. That was an insane purchase for an unborn child. Because, while the volume is complete, it is also dense, dark, and academic, with teeny tiny text and annotations galore. It makes for a beautiful reference book, but, c’mon, a kid isn’t going to touch that book until they’re either a). an adult or b). a very, very lonely teenager.

Realizing my folly, I started searching for more accessible versions of classic folk and fairy tales to share with her. I had a checklist – do I have a Red Riding Hood for her? Check. Three Little Pigs? Check. Goldilocks? Check. And I thought I’d assembled a few very decent introductions to the world of folklore for our library. I was pleased.

Red Riding Hood

On the other hand, kids will love this one.

However, after she was born and we started reading books aloud more often, I realized that there were SO many holes in our collection. This became particularly apparent when reading the more modern fractured fairy tales – fractured fairy tales are the more meta, ironic takes on classic folklore. Many of these books – ranging from The Stinky Cheese Man to Each Peach Pear Plum to The Princess and the Pizza – have a lot of fun alluding to and referencing classic folklore, which is normally, in turn, great fun for the parents and kids reading at home. I’m a big, big child of the pop culture generation, so recognizing references is something deeply, deeply ingrained in my DNA. [read the rest of the post…]

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As I described earlier, having an interrupting chicken in your child’s library can be a humorous and fulfilling experience. However, you DO have to make sure that you have the right kind.

For example, THIS is the perfect kind of interrupting chicken for your child:

THIS is not. (Be sure to wait until the end, though):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbGoGLOSPSE

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In my post about Imogene’s Antlers the other day, I mentioned how rare it is to find a book that can make your kid really laugh out loud. It’s fairly easy to find your kid a book where, upon reflection, they’ll say, “yeah, that’s a funny book.” But finding a book that inspires pure, spontaneous laughter, those titles are few and far between.

That being said, Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein doesn’t just make my daughter laugh, it makes her lose her mind.

Interrupting Chicken

Finally. A book that teaches kids the joys of interrupting their elders...

Honestly. She goes bonkers for this admittedly very, very funny picture book in a way that I’ve never seen her react before. And the funny thing is – Interrupting Chicken should be an ideal bedtime book. It’s about a father chicken trying to put his young daughter down to sleep and read her a final bedtime story, but, as the title suggests, she keeps interrupting him. It’s a book built around the bedtime ritual, so, originally, I thought this would be a perfect new bedtime book for our family.

Interrupting Chicken

So cute when she's not interrupting...

I was WRONG. I find I can’t read Interrupting Chicken to my daughter at bedtime anymore because it has the opposite effect of a good bedtime book – it actually wakes her up. It doesn’t just wake her up. It makes her hyper. She loves it SO much and she’s created such a weird, funny little ritual surrounding the book that, while we read it, she becomes such an active participant that she freaks out a little bit. Which, don’t get me wrong, is HILARIOUS to witness. However, when it’s already past 8:00 pm and it’s a school night, it gets to be a bit much. So, full disclosure, Interrupting Chicken is a book about bedtime that we only read during daylight hours at the moment, but it is still one of our favorite semi-recent additions to our home library.

This is the first David Ezra Stein title that our family has read, and he’s a major talent, both as a writer and as an illustrator. Interrupting Chicken has a fantastic visual style that brings together various different mediums – the main spreads with the chicken and her father are watercolor paintings with a great palette of reds, greens, and browns; there are sepia-toned storybook pages interspersed throughout the story; and we even get the chicken’s own attempt at making her own picture book that’s illustrated in crayons. The sheer design of the book is really impressive.

[read the rest of the post…]

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Reading Rainbow

Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high...

I was a huge Reading Rainbow fan when I was a kid. Heck, there’s a whole generation of bookish children from the 1980s that, thanks to the influence of the best reading-related series that PBS ever produced, would very quickly form a cult behind LeVar Burton if the world ever found itself dropped into a Mad Max/Stephen King’s The Stand-esque dystopian wasteland. So, after I wrote my post on David Small’s Imogene’s Antlers yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Reading Rainbow actually did a whole episode themed around Imogene’s Antlers back in the 1980s.

It opens with LeVar visiting the Philadelphia Zoo to discuss the differences between animals and humans and, around the 6:40 mark, they start talking about Imogene’s Antlers directly and even get the hilarious Imogene Coca (Get it? Har, har) to do a reading of the book. Check out the video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhdZO8agUo4

Isn’t that such a great show? That video completely reminded me how wonderful Reading Rainbow was and I plan on spending tonight trying to locate some of the episodes on DVD to share with my daughter.

Oh, and, just FYI, if I ever met LeVar Burton in person, it would probably resemble something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zweTtDGlK-c&feature=related

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There are artists and illustrators that, I will admit, I have completely pushed on my daughter. When picking out books for her, I default to my own personal preferences far too often and the results of this editorial bias on my part are usually mixed at best. Sometimes she connects with my hand-picked selections and embraces them as her own; other times, she rebels against them fully and, as punishment, makes me read her a Disney Princess book. We fall into these roles fairly often, but every now and again, like the best children always do, my daughter throws me a curveball, just to mess with my equilibrium. One of the most pleasant of these unexpected surprises was the way that my daughter, very independently, claimed David Small as one of her very favorite children’s book creators and claimed Small’s Imogene’s Antlers as one of her very favorite picture books.

Imogene's Antlers

Imogene's Antlers, a laugh-out-loud library title

Small is a fantastic illustrator and author, who’s illustrated over 40 picture books (many of which he wrote himself), but he first got on my radar thanks to his searing 2009 memoir, Stitches, which stands as one of the best graphic novels I’ve ever read. I was actually at the 2009 National Book Awards ceremony in New York when Stitches was nominated in the young people’s literature category – it’s wonderful, but definitely not appropriate for most kids younger than high school age – and my main regret from the evening (aside from accidentally knocking a tray of drinks onto an old woman) is letting someone else grab the free copy of Stitches from our table’s centerpiece before I could.

I loved Stitches, but I hadn’t heard of Small before reading it. And, when my wife came home from the library one day, touting that she found a David Small picture book to read to our (at the time) 3-year-old, I was skeptical. And I don’t really have a good reason why. One theory I have is that I’ve seen lots of illustrators who typically create adult-themed material completely fall on their faces when they tried to create a “kids book.” Sometimes their works talk down to their audience, sometimes they’re just showcases for their art (with no semblance of a story), sometimes they’re achingly ironic, sometimes their attempts to reach kids just don’t work. The irony, of course, is that Small had been a successful and award-winning children’s book creator for YEARS before he published Stitches, but my limited exposure to his work gave me COMPLETELY the wrong idea about who Small was. And that’s my fault and yet another prime example of one of the most recurring themes here at Building a Library – I am wrong a lot. A LOT.

So, I didn’t push David Small on my daughter. In fact, I did the opposite. I presented the picture book my wife had found at our local library – titled Imogene’s Antlers – to her with an enormous indifference. I assumed that the book would be over her head or just wouldn’t connect with her and let my wife read it to her first, totally expecting that the book would flop. Once again, just to restate an important point, as a father, I am wrong A LOT.

My daughter went nuts for Imogene’s Antlers. NUTS. We have bookcases full of kids books in our house, but you could probably take all of the books that actually made my daughter laugh out loud, made her cackle like a madwoman while she read them, and those books would take up about a shelf and a half. Imogene’s Antlerswould definitely have a place on that shelf. [read the rest of the post…]

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Yes, the books from the 1980s Sesame Street Book Club are cool, they remind me of the heyday of Jim Henson and Sesame Street, and they’re an amazing value for your dollar. BUT, with all that said, my favorite thing about the Sesame Street Book Club might be this disclaimer that ran on the back covers of most of the books.

Sesame Street Book Club Disclaimer

So great...

That’s right:

Children do not have to watch the television show to benefit from this book.

I don’t know why that sentence tickles me to my core, but it does. It just seems so earnest and idealistic. Can you imagine picking up a Spongebob Squarepants, Scooby Doo, or Clone Wars easy reader at a bookstore and seeing a disclaimer on the back that says, “Hey, if you haven’t seen the cartoon, no worries. We tried to make this a great standalone book anyway”?

It would NEVER happen. Most of those spin-off books are basically just advertisements for their source material. OR they’re just simplified summaries of movies or TV shows. (Some of them “simplify” their summaries to such an extent that they’re virtually illegible unless you’ve already seen the movie, watched the show, played the video game, etc.)

But, bless their hearts, the creators behind the Sesame Street Book Club titles weren’t just trying to create another ancillary revenue stream. They were, honestly and truly, trying to make engaging, exceptional kids’ books. They were trying to tell stories, teach the alphabet, and help kids learn, first and foremost, and the fact that the characters came from a popular TV show was just icing on the cake. Yes, I’m sure money was made and the corporate side of the Children’s Television Workshop was anxious to get some books out there for parents to purchase, BUT they didn’t let their quest for the almighty dollar completely drive their content strategy. The Book Club could’ve just tossed out cheap transcripts of popular Sesame Street sketches – The Rubber Duckie Song: The Book or These Are the People in My Neighborhood: The Reader. Instead, they actually decided to TRY – they chose to try to make some really smart, educational books, even though they didn’t have to. And that’s admirable.

It’s a little disturbing how strange that idea seems in the current age of platform synergy and leveraging content assets, but it gives me yet another excuse to indulge in my nostalgia for vintage Sesame Street arcana, so I’m just going to look at that beautiful disclaimer, think about Mr. Hooper, and smile.

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