Miscellany – Thoughts on Childrens Book’s, Reading with My Daughter, and More

This is the hodge-podge section. This is where you’ll find my random thoughts about children’s literature, finding books for my daughter, reading with kids, publishing, random stuff, videos, links – that which defies categorization.

Used Book Find of the Week: Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: A Studio Book (1978)

by Tom B.

John K King Books

Hopefully, your hunt for great used kids books will take you to amazing stores like this one.

Since I started Building a Library, I’ve probably gotten the most questions from friends and family about how to find great used books for their kids’ home library. Because finding new books is relatively easy. There are magazine reviews and display racks at Target and cartoon/toy tie-ins that can usually point you towards at least some new children’s titles and, often times, those titles might even be halfway decent. Bookstore employees and librarians, in particular, pride themselves on highlighting great new children’s titles that have recently landed on their radar, and they’re definitely amazing resources that parents need to take advantage of more often. Simply put, new books have a lot of advocates in their corner.

Finding advocates for used books, on the other hand, is a trickier issue all together. Because the definition of used books can be pretty broad. When you say “used books”, are you just talking finding already-read versions of popular titles that you can buy for cheaper-than-sticker-price? That’s a valid definition, but, usually, when I’m looking for “used books”, I’m looking for books that I can’t find new. Books that are out-of-print, unheralded classics, or even just weird little titles that you would never see at a Barnes & Noble. A good example of this is my well-documented love for the Sesame Street Book Club titles, books that you can only now find via eBay, flea markets, or used bookstores. [read the rest of the post…]

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Apologies, Apologies

by Tom B.

Alexander

This has been me all week. I'm totally moving to Australia.

Hiya readers – I really, really do have to apologize for the ridiculous lack of updates over the past week. I had some issues with my hosting account and… trust me, the rest of that sentence is pretty darn boring and self-pitying. (You don’t want to know how the sausage is made.) Hopefully, all of my technical issues are now resolved and I can get back to regularly ranting about the books that my daughter reads – as if I was a crazy stalker person, obsessively cataloguing her daily activity in a journal that the FBI will one day present to a jury of my peers as “Exhibit A”. (I fear that the line between “dad” and “maniac” is disturbingly thin.)

Hope everyone is having a great pre-holiday and I’ve got some great recommendations and rants on the way. Thanks for sticking with me, people that Google Analytics assures me actually exist.

Tom

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Scaredy Squirrel Book Trailers and The Problem with Online Read-Aloud Videos

by Tom B.

Scaredy Squirrel

Scaredy hopes you enjoy his book trailers

I’m running a bit behind on my epic, three-part appreciation of the genius of Melanie Watt (click here for part one and part two), so, in the meantime, I thought I’d share a few Scaredy Squirrel-related videos to give you a taste of what you’ve been missing. (And, if you’ve already read Scaredy Squirrel, then enjoy this taste of… nope, the metaphor doesn’t work anymore. Just watch them and enjoy, OK?)

First, here are two very brief book trailers created by Scaredy’s publisher, Kids Can Press.

And, now, here’s a pretty good read-aloud video of the first Scaredy Squirrel book.

There are actually a lot of these kinds of videos on YouTube, videos of people reading children’s books aloud, and I have mixed feelings about them. On one hand, it’s nice to get such a thorough preview of the book and, particularly for picture books with a lot of verse elements, it’s kind of cool to hear someone else reading it aloud to get a sense of their rhythms and inflections (particularly if you’re not 100% sure if you’re reading it right – looking at you, In the Night Kitchen.)

On the other hand, most of these videos seem pretty lacking to me. There’s a read-aloud video of Watt’s Chester that I couldn’t stop screaming at – “You’re not reading like 40% of the text on the page! Why didn’t you read the jacket flap? Aren’t you going to highlight the illustrations? Are you trying to give me a heart attack???” [read the rest of the post…]

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Wednesday Miscellany: Resources to Help You Build a Home Library

by Tom B.

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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Paul Galdone and James Marshall: Two Great Animated Folk Tales

by Tom B.

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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Do You Have the Right Kind of Interrupting Chicken?

by Tom B.

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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The Very, Very Cool Imogene’s Antlers Episode of Reading Rainbow

by Tom B.

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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My Favorite Thing about the Sesame Street Book Club…

by Tom B.

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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Fantastic Book Trailer for Lane Smith’s Grandpa Green

by Tom B.

I’m hot and cold on book trailers – I generally like the idea, but sometimes take issue with the execution – but I have to say I really, really dig this simple, short promotional spot that Macmillan put together for Lane Smith’s Grandpa Green.

It sells the visual appeal of the book and, I think, gives you a nice sample of its tone and voice as well. Check it out.

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Watch This Animated Version of William Steig’s Pete’s a Pizza

by Tom B.

If you’re still on the fence about some of the board books that I recommended yesterday, you should definitely check out this Weston Woods animated version of Pete’s a Pizza by William Steig. Sure, the book is better, but it’s a really charming video and the narration by Chevy Chase is surprisingly great. Honestly, aside from Community, this is the best thing that Chase has done for YEARS.

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

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