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.
For the record, none of my elephant friends came over to play chess when I was sick.
OK, I apologize for the absurd delay in new posts. I ended up being much sicker than I thought I was and just couldn’t post with any regularity. But, after multiple days of antibiotics and, what might be, a permenant case of Ricola breath, I should be back on a regular posting schedule for the foreseeable future.
Thanks again for your patience.
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Just FYI, dear readers. (And, yes, I technically have enough readers to technically refer to them in the plural now.)
When I'm feeling better, I'll tell you how awesome this book is.
Regular posting will resume tomorrow. I apologize for the lame-ass delay in new material this week, but, of course, two weeks into launching the blog, I came down with a nice case of super zombie-pneumonia. So I’m either way, way sick or I had a much uglier psychosomatic reaction to those Contagion trailers than I thought I did.
Anyway, more tomorrow after I let Osmosis Jones beat up whatever plague is currently in my body.
Sorry for the sucking.
Tom
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Kneel before the Substitute Creacher!
We did our normal Friday trip to our local library last week and came home with some old favorites – my daughter enjoys the Dirk Bones early readers – and some fun new titles. One of the standout titles was Substitute Creacher by Chris Gall, which was the perfect book for an almost-five-year-old, in October, who just had her first subtitute teacher experience last week. Gall’s artwork is big and bold – cartoonish, but in the crazy bombastic style of a 1950s monster movie poster. It’s like Harry Allard’s Miss Nelson is Missing mixed with Kang and Kodos from The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror episodes.
I’ll write a longer entry on it one day, but we’ve had a GREAT intial reaction to it so far. Here’s the book trailer, so you can decide for yourself if your kid is ready to experience the campy horror of… the Substitute Creacher.
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It’s Friday, so I thought I’d take a break from obsessing over my own collection of books and share with you a few links, videos, and other resources that might help you start building your own library of awesome kids titles.
For starters, keeping with September’s apparent theme of “new works from massively iconic children’s lit authors”, a new Dr. Seuss book was released this week – The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories, a collection of short illustrated pieces that Seuss originally created for magazines decades ago. (New Sendak, new Shel Silverstein, new Seuss – this September has been amazing month for kids lit… and alliteration.) The book was assembled by self-proclaimed “Seuss-o-logist” Charles Cohen and this video explains how the volume came to be
So, obviously, The Bippolo Seed looks like a killer addition for your home library if your kids are big Seuss fans.
In terms of general library building:
Kids LOVE Harry Allard books.
Check out this fantastic list titled “Building a Home Library of Children’s Books: 50 Must-Have Titles” by Pat Wroclawski, the children’s book consultant at The Book Stall at Chestnut Court in Winnetka, Illinois. Pat includes all of the core titles you’d expect – Brown Bear, Brown Bear, Goodnight Moon, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, etc. – but the list gets extra bonus points for some very cool suggestions beyond the normal canonical works, including fantastic titles like Miss Nelson is Missing by Harry Allard and James Marshall, A Chair for My Mother by Vera Williams, The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by A. Wolf by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, and more.
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I am the Truax, I speak for the hardwood flooring industry….
It’s a sad fact of being a parent, but sometimes, for reasons I can’t explain, you will find inexplicably awful books appearing on your kid’s bookshelf. Usually, it’s just a crappy movie tie-in or a flea market oddity or a Burger King promotional item, but sometimes you find something really, truly odd.
Case in point – one day, while on vacation, I found my 4-year-old daughter perusing a worn copy of Truax, a weird pamphlet of a picture book, published in 1995, that is supposed to be an eye-opening rebuttal of Dr. Seuss’ classic environmental fable, The Lorax.
However, unlike Theodore Geisel, the creators of Truax didn’t rely on some stuffy, tree-hugging publishing company like Random House to release their iconic children’s tale. Instead, they wisely chose a more fair and impartial partnership to bring their story to the masses – The Truax was published “through a cooperative effort of the Hardwood Forest Association and the National Oak Flooring Manufacturers Association.” That’s right. Because if you want a balanced, agenda-free look at the logging industry, there’s, of course, no better source for information than the National Oak Flooring Manufacturers Association.
(In related news, after hours of intense debate, my mom has named me Handsomest Dude in Town. I thank her for her calm, fact-based assessment.)
My daughter found Truax – the title is just “Truax”, not “The Truax,” which sounds much better – at the bottom of a toy chest in an old family cottage in northern Michigan and, when asked what she was reading, she shook her head and said, “I don’t know. I’m very confused.” And I don’t blame her.
Truax is an odd little attempt at parody from people who obviously felt slighted by Dr. Seuss’ portrayal of the logging industry as a bunch of mean ol’ Once-lers in The Lorax. Is it amateurish? Heck yeah – it looks like it was written and drawn by the people who create kids menus for knock-off Big Boy hamburger chains – but the people creating it were, in fact, amateurs, so it’s a little hard to fault them for not having Seuss’ virtuoso skill with words and images. But, don’t worry, dear readers, there are a lot of other faults that you CAN hold against the Truax team. [read the rest of the post…]
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Little Lit: It Was a Dark and Silly Night....
Parents: If you haven’t heard of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s Little Lit books yet, man-oh-man, are you missing out. Little Lit is an extremely cool series of kid-focused comics anthologies, all organized around a specific theme. There have been three volumes so far – Folklore & Fairy Tale Funnies, Strange Stories for Strange Kids, and It Was a Dark and Silly Night – and one collected volume of the whole series so far called Big Fat Little Lit. Each volume has attracted a murderer’s row of amazing writers and illustrators as contributors – people like David Sedaris, Ian Falconer, Maurice Sendak, Crockett Johnson, Chris Ware, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Jules Feiffer, Neil Gaiman, William Joyce, Lewis Trondheim, Lemony Snicket, Spiegelman himself, and lots, lots more.
It’s a breathtaking collection of talent and we’ve already got two Little Lit volumes on my “Books My Kid Will Read in the Future” shelf. (Expect full breakdowns on them in the future. I’ve got a whole comics themed week of entries planned for sometime in October.) The stories skew a bit older than my daughter – I think a 7 or 8-year-old would think they were the coolest books they’ve ever seen – but there are a few stories that I think I could get away reading with my 4-year-old at the moment, namely David Sedaris and Ian Falconer’s Shrek-esque team-up “Pretty Ugly.” (After Squirrel Meets Chipmunk, I definitely want a full-on twisted kids’ book from Sedaris and Falconer sometime in the near future.)
I was reminded of the Little Lit series today thanks to Neil Gaiman’s new Tumblr blog where he posted an animated version of his contribution to the It Was a Dark and Silly Night volume (illustrated by the great Gahan Wilson) that was adapted by director Steven-Charles Jaffe.
Check it out below and get a taste of the chaotic fun of the Little Lit books.
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Iggy Peck, Architect is next on our reading list
One of the core reasons for this blog existing is that, selfishly, I really want to know what other people’s kids are reading, and I really, really want recommendations for great kids’ books that haven’t crossed our path yet. We got some great submissions last week – which was very cool, since the blog has only existed for a week, so thanks for the charity, dear readers – but one stood out for me as an early favorite. Based on a recommendation from my lovely friend Megan McKnight, the next book we’re hunting for is Iggy Peck, Architect by Andrea Beaty, illustrated by David Roberts.
(Or maybe we’re just going borrow it from Megan or… ooh, our local library has it… oh, OK, we’re totally getting this book now.)
According to the description of the book:
Iggy has one passion: building. His parents are proud of his fabulous creations, though they’re sometimes surprised by his materials. But hey! What’s wrong with a tower built of diapers? (Even dirty ones!)
Dear Ig has it made until second grade. That’s when he meets his match. His teacher, Miss Lila Greer, frowns upon architecture. Banned from building in school, second grade becomes a bore until one day a fateful field trip lets Iggy Peck show the world his true talents!
It was named one of Time Magazine’s Top Children’s Books of 2007 and won a Parents’ Choice Silver Honor Award. And, more importantly, it looks very cool. I LOVE the graphic paper backgrounds to Iggy’s illustrations. And, coincidentally, I recently had a long conversation with my daughter trying to explain what an architect does. We have lots of books about the actual construction process – “Biff Builds a House” and so on – but we haven’t encountered many that actually get into the planning/artistic inspiration aspects of what architects do.
On the author’s website, you can find some great sample pages and other resources if you’re interested.
So, thanks Megan for the suggestion! If anyone else has suggestions for what we should try to read next, just email me and pass it on.
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Maurice Sendak – the man responsible for such Library favorites as Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen – released the first book that he’s both written and illustrated in 30 YEARS earlier this month. (Not that Sendak hasn’t been working all this time. He’s still a prolific illustrator – my daughter is a BIG fan of Mommy?, his epic monster-mash of a pop-up book that he illustrated for author Arthur Yorinks in 2006.)
Maurice Sendak’s Bumble-Ardy
His new book is called Bumble-Ardy, which we’re hoping to get our hands on soon. But, while promoting Bumble-Ardy, Sendak spoke to the New York Times and offered this fantastic insight on the responsibility that a children’s author has to his dual audiences of kids and parents:
You mustn’t scare parents. And I think with my books, I managed to scare parents. Randolph Caldecott was a sneaky guy. Because under the guise of stories about little animals, he had the same passion for childhood. If you just look at the surface of them, they look like nice English books for kiddies. But his books are troubling if you spend time with them. He inspired me. I adored Caldecott. Probably his idea, or my interpretation of him, was that children’s books should be fair to children. Not to soften or to weaken.
Before that, the attitude towards children was: Keep them calm, keep them happy, keep them snug and safe. It’s not a putdown of those earlier books. But basically, they went by the rules that children should be safe and that we adults should be their guardians. I got out of that, and I was considered outlandish. So be it.
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That was what my almost five-year-old daughter told me as I was getting her ready for bed tonight.
“What?” I said. “Wait, what was this? When was this?”
It had been raining today, so her kindergarten class had stayed inside for recess and watched a movie.
The book in question….
“And it was about this old lady… and there was this scary part with hands at the beginning… it was so freaky… and the old lady, she was a witch… she would take children’s bones and boil them, and, if you want to get someone’s bones, you have to kill them. So this lady KILLED children, Dad. She killed like a hundred children. She had a fence of bones… no, I’m serious, Dad. She killed children. So many children. And ripped out their bones.”
“This was at school today?”
“Yes, I’m really telling the truth, Dad. It was a video from the people that made the Knuffle Bunny and Pete’s a Pizza videos, but it was about KILLING…”
That went on for a while.
It turns out – after some quick Google searches – that the video was an animated version of a book called Teeny-Tiny and the Witch-Woman (1975) by Barbara K. Walker, illustrated by Michael Foreman, which seems to be out of print. The cartoon adaptation was done by Weston Woods, a fantastic production company, owned by Scholastic, that specializes in animated versions of classic children’s books. (My daughter knows their Mo Willems and William Steig videos, which are great.)
I found Teeny-Tiny and the Witch-Woman on YouTube and… yeah, my daughter was right. That is freaky. Really freaky, right? (The hands are WAY scary.)
So, OK, Teeny-Tiny and the Witch-Woman – you’re on the radar of the Library now.
I’m going to try to track down a copy to see if the actual book is any less “freaky.” Oh, and I’m also going to enjoy about a month of questions from my kid about murdered children and the best way to collect the bones of young ones, so, thanks a lot, Teeny-Tiny.
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Was that too obvious a note to start on? Dammit. Well, hopefully, I can set the bar low with this first post and move upwards and onwards from there.
So, what is this blog about? First, check out our “About” page (again, too obvious?) to get my answer to the question – WHAT DOES “BUILDING A LIBRARY” MEAN?
One of several branches of our in-home library
But, beyond that, let me give you the highlights. For the past five years, I’ve been obsessively collecting books for my daughter in the attempt to build her a nicely diverse and engaging library of books that she can read right now and books that (hopefully) she will read one day.
My library project has had its ups and downs, and I want to share my results. Why? Because a). I want to give parents, who are looking for new books for their own children, the benefit of our experience and maybe help recommend some really great books, and b). I just enjoy talking about kids’ books.
How is this going to work? Every week, I’ll profile different books in our library. I’ll give you a skeptical parent overview of the book, let you know if I recommend it as a buy or if I suggest that you pilot it via your local library, and I’ll help up some context around the book too – i.e. recommendations for other similar books, discussions of genre, characters, etc.
On the right, you’ll notice a sidebar called “My Dewey System.” This is my attempt to categorize the different books that you’ll be likely to find in a kid’s library. The categories in the sidebar will expand over the next week or so, but, at the moment, our list of categories includes:
Board Books, Picture Books, Easy Readers, Chapter Books, Young Adult Books, Poetry, Nonfiction, Comic Books, and, my favorite, Books My Kid Will Read in the Future.
Dust covers roam like tumbleweeds in our house…
(Yeah, yeah, I know there are WAY more actual categories of children’s books, but this is what we’re going to start with.)
You’ll also find posts with original articles and general miscellany about kids books, links to other great resources on the web (check out our blog roll and Twitter sidebar for a very cool collection of links), and anything else I deem relevant. I’ve spent a lot of time collecting different resources in my hunt for the perfect books for my kid and now I want to spread the wealth – hopefully, some of you might actually find it valuable. (No worries, if not.)
And, most importantly, if you have a great book that you want to recommend or that you think any children’s library should not be without, PLEASE send me an email and let me know. There is a very, very selfish side to this project, in that I really want the dialogue to go both ways so I can reap some really excellent new book suggestions for my daughter.
Regardless, thanks for checking out the site and I hope you enjoy the ramblings of a self-obsessed, unlicensed, amateur children’s librarian. (Enjoy, tolerate… I’ll take what I can get.)
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