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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Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, a 1970 picture book following a child’s romp through a surreal nocturnal bakery, is a weird book, but it’s up to your own personal interpretation whether it’s “delightfully weird” or “uncomfortably weird.”
In the Night Kitchen
I first became aware of it thanks to its reputation as “the book with the naked kid” – the young hero, three-year-old Mickey, loses his clothes early in the story, and he spends a fair amount of the rest of the tale naked, with his penis frequently visible. That choice alone has caused the book to be challenged or banned on several occasions and, while, sure, it is unusual to see a naked child in a picture book, it’s a fairly lame cause for controversy. Mickey isn’t sexualized AT ALL and, let’s be honest, most kids, thanks to diaper changes or older or younger siblings, have seen a baby or toddler naked before.
I’d wager ten bucks that any parent who ever tried to have In the Night Kitchen removed from their local library laughed like crazy whenever their two-year-old did a pre-bath naked run through their house, particularly if it was in front of company, so it’s ridiculous to try to turn Mickey’s nakedness into anything perverse or predatory. When we first read the book, my daughter snorted and giggled at seeing Mickey naked for the first time, but, every subsequent time we’ve read it, his nudity has almost never come up. When she does notice it now, she just smiles and says, “He lost his clothes. What a goofball.”
But, all nakedness aside, I do find In the Night Kitchen to be a fairly difficult book to read. Don’t get me wrong – my daughter LOVES it. She thinks it’s funny and strange, she loves pouring over the little details in the backgrounds of the Night Kitchen, and she has fond memories of visiting Philadelphia’s Please Touch Kids’ Museum where she played on huge reproductions of scenes from Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are. (It’s an awesome museum.) If you ask her to tell you what the story of In the Night Kitchen is, she can’t really verbalize it, but she knows, without a doubt, that she likes it.
My issue with In the Night Kitchen is a rhythm thing. For whatever reason, when reading Night Kitchen at bed-time, I find myself tripping over the words constantly. I just can’t figure out its groove. The words are presented more like verse than a normal narrative – and maybe that’s coloring my reading of it – but all of my attempts to find its poetic cadence have failed miserably. And I realize that it’s my problem, not Sendak’s. It’s not fair for me to fault him for my inability to hone in on the perfect inflection for his story. I like that everything about In the Night Kitchen is atypical. I like that it’s not a sentimental, sing-song nursery rhyme. I’m a guy who loves Vonnegut and Terry Gilliam movies – I like weird. However, on a personal level, I find reading In the Night Kitchen out loud a strangely jarring experience. It’s a kind of weird that I’ve never fully figured out and, at some level, it makes me uncomfortable.
Which, in and of itself, is weird. Fill a picture book with a thousand naked children and I won’t bat an eye, but get a little surreal and atonal with the free verse, and I get all frustrated and cranky. Again, this speaks to my failings, not the book’s, but while I love Sendak, I will admit that In the Night Kitchen is not a book for everyone. For me, In the Night Kitchen is a PERFECT library book – it has the potential to be a big hit or a big miss, depending on your household, so being able to pilot it at your local library first before bringing it home is a very good thing.
If there are any other parents out there who have my rhythm or weirdness issues with In the Night Kitchen, I found two videos that might help. The first is a Weston Woods animated version of In the Night Kitchen, which, honestly, really helped me in terms of hearing how someone else reads the story. And the second is an extremely funny video from the Dad Labs – called “Owen’s Reading Nook” – where the reader, Owen… has some very honest reactions to the inherent WTF weirdness of In the Night Kitchen. Enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSBAADKHBk
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The 16th Elephant and Piggie book by Mo Willems, Happy Pig Day!, is being released today and, in honor of its publication, I spent last night composing this long-winded ode to the Elephant and Piggie series, a collection of easy reader titles that have had a big impact on our household. I’ve wanted to write about Elephant and Piggie for a while now, but it’s hard to know where to begin. Because, at this point, the way I feel about Mo Willems as a children’s book creator is the same way I feel about the Coen Brothers as film directors. It’s not a question of which of their works are good and which are bad. It’s pretty much just a question of measuring excellence.
There Is a Bird on Your Head
Quick semi-related diversion: In my opinion, the Coen Brothers have never made a bad movie – yes, Ladykillers wasn’t Raising Arizona, but it was way better than most average film comedies (for Hanks’ lead performance alone), and Intolerable Cruelty is an unheralded gem – so, when discussing their films, I mostly just find myself ranking favorites. The same thing happens when I talk about Mo Willems. I simply have yet to meet a Willems title that my family hasn’t enjoyed. So, when looking at his whole body of work, I’ll admit, it turns into a semi-pointless exercise of pure fanboy-esque categorization, with me ranking his titles from “the very best” to the “normal best.” (Ooh, aren’t I a harsh headmaster? Grading his books from “A+” all the way to “A-“.)
That being said, although I love the Pigeon (like many others, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus was our first Willems title), the large bulk of my Mo-love is reserved for the Elephant and Piggie books, a remarkable series for beginning readers. The E&P series, which began in 2007 with There Is a Bird on Your Head!, falls under the category of “easy readers”, a term that generally describes books designed for children who are just starting to read on their own. Easy readers are equal parts illustrations and large, easy-to-read text, and their vocabulary is normally limited to words that appeal to kindergarten to second-grade reading levels.
The Elephant and Piggie books boil down the easy reader to its essential components. The lead characters, Gerald the elephant and Piggie the pig, stand in front of a plain white backdrop, acting out their stories with just their body language and bare minimum of props. The earnest duo – like a more affectionate animal version of Laurel and Hardy – communicate through sound effects and large-text word balloons that make it easy for kids to pick out key words and follow the action. The dialogue-driven E&P books are, actually, a lot like wonderful, condensed one-act plays for kids. There are series of engaging verbal volleys between Elephant and Piggie in each volume, replete with knowing humor, repetition, and facial expressions that really help the young readers understand the inflection and emphasis of the words. [read the rest of the post…]
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Before I start my discussion of Mercy Watson to the Rescue – which, by the way, is an exceptionally good book – I’m going to get into an annoyingly pedantic discussion of children’s book categories. Why? Because one big part of collecting books for your child is figuring out what books are appropriate for your kid at what age.
Mercy Watson to the Rescue
And I’m not talking about subject matter. Generally, you don’t have to worry about boobs, blood, and salty language until you get into later-age YA fiction. (Unless there are some really awesome picture books that no one has turned me onto yet. Clue me in, guys. I’m cool.) I’m talking about format – how many pages, what’s the text-to-picture ratio, how big is the font, how long is the story, etc. Different formats work best at different stages along your child’s development as a reader. There are lots of categories and terms for these books – some are used often, some less so, some are interchangeable, some are used incorrectly… it can be a huge pain. (If you’re really not interested in reading a brief aside about children’s book types, scan down a bit and I’ll say “BORING PART OVER” when I’m done.)
There are easy readers (sometimes called “I Can Read” books), beginning readers, middle readers, transitional readers, chapter books, young adult books – the list goes on and on. Since my daughter is almost five, we’ve had limited interaction with some of these book types so far, particularly the ones above her current reading level. We have TONS of picture books. (Almost literally tons.) Over the past year, we’ve spent a lot of time getting comfortable with easy readers. And we even have a few younger-skewing YA novels (mostly the works of Roald Dahl) that we’ve read aloud during bedtimes (plus whole shelves of YA novels that can be classified under the “Books My Kid Will One Day Read” category).
If I had to pick a category that we’ve explored the least so far, it’d be chapter books, but I bet that’s going to change a lot over the next year. Chapter books are story-books that are normally targeted at 6 to 10 year olds, and they’re sort of mini large-print novels. They’re short novellas with a relatively large font size and a much higher emphasis on text than images. (All chapter books have illustrations.) They’re the next step up from easy readers and, typically, they’re broken into frequent chapters to help hold the attention span of the reader and make it easier to check in and out if the reader can’t finish the whole book in a single sitting. (As I describe them, they sound a lot like Dan Brown novels… but better.)
BORING PART OVER! – At the moment, our favorite chapter books come from Kate DiCamillo’s Mercy Watson series, which began with the fantastic Mercy Watson to the Rescue. In the world of chapter books, the Mercy Watson series skews pretty young – Chris Van Dusen produces so many expressive, polished, retro-styled paintings to accompany each book that, at times, they resemble longer picture books – but the stories are so simple yet sophisticated that many different age groups can enjoy the series. An eight-year-old would get a kick out of reading them and, I can attest from past experience, a four-year-old loves having them read to her. A lot of that has to do with Kate DiCamillo’s talent as a writer.
Once you start collecting books for your children – or even regularly checking books out for them at your library – you will very, very quickly start to develop a list of “must-read” authors. These are the authors who are so good so consistently that you’ll find yourself going back to them again and again. We have a couple of must-reads at our house. It’s very hard to go wrong with Mo Willems, Maurice Sendak, Lane Smith, Julia Donaldson, William Steig, Doreen Cronin… the list goes on and on. Kate DiCamillo is definitely on our “must-read” author list too. [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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We’ve all been there….
If the runaway success of Adam Mansbach’s Go the F**k to Sleep has taught us anything – other than the fact that profanely begging your kid to go to bed is, apparently, a strangely universal experience – it’s that there is a definite market for kids’ books that are really for grown-ups. Yes, they might look like lavish children’s tomes with their 32 pages of lushly rendered illustrations, but, c’mon, there are two different picture books based on Bob Dylan songs. NO kids were asking Santa for those books. Those were for the parents.
And I get it. These “kids’ books for grown-ups” exist for two main reasons. First, there’s total value in parents wanting to share something that they love with their kids. Even though it’s not my cup of tea, I totally get why a die-hard Dylan fan would cherish a kid-friendly way to introduce their offspring to “Forever Young.” And, second, there’s something just inherently hilarious about something that looks like it’s for kids, but really, it’s got a secret grown-up dirty side. (It’s the reason why there’s almost nothing as funny as watching a toddler say the f-word.)
There are a lot of these kinds of books out there, but I thought I’d share two of my favorites.
Major Tom, you’ve really made the grade…
First up, illustrator Andrew Kolb‘s ridiculously cool picture book version of the classic David Bowie song “Space Oddity”. Yes, that “Space Oddity” – Ground control to Major Tom, take your protein pills, and put your helmet on…. Kolb turned Bowie’s optimistically tragic space anthem into an epic modernist picture book for kids that he originally released as a free download on his website. However, EMI and the rights holders for “Space Oddity,” perhaps a wee bit predictably, brought down the hammer on Kolb and the download link is no more. The artwork is still up on Kolb’s site, sans lyrics and labeled now as “Space Picture Book”, with a note that specifies “[t]his is merely a concept and no physical form of this book will be made until all involved approve of the collaboration.”
But you can still browse through a copy of the original version of Kolb’s book on Wired.com’s Underwire blog here, and they even provide a link, so you can play Bowie’s song while you read.
[Author’s aside: Thanks to the movie Labyrinth, my daughter is OBSESSED with David Bowie. She loves him – loves “Magic Dance,” loves “Rebel, Rebel”… she’s a big fan. In a misguided attempt to foster her newfound Bowie love, I burned her a CD with a bunch of Bowie hits without, admittedly, really looking at the songs I was putting on there. So, while driving to swim class one day, I was suddenly hit with a barrage of very urgent, very worried questions from the back seat about what exactly was happening to Major Tom. The song has since migrated its way off the mix CD.] [read the rest of the post…]
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Cover of The Phantom Tollbooth, illustration by Jules Feiffer
I mention this on the site’s “About” page, but, when I first found out that I was going to be a father, the very next day, I went out and bought a copy of Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth for my kid – my kid who wasn’t going to be born for another nine months. Why? Because, in many ways, I think it’s the perfect children’s book.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Seuss, Silverstein, and Dahl, but there’s just something about the story and the narrative world that Juster puts together in Phantom Tollbooth that just floors me every time I read it.
For those unfamiliar, The Phantom Tollbooth is the story of Milo, a bored, apathetic kid, who, one day, finds a tollbooth that has mysteriously appeared in his bedroom. With nothing better to do, Milo gets in an old toy car, drives through the tollbooth, and finds himself in The Lands Beyond in the Kingdom of Wisdom, a pastiche of a fairy tale-land built around knowledge, wordplay, and mathematical nonsense. Milo makes friends with a watchdog – a pooch named Tock with a real clock in his center – travels through lands like Dictionopolis and The Island of Conclusions, and eventually quests to the Mountains of Ignorance to rescue the princesses Rhyme and Reason. (His travels are expertly illustrated by Jules Feiffer.)
The ironic wordplay and absurdism of The Phantom Tollbooth gets a lot of attention, and it should. My almost five-year-old daughter is currently getting a lot of laughs out of the verbal misunderstandings in books like Peggy Parish’s Amelia Bedelia series, which I’m hoping will act as gateway drugs for one day introducing her to Tollbooth – in terms of fun with language, Tollbooth is like a nuclear bomb compared to Parish’s firecrackers. (If you want a far more insightful – and better written – take on Juster’s way with words, read the great Michael Chabon’s essay on Phantom Tollbooth, which will accompany a new fiftieth anniversary edition of the book that comes out this October.)
However, while the allusions and puns are fast and furious, they’ve never been my absolute favorite part of the text. For me, The Phantom Tollbooth has, first and foremost, always been about Milo, who, I think, is one of the greatest protagonists in all of children’s literature. [read the rest of the post…]
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