reading

Press Here by Hervé Tullet

by Tom B.

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 Difficult Task of Introducing Your Kid to Folk Tales and Fairy Tales

by Tom B.

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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Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein

by Tom B.

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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My Love Letter to Toon Books and Little Mouse Gets Ready by Jeff Smith

by Tom B.

I have a big, big geek-dad crush on Toon Books, a fascinating publishing company that has the ridiculously admirable job of making readable comic books for young readers. And, Little Mouse Gets Ready, their Level One comic for beginning readers by Bone creator Jeff Smith, is quite simply one of my favorite books that I’ve ever bought for my daughter.

Toon Books

Toon Books: Comics 'R Good for Kids

But let me backtrack a little and explain why I’m about to so effusively gush over Toon Books.

I’m a comics fan and have been since I was a kid. My house is filled with comics and graphic novels, so, of course, my daughter started to show interest in these cool, colorful books with lots of pictures that are stacked up in piles all around Daddy’s office. And that made me incredibly excited. I was dying to share my love of comics with her and quickly started taking her with me to our local comics store (Detroit Comics – GREAT store). I let her pick out some kids’ titles she was interested in – Muppets and Fraggle Rock comics, Monsters Inc., Tiny Titans, Scooby-Doo – and it didn’t really bother me that they were mostly commercial property spin-offs.

I knew enough to steer her away from the really heinous stuff, and I knew that even dorky media tie-in comics can act as great gateway drugs into real, honest-to-god comics comics. My own pathway into comics fandom began with Larry Hama’s G.I. Joe, a comic based on a toy property, which drew me in, taught me how to read and appreciate comics, and eventually led me to the X-Men, the Avengers, Captain Britain, Milk & Cheese, Plastic Forks, Sam & Max, Dark Knight Returns, and so on and so forth, onwards and upwards. So, sure, I didn’t want to let my daughter think that Scooby-Doo was the pinnacle of kids comics, but I knew I had to let her get interested in comics on her own terms. Nothing will turn a kid off comics faster than a parent shoving titles at them and complaining, “No, no, you don’t want to read that – that dumb book YOU’RE interested in. THIS is the one…”

So we bought her a stack of her own comics and she loved them. LOVED them. She’d flip through them endlessly and read them at night under her covers with a flashlight. I was in geek-dad heaven. Until…

Until she asked me to sit down and READ the comics with her. And then, very, very quickly, something horrible – something I really, really didn’t want to admit – became readily apparent.

Reading comic books with a kid can be a huge pain in the ass. [read the rest of the post…]

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In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak: Two Different Readings

by Tom B.

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

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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Happy Pig Day! and The Elephant and Piggie Series by Mo Willems

by Tom B.

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

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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