One book that We Like!

Since I'm hoping to have this blog give the false impression that I am a sunny and equanimical person, who likes the majority of books that she reads, let me balance out that cranky last post with a brief and praiseful offering: Antoinette Portis's Not a Box. It is good.

Oh, fine, here's a little more. It slightly looks like the first draft of a new Japanese children's character, but the tribute to imagination just works despite residual hyper-cuteness. The conceit is that the black lines represent the "real"--the little rabbit positioned in, on, or beside that cardboard box--while the super-imposed red drawings are pure fantasy--the box as building on fire, robot, spaceship, hot-air balloon, or more. A very prosaically-minded adult voice tries to squelch each imaginative move from off-screen ("Why are you spraying water on that box?" for example), but the rabbit/child sticks to his/her guns, insisting endlessly the title phrase. It captures very simply both the beauty and the sadness that children feel in realizing their mental landscape is not broadcast automatically to those they love.

Two Books that Did Not Work.

Last night we read several books that I did not love. For opposite reasons, which I suppose is instructive. First up, Mercer Mayer's Just a Baseball Game, which, like all of his books, is just straight up ugly to look at. I'm sorry, people who find Mercer Mayer's "keeping-it-real" snot-nosed story-telling compelling and dynamic, but I really don't like him. Just look at this cover and you've instantly comprehended a visual style which he somehow feels needs to be spread over a bazillion books, instead of, preferably, no books. (I should add that I make exception for There's a Crocodile Under My Bed, which pre-dates this inexplicably named "Look-Look" series of books about feeling and acting like a brat.)

So. Not much appreciation for Mercer Mayer by me. (And yet we read the book 2 times. Go figure.) Then YoungerKid picked out Lloyd Alexander and Trina Schart Hyman's The Fortune Tellers. And this one seems like it should be knocked out of the park: it has won all kinds of awards, and the author-illustrator team is dreamy--I'm basically living my entire life in anticipation of the day I can start reading Alexander's The Book of Three to OlderKid--but this book was pretty boring. That is, it's funny, but only to middle-aged people like me; the irony of a fortune teller whose "fortunes" are sayings like "You will be rich when you earn a lot of money" were totally lost on (the admittedly a little young for this) Older and YoungerKids. But then, the last part of the book veers wildly into a strange chronicle of the bad things that happen to this fortune teller, such as: falling off a balcony, being attacked by lions, being stung by hornets, being dropped by an eagle into a rushing river and never seen again...which, fine, it's a folk tale, but, that narrative turn really made no sense, and made the story seem bizarre without really lifting it up into unified and satisfying. And, maybe I'm excessively conditioned by Hyman's powerful work in her books Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood and St. George and the Dragon, but the strong lines of her illustrations seem inextricably rooted in a primitivist Grimm myth-world. Which is not to say that she can't try to break out of the box and visit Cameroon for this one, (which she apparently physically did), but the mixture of old and new aesthetic elements didn't quite work for me.

In Praise of Polo

There is the way that I would like to choose books for my children: this method involves poring over Horn Book and School Library Journal reviews, browsing recommended lists from the American Library Association and the Cooperative Children's Book Center, and perusing such authoritatively named guides as Babies Need Books. Then there is the reality, which is that library visits tend to happen on the fly, in the rare and magical moment that everyone is feeling well-fed and not tired and not in need of a long digging session in the sandbox and not likely to want to sing verses of "Little Boxes" at the top of his or her lungs for one or two hours on end. Once we get there, not surprisingly, these precious library visits tend to be conducted with the speed and grace of an episode of "Supermarket Sweep." Usually we're so relieved just to have made it past the siren call of apple juice and muffins in the lobby snack bar that our book selection technique involves a general grabbing of any book that appears to have bright colors and the right proportion of words to a page.

Thank goodness, then, that our public library is staffed by marvelous people who do all that aforementioned browsing, pondering and perusing for us, and that the contents of our book basket, usually chosen nearly at random, tend to have a success rate of at least 50%. A recent favorite, previously totally unknown to us, is the fabulous Polo: The Runaway Book. (Like Zoo-ology, also reprinted for the U.S. market by Roaring Brook Press.) This book is really a graphic novel telling, in sequential pictures and only two words ("My book!"), the story of a dog (assisted by a cotton-candy-selling rhino, knitting penguin, dirigible-flying chicken, and pig princess, among many others) trying to retrieve his book from a glowing alien dot. What's spectacular is not just the visual ingenuity evident from that brief plot description, but also the good-heartedness of all of Polo's adventures. We are all in favor of any book that ends with a party, especially when that party affirms both the pleasure of reading as a solitary occupation as well as the greater general enjoyment that comes from sharing our favorite books with all our friends.

P.S. It's possible that this book will cause you too to have magical adventures. Viz.: We took the book to a Radisson in Kansas City, not perhaps the most fairy-tale of locations. When we came out from the lobby the next morning, though, the street was filled with Shriners from all over Missouri, many of them dressed in full clown regalia and riding in their signature tiny cars. Older Kid and Younger Kid stood and gaped and gaped some more, amazed at the possibilities hidden in any given concrete street.

Joelle Jolivet

There was a time in my life when I did not know that I greatly enjoyed oversize books with woodcut illustrations of animal species. That time is gone, since we are now the proud owners of both Zoo-ology and Almost Everything, both illustrated by Jolivet and originally published in France. They both are indubitably French, but the former is greatly preferable to the latter since Zoo-ology's Frenchness comes out mainly in the way that the animal illustrations are classed in odd categories ("Hot," "With Horns," "Black and White"). Almost Everything has both a frankness about the naked human body uncommon to U.S. picture books, which is okay, and a strange fascination with the exoticism of ethnic costume, which kind of is not. Not to mention that the book certainly does not cover almost everything; where are books? computers? washing machines? disposable diapers? Trader Joe's frozen meatballs? the other fundamental pieces of my daily existence?

Now we have borrowed from the library 365 Penguins, illustrated by Jolivet with a slightly less folkloric and more mid-century modern style than the encyclopedia books. The text, by Jean-Luc Fromenthal, is...odd; it's half math lesson (how many penguins can fit in 12 drawers that hold 12 penguins each?) and half environmental harangue. Unfortunately, (or fortunately), the oddest part of the book, in which the eccentric uncle shows up to explain that he has sent this hapless family the titular penguins for the purpose of illegally smuggling them from the North Pole to the South Pole, is totally uninteresting to Older Kid and Younger Kid. They greatly delight, however, in the penguin induced chaos--fish bones in the piano, etc.--which is to me the scariest part of the book.

Pie-making, Meet Intertextuality

Back in May, there was a hard freeze hereabouts way later than there should have been. Many, many peach blossoms never got to turn into peaches. Which means that now, in August, the few peaches that survived are being fought over at the farmer's market with a passion inflamed by the 100 degree heat. I of course succumbed to this passion and bought many more peaches than I should have, though many fewer than I really wanted. (Who wouldn't lust after a bushel box of Missouri peaches?) Which means that now, this week, I have some extremely ripe peaches which, despite everyone's best efforts, are not going to get eaten out of hand. Which means that I have to make many, many pies.

Which means, of course, that we are reading Each Peach Pear Plum, a Janet and Allan Ahlberg classic that centers around a large pie of mysterious origins left in the middle of an orchard for all to enjoy. This book is to me the best example of the signature Ahlbergian nursery rhyme/fairy tale mash-up universe, mainly because of its simplicity--it's especially good for the 0-2 age span. Sure, The Jolly Postman has gimmicks, namely, actual letters from, say, the Three Little Pigs's lawyer to the Wolf that you can take out of actual envelopes and read and then put back (or rip up and put in your mouth, depending on your age.) And Jeremiah in the Dark Woods, concerning a boy's hunt for the thief who stole his grandmother's tarts (the robber turns out to be that exemplar of white privilege, Goldilocks), has the virtue of being long enough to keep a four-year-old occupied during almost all of an afternoon's monsoon. (I know this for an actual fact.)

But Each Peach Pear Plum is better than these. It is partly an "I Spy" book, which is particularly enjoyable when the illustrations are good, as these are, and partly a fantasy about what would happen if all your favorite characters--Tom Thumb, Mother Hubbard, Cinderella, The Three Bears, Jack and Jill, The Wicked Witch, Baby Bunting, Bo-Peep and Robin Hood--got together and shared some plum pie. I also like that though Baby Bear is ill-advisedly allowed to carry a gun throughout the entire book, which he repeatedly fires accidentally at people and things, no one holds it against him; likewise, no one minds that the Wicked Witch joins in the picnic too even though she's spent the whole book skulking around in the bushes and scaring poor Jack and Jill.

I am in general a big fan of Allan Ahlberg's dark and surrealist humor (see The Man Who Wore All his Clothes and The Runaway Dinner) though it's often very hard to explain when 4 year olds ask follow-up questions. Each Peach Pear Plum has just the teeniest taste of this sensibility, and it is all the better for it. Especially when you follow it up with a nice big slice of last of the season peach pie.

It Begins

Hello, and welcome to The Read-Aloud Project. This blog will chronicle the connections between our family and our many thousands of children's books (plus the many thousands more at our local library). I'll try to post as frequently as I can about what books we read, what books we want to read, and what books we can't stop reading, all from the perspective of 2 boys, ages 4 and 2, and 2 working parents, ages unmentionable, who all like to read and are also all kind of bossy about their tastes. Especially the 2-year-old.

In the meantime, if you yourself would like to try reading aloud, follow this handy eHow site on "How to Read Aloud to Your Children." Don't worry, the difficulty level is "easy"!