Starting with the Little Ones

Continuing the Best of EatReadSleep’s Tenth Anniversary!

I read everything, but children’s books are also my profession. I loved reading to my son when he was little, and now I have grandchildren to turn into bibliophiles. During the ten years that I’ve been writing EatReadSleep, I have been the children’s selector for a large library system. Here are some of my favorites from that time.

Board Books

I have only written one post about these sturdy little volumes, and it was meant to be funny. Seriously, though, Sandra Boynton, Michael Dahl, and others have poured their prodigious talents into books that will be slobbered and chewed on, and parents everywhere appreciate it.

Academic Board Books are a thriving industry. Lots of titles here. Also lots of snark.

Picture Books

Picture books! Those little artistic gems. How I love them. The best picture books convey oceans of meaning in just a few well-chosen words, along with gorgeous or hilarious illustrations. Here are some of my favorites over the years. Many of the reviews are grouped in the original posts. Click the links for full reviews!

Series:

How Do Dinosaurs…? Jane Yolen is one the most prolific living writers, and this continuing series never fails to teach lessons in the cleverest ways.

Pete the Cat is one groovy dude. James Litwin started the series, which was continued by James Dean. This is one of the most popular series going these days.

Olivia makes an appearance in the same post. She is one precocious little pig.

Duck and Goose are a charming pair, one more adventurous than the other. Tad Hills is also the author of the excellent Rocket Learns to Read and others.

Jean Reagan writes the How to Babysit a…. series, instructing children to allow grandparents naps and other helpful advice. Comedy that hits close to home.

Bonny Becker started the Bear series with A Visitor for Bear. Sweet, charming, and amusing. Large volumes just right for bedtimes.

What dog lover doesn’t sympathize with Carter Goodrich’s Mister Bud? Adorable.

Some children’s books, like Muppets movies, are at least partly written for grownups, even though they definitely work for the kids, too. I Am Otter is one of those.

Single Titles:

Oh, this poor, little penguin. Flight School will have you sympathetically laughing along.

The Tortoise & the Hare is a wordless wonder, just one of the Caldecott winner’s stunning creations.

There Might Be Lobsters is a summery title that will help timid children to overcome their fears.

Hum and Swish is another breezy, oceanside title. This one encourages children to stay true to their own vision.

Great Joy is not your usual Santa-and-his-reindeer Christmas books for kids. Enduring and gorgeous. Tissues not included.

I mean, seriously. Look at those ears and tell me you’re not in love. In a Jar is for every child whose friend has moved away.

Sweety is a confident little misfit. For every child who marches to the beat of her own drummer. Sweetness and naked mole rats. (That’s a species, not a state of undress.)

This Is My Home, This Is My School. A fond look back by a happily homeschooled author, for his younger fellow home educators and their friends in conventional school settings.

Everything about Madeline Finn and the Library Dog will make you say, “Awww.” There are other books that follow, but I love this one.

Watercress is a recent multi-award winner, a quietly beautiful book that packs an emotional wallop.

Clovis Keeps His Cool, but just barely. That huge bull with the petite feet! Hilarious with a message.

Achingly poignant, Boats for Papa is for little ones experiencing the loss of a parent, whether through divorce, abandonment, incarceration, or death.

The Steads can do no wrong. A Sick Day for Amos McGee was the first Caldecott winner for this married couple and features an old zookeeper and his loving animals.

Saint George and the Dragon was old when my son was young. A medieval myth retold and spectacularly illustrated by one of my favorite book artists.

There will be many more children’s books to come, so stay tuned!

Academic Board Books

It all began with literary classics, and I said “Are you kidding?” to War and Peace for infants. The only people who want their six-month-old to read Tolstoy on 32 board pages are yuppies who are obsessed with getting Suzie into an Ivy League college before she can tie her own shoes. I mean seriously, Wuthering Heights? Babies need time to understand that most people—hopefully including Mommy and Daddy—have nice, normal relationships before they learn about creepy guys who dig up their beloved’s grave in order jump into her moldering, beetle-crawling arms. Call me old-fashioned, but I think kids should at least be toddlers before they are confronted by such deviance.

So I ignored the whole phenomenon of academic board books for a long time. Not ABC’s and 123’s, which are the traditional domain of board books, but nuclear physics, engineering, and the intricacies of manipulating RNA, for sure.

Then one day, I received a request for Astrophysics for Babies. Really? I thought, but I bought it.  “Who will check this out?” I wondered.

Everyone. Everyone checked it out. All of the excellent, education-minded parents where I work checked it out. My friends with little ones checked it out, too. I tried a few more: organic chemistry, robotics. Forty copies of every title, all checked out.

Publishers knew that they had struck gold and launched new series, and I kept buying. Finally, one day, I took a look at the books that had just been unpacked and thought, “Blockchain for Babies. I have never understood blockchain.” So I opened the book and read 32 board pages about it, and now I get it. No kidding. I couldn’t work with it professionally, but I get the concept and can discuss it without embarrassment. Now I’m a believer. All adults should read board books about Ph.D.-level topics.

Our latest batch of board books is about famous philosophers: Aristotle, Socrates, and so on. I checked out the one on Simone de Beauvoir, who, according to this volume, believed that everyone is equal, that everyone should be free to be themselves, and that everyone should be nice. In children’s biographical literature, all heroic people of all times thought that everyone should be nice. To the relief of parents, nothing is mentioned of Simone’s eclectic romantic pursuits, including her humiliating relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, who was repeatedly unfaithful to her and seemed to undermine everything she had to say about women’s equality. (French wine, berets, and cigarettes sold separately.) However, let me point out that Sartre is not one of the philosophers highlighted in this series (so there), perhaps because his existentialist viewpoint is difficult to explain in 32 or even 3200 pages, but has lately come to have some connection to climate change.

I highly recommend that parents of precocious children should acquaint themselves with world philosophy by reading board books and children’s nonfiction in general. That way, when your seven-year-old comes home from Harvard for Christmas break and mentions studying Descartes, you can nod sagely and intone, “I think, therefore I am,” and he will believe that you know what you’re talking about. It’s not until he is ten that he will roll his eyes, take a drag from his Turkish cigarette, and groan, “Oh, Dad. I know you read that in a board book.”

Disclaimer: I have read a boatload of these adorable little books as library copies. Opinions expressed are solely my own and may not reflect those of my employer or anyone else.