kids' books - SEARCH and DESTROY

yah DON'T LET THE PIGEON DRIVE THE BUS is great

recently got some book Maurice Sendak illustrated in the 80s and was shocked/appalled that it had all this bullshit about the Christ-child and St. John and various terrible things (wars, etc.) being part of "God's will". Can't fathom how any self-respecting Jew would crank out such shit.

Dear Milli, it's called (a Grimm fairytale, apparently?)

it's standard Xmas story silliness

well yes, but with the MYSTIC CHILDHOOD INNOCENCE dial cranked up to 8 million

http://covers.openlibrary.org/w/id/3044378-L.jpg
http://www.barnowlbooks.com/Images/books/14FootWheel.jpg
etc.

that looks VERY ENGLISH

Very, and Northern (has to be read in a yorkshire accent)

revive!

Do you have Robert Munsch outside of Canada? I've also come to really like Sandra Boynton's books. We go to the library all the time, so I've kind of gotten over being super choosy about what books my oldest daughter gets. She picks whichever three books she wants, and if they're awful there's a built in exit strategy so it's easier to tolerate knowing there's a finite number nights I'll have to them.

don't know robert munsch.
daughter currently loves frog & toad, and I kind of love them too.
http://www.lonestar.edu/departments/libraries/kingwood-library/frog_and_toad.gif

the other one i try to encourage which she really likes is little bear
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2xIkW1rqYnM/TwUyRXTAQlI/AAAAAAAACgU/MTr0ZXH4MZw/s1600/little_bear_maurice_sendak.jpg
it's weird though, i guess there's a bunch more "updated" little bears, which aren't by the same people? even though it says "maurice sendak's little bear" the illustrations are totally different and kinda lame. and sendak didn't even write the original little bears, so that's stranger still.

of course she also loves these horrible things, which I am trying to secretly get rid of
http://cd.pbsstatic.com/l/57/6657/9781577556657.jpg
they kind of make me sick to my stomach.

we go to the library pretty much every week, usually check out 5-7 picture books and it's totally unpredictable to me which one's evie will latch on to and demand to hear four times in a row and which times she'll reject completely

we're finishing our years of little kid books (youngest on the verge of turning 6) & in retrospect the ones that *I* loved reading the most to my kids were the Frances books by Russell Hoban. I think they loved them a lot too. I like Little Bear & Frog & Toad too. at one point we got a bunch of new-ish Scholastic-catalog books that were uniformly crappy. oh & I like Danny & the Dinosaur but we recently got a sequel at the library, something like Danny & the Dinosaur at Camp, & it was awful.

so i ordered Sandek's In the Night Kitchen bc it was one of my favorite books growing up and i wanted to read it to my daughter, but ppl keep balking when they find out bc it has gasp penis in it. what do u guys think? inappropriate to read to little girl? only for little boys? that seems unfair, but i'm willing to accept that i'm wrong here...

I don't have kids but I read it when I was a kid... found it a bit disturbing, but more because they want to BAKE HIM and all the illustrations of dough are kind of weird and scary and undulating, not because there's a penis. It's not a sexual image, and your daughter will learn about bodies at some point - she's probably seen you naked, right? It might spark some curiosity but it's not going to turn her into a rampant pervert or anything.

that's what i thought. it's silly.

re bakers + ovens, apparently sandek meant it as being evocative of the holocaust, which is why one of the bakers has a chaplain-stache

Oh wow, yeah. Totally didn't get that at the time (when I read it I probably wasn't even aware that there was such a thing as the holocaust) but I can see it now.

I read ITNK at the library when I was six or so and I really dug it but I felt nervous reading it because I knew if my mom saw me looking at a picture of a boy wang, I would get in trouble. So I think if I had a less conservative parent and they bought me the book and just treated it like a normal thing, it wouldn't have been so nerve-wracking to read it.

Did you see Sendak's interview with Colbert? He had a solution.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/21/nightkitchen.jpg/

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg21/scaled.php?server=21&filename=nightkitchen.jpg&res=landing

my kid loves 'don't let the pigeon drive the bus' and has taken to drawing the pigeon everywhere. (sometimes with wheels, sometimes with cars on his back while he looks at them quizzically.)

mo willems has another book called 'that is not a good idea!' which has some great visuals and is pretty funny and even has a dark twist ending (i think the duck's eye makeup is an intentional hint.)

http://www.playingbythebook.net/wp-content/uploads//thatisnotagoodidea.jpg

mo willems has a million books and all the ones we've read are great, it's crazy. the elephant and piggy books are my favorites, esp "we are in a book" which is very meta

http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1223426154l/893753.jpg

Favorite Mo Willems book is City Dog, Country Frog. Great Jon J Muth art too.

Currently loving the Moomin picture books and basically everything by Russell and Lilian Hoban.

This book has earned me big groovy Uncle points:

http://dulemba.com/Blogstuff/BlogTours/JonKlassen-hat.jpg

there's a sequel to that one called "this is not my hat." and klassen also illustrated this lemony snicket book which is pretty cool:
http://studioroxas.com/wp2013/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/JK_launch1.jpg

hey is this the place to admit when you bust out sobbing reading to your kids
cos i did that a few weeks ago

what were you reading

(full confession for the comics nerds: I have teared up reading the bit to my daughter in Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman where Supes eulogizes Pa Kent)

not technically a kids book I know but whatever
http://www.4thletter.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/ass06-18-19.jpg

Beatrice can read now. When did this happen???

Board Book S/D:

Search:

Everywhere Babies - I LOVE this book! It's so cute and fun and Ivy loves looking at all the babies.
Goddamn Sandra Boynton - I'm not entirely sold on her (I associate her art too strongly with crappy greeting cards and dumb mugs), but I shit you not, whenever I pull out one of her books, it's non-stop baby grins. Moo Baa La La La indeed.
The Snowy Day/Whistle for Willie - yay for books about kids who live in apartment buildings, and Peter is precious and adorable although it stresses me out that they let their dog run around the city off leash and unsupervised.
Polar Bear Night - another really cute one that gets me a little emotional if I'm not careful.
Good Night Gorilla - LOL

Destroy:

I Love You Forever - what the fuck this is the creepiest fucking book ever. (not a board book, or at least not the version we have, but still it's terrible.)

Meh:

Guess How Much I Love You - I want to love this book but it just kind of bugs me. Why can't you just let Little Nutbrown Hare have the last word, dude?
Ten Little Fingers, Ten Little Toes - I was super psyched about this one because it's often recommended along with Everywhere Babies but 1) it's pretty ableist (babies without ten fingers and ten toes are also adorable and worth of kisses!) and 2) it's great that all of the babies are ~diverse~ but the main character baby is white, so it kind of feels like it's treating the non-white babies as ethnic window dressing. I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking it.

i scanned through 'love you forever' because we have it for some reason and i was like 'hell no'. depressing as fuck.

The Snowy Day/Whistle for Willie - yay for books about kids who live in apartment buildings, and Peter is precious and adorable although it stresses me out that they let their dog run around the city off leash and unsupervised.

Yeah Ezra Jack Keats rules.

Guess How Much I Love You - I want to love this book but it just kind of bugs me. Why can't you just let Little Nutbrown Hare have the last word, dude?

I think technically he does have the last word? The last bit is thought, not said.

The Amazon reviews for it are hilarious. Xpost

He whispers it. It's like a compulsion. Let it go, Big Nutbrown Hare.

Love You Forever is so creeeeeepy. When the boy grows up and moves out his mother drives over to his house with a ladder and climbs into his bedroom window and crawls across the floor to get to the kid (who is now a grown adult).

I've been enjoying David Wiesner's books a lot, he's in the Chris Van Allsburg school of luxuriously illustrated fantastic weirdness but less wordy, some of them have no words at all.

I do like to read Guess How Much I Love You because I like doing the voices for the Nutbrown Hares. I like reading Barnyard Dance despite my Boynton misgivings, too, because it's just fun as heck. Also "Stand with the donkey" always tickles me. Hipster donkey, too cool to dance.

our 3 yr old was making me read him 'engineer ari and the hanukkah mishap' every night for awhile. he's taken to calling pennies 'maccabean coins'.

Search: anything at all by Julia Donaldson, but particularly The Highway Rat, which is a work of genius.

Also, having read this I urgently need to buy This Is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen.

I Love You Forever - what the fuck this is the creepiest fucking book ever. (not a board book, or at least not the version we have, but still it's terrible.)

Haha yes, it's shocking. We got it as a "gift" (changed the locks obv)

The Snowy Day

cosine, this book rules

my kids were super into YOU CHOOSE for awhile and i was concerned that it was encouraging an acquisitive, window-shopping view of the world

but i think on balance it was good: a brief moment where they could pretend that they actually had control over what the hell was happening to them

I Love You Forever

Haha, I don't have kids but I came here to post DESTROY: I Love You Forever. I worked at a Waldenbooks in college and we couldn't keep this book in stock, it sold constantly and the people who bought it always made it a point to tell me how much they loved it while they were checking out. It's seriously the creepiest piece of shit book ever.

so close to a solid idea for a good albeit mawkish and depressing book though. I'm not sure what the audience for that book is, I suspect it's for grandmothers.

An excerpt from my favorite Amazon review of I Love You Forever:

Anyone who's had a baby in their family knows there's nothing cuter than looking at them while they're sleeping. The mother in the book knows this and sneaks into his room at night to peek at her angel, and sing her little song to him. Nothing wrong with that, right?

Only it doesn't stop there. When the boy is a teenager she CRAWLS into his room on all fours and, "If he was really asleep she picked up that great big boy and rocked him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth" while she sang her song. I don't know about you but if I was 15 and woke up in my bed with my Mom holding me like that, I'd probably scream. Who knows what kind of weird dreams this poor boy was having?

Well at least when this poor lad moves out of the house, he won't have to deal with his mother's obsessive habits anymore...or does he? Yep, once he's full grown, according to the book, "...sometimes on dark nights his mother got into her car and drove across town." YIKES! Not only is that scarier than hell that she's driving with a ladder strapped to her car in the middle of the night, but she makes a regular habit of it.

Yep, ol' Mommy climbs up his house, crawls through his window and does the same thing. Man this guy sleeps better than anyone I've ever known! Well, you can see by looking at this small single bed that he never got married. And he had such a healthy upbringing, too. It's a shame!

Though the book takes a poignant dramatic turn when he hears his mother isn't doing well and he goes to visit her. As he holds his dying mother in his lap, he turns the tables and sings the song to her. But wait a minute! I thought he was asleep during all those other times. Looks like he was playing along with this little sick little game a little too eagerly.

At this point, you feel bad for making fun of the book at all 'cause his mother has passed away. The son returns home, though, and picks up his baby girl and sings the song to her.

But from everything we've seen in the book, the guy lives alone. The only woman he ever sees at night is his Mom. Leaving the only possible mother of his child to be...OH MY GOD!!!

Not true that "from everything we've seen in the book, the guy lives alone". In the pic where his mother calls to say she's dying he is preparing what looks like dinner for two and there are two mugs sitting on the counter.

love his style, kind of too prolific for his own good, almost makes it hard to pick out the "best".

also after someone pointed this out to me I can't unsee it:
http://i.imgur.com/Zfj3x7S.jpg

"I dress myself!"

El Deafo by Cece Bell is a wonderful graphic novel for children ages 6-12 (imo). It's an autobiographical story about a little deaf girl/bunny. Great gift idea.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CQkhVoKUcAAKqss.jpg

my daughter *loves* that book

Yeah mine has read it about 20 times and so have all her friends.

god I hate these "If You Give a ____ a ____" books, would prefer it if they were stuffed with completely random non-sequiturs instead of this cutesy "aw the animal thinks its people" nonsense.

Oh I hate those too. But not as much as I hate Pete the Cat books. I can't understand the popularity of these things at all.

you aren't supposed to like kids books. your kids are supposed to like them.

my 4yo for a book of fairy tales and she asked me to read her hansel and gretl which i did and even tho i knew how much disturbing material was in it i was still a little taken aback. the wife is frank about wanting to ditch her kids in the forest (and we had an interesting conversation about why she isn't called their mother but her husband is called their father), the dad resists but ultimately she nags him into essentially abandoning his children for death. of course the witch tries to cannibalize both of the children, not to mention that the entire story takes place against a background of terrible deprivation + acute poverty. but i've read scholars who believe that the gruesomeness was necessary (bettelheim particularly iirc) for kids to process complicated details about the world and themselves. and my daughter loved it so much she wanted me to immediately read it again (despite it being a fairly lengthy story). she had a lot of questions too and she found the cannibalism elements hilarious. she also noted without my prodding that the witch was obviously the wife from the beginning and i kvelled bc i agree that it is the subtext - psychologically if not literally attributable to the text - and i think it was a v astute observation.

then we read puss and boots and i think we both found it significantly less stimulating

what no "Jew in the Thorns"

alas this version of collected stories (not just grimm) did not include it

Never realised that about the witch, now feel foolish

https://www.amazon.com/Night-Gargoyles-Eve-Bunting/dp/0395968879/

My new favorite one to read.