Favorite Children's Books: Part II

The was really just a good story about remembering a great kids book series, but it reminded me how much fun we had reading picture books to our children, so I thought it worth mentioning some others.

My wife and I are nothing if not verbal. We like to converse, so it is no wonder our first child almost came out of the womb talking. Soon after he splashed onto the scene his mom was reading to him. The first book was Sandra Boynton’s wonderfully silly, Moo, Bah, La-la-La. (“A cow says moo… a sheep says bah….three singing pigs say la-la-la…”). That book, and others, was read to him for weeks and months until he was pointing at the pictures, mooing and bah-ing after naming each animal. Perhaps predictably, his first real word was “dog," as he stood by our back door and pointed to a barking dog in a neighbor’s yard.

For a slightly older child, Boynton’s But Not the Hippopotamus employs repetition, reciting a series of situations which don’t include the hippo. Then turning from that pattern, the hippo is finally included. On one last page the hippo is included again, “but not the armadillo!”

In paging through the hippo book recently I noted the influence of Dr. Suess, who almost single-handedly pioneered the genre of whimsical children’s books. The rhythm of Not the Hippopotamus, with the turn at the end, struck me as conveying fundamental elements of joke telling, timing and delivery. On first reading, the very young child will giggle with surprise at the end turn, and in subsequent readings will wait in anticipation to gleefully nail the punch line. There is nothing like sharing a good laugh.

As an adult, my greatest joy in exploring children’s books was when I found William Steig, recognizing him as a cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine.  Like an early fan of some uber hip rock band, I lay claim to being deep into Steig long before Shrek was made into a movie. But this late career, which Steig began at age 61, had been rolling along for 20 years before I discovered it. Ironically Shrek is one of my least favorite Steig books, though it’s a welcome relief from stereotypical ferry-tales for which Disney became famous. Steig is not as dark as Roald Dahl, but his stories are bizarre and wildly imaginative. Since he was American born in 1907, his Polish Jewish parents themselves escaped the Holocaust, but it still informed Steig’s outlook and influenced his children’s books with their sardonic humor and slightly menacing characters. In The Amazing Bone a young pig is rescued from thuggish predators by a bone which can speak, in multiple languages no less! In Dr. DeSoto, despite his misgivings, an empathetic mouse dentist agrees to pull the painfully rotten tooth of a fox patient, but thwarts being eaten by anticipating the fox’s inability to resist his natural and the urge to swallow a mousy morsel. Amos and Boris is a classic fable of loyalty and friendship between a whale and mouse.  Both Tifky Doofky and Gorky Rising invoke the paranormal and strange shifts in reality.

In my book, if you take the individual child into account, it’s never really too early to introduce some of the more difficult aspects to the human condition to children if you do it well. Books are perhaps the best medium for accessing realms of experience beyond our own. In another blog I’ll delve into sharing the transcript to Spaulding Gray’s first monologue Sex and Death to the Age Fourteen with an 11-year-old.