My son in law sent me an article about choosing children’s books written by a father of young kids. I found the article very entertaining and full of sound advice. I was especially interested because my grandson adores books. I sent him pop up valentines and he handed them to his mother over and over to be reread at bedtime. Gotta love that kid. He is either going to be a nuclear scientist or a very erudite mailman. Jury is still out since he just started pre-school.
Want to share some highlight’s of the father’s advice from his article. He sorta makes you want to run into him with a kid and book by the fireplace at Starbucks…
He wrote: As you may have heard, Jan Bernestain, the lady who co-created the Berenstain Bears series died. Now it’s terribly crass and rude to rip into a poor old woman who just passed. But those books are really shitty. They are way too long and the bears never kill any campers ot steal Molson from a nearby tent.
I have two children, and I have spent a lot of time reading to them. When you have the right book, reading to your kids can be tolerable, even fun. But with the wrong book, reading to your kids is painful. They squirm. They half-sit on you, half off and wrench your back out of place. They get too close to the book so that their big fat baby heads block the text. Or worst of all, they demand you read the same awful book night after night after night. There are kiddie books that you will be forced to read literally hundreds of times to your children. You need to make sure that they don’t suck. Here’s how.
1. Check for length and textual density.
Before you buy the book, open it. Are there large swaths of text on each page? That’s not a kid’s book. That’s a medieval torture device. My kid once brought a book about beagles home from the school library. This thing was a goddamn reference book. It must have contained 20,000 words, all of which were useless facts about the beagle. Did you know beagles are the smallest of hunting dogs? Did you know that information serves NO fucking purpose?
You want a book that features, at most, five or six lines of text per page. Any denser than that and you are on the dark side of the Reading Rainbow. If you get caught reading a book that’s far too long to a kid, do what I do and just start skipping entire sections of copy. And if my kid notices that I forgot to read part of the book and wants to go back? NO DESSERT. THERE IS NO GOING BACK.
2. Make sure the text rhymes.
I have no idea why rhyming books are more fun, but they are. If a book rhymes, then I can really get into the performance of reading it to my kid. I can figure out the rhythm of the text (though it can take a couple pages to sort it out– “Oh, I see! It rhymes every THIRD line! TRICKY!”). I can sing it. I can do voices. I can become mellifluous. I can PERFORM. It’s really a parent’s time to shine when the text rhymes. If it doesn’t rhyme, it’s ass.
3. Avoid one-trick ponies.
One of the best-selling children’s books of all time is Laura Numeroff’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. The story is basically a set formula. If you give that mouse a cookie (Who gives a mouse a cookie? You know what you should give mice? GLUE TRAPS.), he’ll do X, which make him do Y, which will cause him to do Z, which will make him want a cookie all over again. Very cute.
But then Numeroff wrote a shitload more books, all of them deploying this exact same formula. There’s If You Give a Cat a Cupcake, If You Give a Dog a Donut, If You Give a Pig a Pancake, and even—I shit you not—If You Give a Moose a Muffin. You think I can’t see what you’re doing, Numeroff? You think I can’t see the creative rut you’re in? Maurice Sendak was right to trash you. THE ANIMAL ALWAYS ENDS UP EATING TREATS.
4. Avoid repetitive books.
Repetition helps children learn. Unfortunately, it also contributes to Daddy’s alcoholism. There are few things worse than children’s books that are structured to be essentially like “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” with a growing laundry list of items that you have to repeat over and over and over again. Even Green Eggs and Ham, one of the greatest children’s books ever written, makes you say plane and train and house and mouse and fox and box a million times over. It will destroy your love of reading. It’s like being hit on the head with a hammer repeatedly until you finally submit. That fucking Gingerbread Boy. Do you know how happy I am when that fox finally chews him up and shits him out after he’s outrun the baker and the cow and the dog and every other incompetent idiot trying to catch him?
5. Do not buy fancy pop-up books.
Oh hey, look! Someone took the time and care to craft an elaborate pop-up model of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai! You know how long it takes your kid to render that page to shreds? Four seconds. Congratulations, you now have an empty book. And be careful with books that have flaps. Some flaps are hard to pry open, and your little child’s fat fingers won’t be able to get underneath. I am a big fan of scratch-and-sniff stickers. Our copy of The Sweet Smell of Christmas is about 30 years old. But I swear the orange sticker still smells kind of orangey. The magic of BOOK MOLD.
6. Buy any book that features textures.
Feel that bunny’s tail! It really IS soft! I could feel a copy of Pat the Bunny all day. The best thing about texture books is that they have to make the pages extra thick in order to embed the fabric, and that means the book is that much shorter. You know how gratifying it is to turn a page that’s three inches thick? I feel like Speed Reader: Shorter reading time equals earlier bedtime equals more time for drinking and watching violent Korean movies. NICE.
7. Do not buy any Amelia Bedelia books.
She’s awful. I hate her. She takes everything you say literally, so when her boss is like, “Make the bed,” she literally makes a little bed out of craft supplies. What a moron. Kids are too young and too stupid to understand the concept of figures of speech, so all the jokes go right over their heads. They’re the lucky ones. If this woman existed in the real world, she’d be arrested and sent to prison and then she’d die from swallowing bleach by accident and she would DESERVE it. Every time she gets fired in these books, I cheer. And when she gets rehired, I want to vote Republican. STOP BAILING OUT THESE PEOPLE.
8. Never buy any book that’s a movie or TV tie-in.
Most of these books don’t even list a proper author, mostly because they were conceived and executed during a conference call between brand managers. None of them has any value. You’re essentially buying an advertisement.
9. NEVER buy a children’s book written by a celebrity.
You already knew this. But just in case you were walking by I Already Know I Love You and thought, “Hey, maybe that one won’t suck,” SHUT UP. You should know better. Celebrities write children’s books because they’re too stupid to write full books and they think anyone can write a children’s book.
10.The truth is that only a few people in history have managed to create great lasting children’s books: Seuss, Scarry, Sendak, Rey, Eastman, etc. Stick with those, and you and your child will have a happy reading time together. Or try these 10 titles:
• Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, by Mo Willems
• One Witch, by Laura Leuck
• The Gruffalo, by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
• The Olivia books by Ian Falconer
• The Llama Llama books by Anna Dewdney
• Iggy Peck: Architect, by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts
• The Paper Princess, by Elisa Kleven
• The Amazing Machines series by Ant Parker and Tony Mitton
• Noisy Nora, by Rosemary Wells
• Little Pea, by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Couldn’t have said it better myself which is why I didn’t.
Only thing he left out was the bloody lip and bruised shins you get when a child tries to squirm out of your lap during a reading of say Nobody Wants a Nuclear War or The O’Reilly Factor for Kids given as gifts by left and right wing childless aunts and uncles. In that case, you deserve what you get for even cracking the binding.
