As my brain slowly returns (soon to be swept away again, so we’ll take what we can get), a bit of children’s book blogging.

(As for the grown-ups – I have a novel I’m currently reading – a fall release Michael picked up at BEA, and once I finish that, I’ll start going through the many books received I’ve, er..received over the past few months, thanks to the kindness of publicists and authors.)

Joseph is making progress on his reading – he’s not as advanced as Katie was at this age (she was reading Little House books in Kindergarten), but that’s not a problem for me. I am way beyond pushing – I learned my lesson with my oldest, and plus, I’m old and tired. So I sort of let him do things at his own pace and am more observant and appreciative of his unique ways of knowing and thinking. He’s a master Lego builder, and creates quite intricate structures, occupying himself for hours. He also thinks through things, and is very, very interested in numbers and patterns. For example, the other day, he worked out in his head (while building with Legos) that if fifty plus fifty was a hundred, fifty-five pluse fifty-five must be one hundred and ten. I was actually sort of impressed by that, and put other things in context.

So, he’s doing a lot of reading on his own these days, finally, and thanks to the library’s summer reading program, he’s got a goal for which he’s feverishly working. I’m sort of annoyed with the whole Early Reader scene, though. But when am I not annoyed with something?

I know that there are standards – that there are lists of words that are deemed appropriate for various levels of reading – that texts are run through tests and programs to make sure they are level-appropriate. My books have been subjected to such tests. But in searching through the ER books at the library, I just don’t see much consistency from publisher to publisher, series to series in what constitutes a "Level 1" book. Some are quite simple, other include 3-syllable words. It makes no sense. I’m having a hard time finding books that are 90-80% words he can read and 10-20% new words – because you know if there are too many new and difficult words, they just get frustrated at this level. And finding such books that aren’t boring. So far, here are the best I’ve found: Add your suggestions:

This books by David Milgem, invovling a robot named Otto and a mouse named Pip, are very easy to read and amusing as well. Not exactly challenging, but for a very-beginning reader, they are just about perfect, I think.

I’m also liking the books in a series from Barron’s – this one, called Find Nat, in which a gnat has a very close call at a doctor’s office – is representative. The trick is to to have a talented illustrator who can fill in the blanks of what the story, with limited vocabulary at hand, can’t describe. Joseph has always listened very well to stories, and loves clever illustrations which he can search for amusing details and continuing jokes, and so it is interesting to watch him read – he studies the picture first, I’m sure partly to get clues as to what the words will say, but also partly just because they’re funny and tell part of the story. We’ll be reading more of these.

There are several books about Tiny – who is a not-at-all-tiny dog, and much less insufferable than Clifford. Tiny and his owner are continually facing problems related to the not-tininess, and of course, they always solve them. Good text, perfect amusing supportive illustrations.

Finally (for tonight, because my brain is slowly shutting down), there’s David McPhail, who is a favorite anyway, but who wrote a whole series of books about a bug, a bear and a boy. Our library only has two, but I see from Amazon that there are many more, most of which are out of print, which is too bad. They are just perfect, I think – the  different sizes of the creatures involved provide ample opportunity for expanding the reader’s encounter with comparative forms of adjectives, and  lots of situations in which the characters, with their varying sizes and talents, work together to solve problems and have fun. They might even make you laugh – the one we read tonight had a story in which the bug solves the problem of the kite that won’t fly because it doesn’t have a tail by offering to be the tail. He gets up in the air and observes to the bear and the boy, "You look like bugs!"

Well, I laughed.

Finally, a few picture books. I’ve not been keeping track, but we’ve read some good ones over the past couple of months. Here are a few I remember:

Stick, the first children’s book by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Steve Breen, is a hoot. A little frog tries to snag a dragonfly and his tongue – sticks. He gets whisked away and has various adventures, sticking to one creature then the next, taking him all across southern Louisiana. Great illustrations (of course). From the review at School Library Journal:

After being dropped onto a horse’s nose and flicked back into the air, Stick attaches his tongue to a balloon bouquet for a scenic city tour. Drifting back to the country, he has several more airborne escapades before jumping onto a seagull’s beak for a ride above the Gulf of Mexico. Finally dropped onto a dock, he’s alone and scared. He asks a heron for help and the bird flies him home to his mother. Hungry, he zaps a firefly instead of a mosquito and takes on the bug’s glow (Oops). Done in watercolors, acrylics, colored pencil, and Photoshop, the artwork is large, detailed, and colorful. The illustrations vary in size and layout, mixing close-ups of Stick with broader action shots and aerial views of the changing landscape. With a frenetic pace and loads of humor, the art perfectly conveys the frog’s childlike exuberance and the story’s lighthearted mood.

The End, illustrated by one of my favorites, David Egielski, is a fairy tale told in reverse. Very simple, direct prose, just stating the facts, enriched by illustrations that are loaded with detail that Joseph really enjoyed exploring, again, finding the jokes and the continuities. What is cause-and-effect, anyhow? (By the way, Egielski did what I think is one of the best treatments of a St. Francis story for children – his St. Francis and the Wolf, notable, not only for the usual great pictures, but because the wolf is mean…you can see, for once, why the people of Gubbio were so scared.)

Pulled this one off of the "new release" shelf, and it’s a good one – poetry by Douglas Florian called Comets, Stars, the Moon and Mars: Space Poems and Paintings. Not ponderous at all, if the title makes you think it might be. Informative and even amusing, with great, absorbing art.

Oh, and for some reason, the fact that the New York Review of Books publishing arm – NYRB – has a children’s line had escaped my notice until I saw a whole row of their titles on the new acquisitions shelf. Worth a look. As will be another NYRB release – The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy, forward by Terry Teachout. For me, not Joseph, silly.