I Will Never See Col Saunders This Way Again

A version of this commodity originally appeared on Dinner a Love Story and was reprinted with permission.

Well, to start with, an apology/disclaimer: Our kids are grown and I've been away from kids' books for a while (although I well remember the thrill, on a common cold fall night, of snuggling in with both our girls and feeling like: ah, day is washed, all is well). Some of what follows may therefore be sometime news, simply hopefully ane or ii will be new to you.

Permit's start with Kashtanka, past Anton Chekhov and Gennady Spirin (ages 9-12). I've written about this at length on Lane Smith's excellent website, but suffice to say it'south a simple, kind-hearted story with illustrations that are cute and realistic with just the right touch of oddness.

Speaking of Lane Smith (who is, to my mind, the greatest kids' book illustrator of our time), Random House has just released a book the two of us did together, called The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip . Far exist it from me to recommend my ain book, but shut be information technology from me (?) to recommend all of Lane's books, and maybe specially an early 1, The Happy Hocky Family (ages iv-8). It's funny and arch but too, at its core, an experience of real familial love. With Lane, every book has its own feeling, and this one's is sort of minimal and yet emotive — right up my alley.

Dorsum when nosotros were doing our book (The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, which I am not recommending, merely just, you know, mentioning, because information technology has recently been re-released by Random House and all), Lane turned me on to The Shrinking of Treehorn, by Florence Parry Heide (ages 6-viii). This is one of those books that stakes out its claim to greatness by showing something that, though harsh, is as well deeply true: Grown-ups often don't run across kids and don't listen to them. The illustrations are masterpieces of 1970s absurd, by the peachy Edward Gorey.

I love The Hundred Dresses, written past Eleanor Estes and illustrated by Louis Slobodkin (ages 7-9), for a similar reason. Using this ostensibly small-scale palette of a kids' volume, Estes has conveyed a deep unsettling truth, one that we seem to be forgetting; every bit Terry Eagleton put it: "Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the torso." Hither, poverty equals petty humiliation, which drives a child, Wanda Petronski, to prevarication, and be teased for the lie, and then to create something beautiful — but the great center-dropping play a trick on of this volume is that the other characters in the volume discover Wanda'southward inner beauty late, too late, and she is already far away, and never gets to learn she has devastated them with her work of art, and changed her vision of the world. This is a volume that, I call back, has the potential to rearrange a child's moral universe in an enduring manner.

I also love Millions of Cats, by Wanda Gág (ages four-viii), for its eerie-funny Eastern European illustrations. I always mentally group this volume with the as Euro-Weird Caps for Sale, by Esphyr Slobodkina (ages 4-viii). After the latter, you will never see monkeys the same way once again. Well, unless the way y'all meet monkeys now is as wily, acquisitive thieves and plunderers who should all exist put in jail forever, no bananas.

I love all Dr. Seuss, especiallyThe Sneetches (ages iv-vii) and the contained masterpiece, best if read in a quasi-Bela-Lugosi voice, "What Was I Scared Of," which contains these classic lines:

I said, "I do not fright those pants
With nobody inside them."
I said, and said, and said those words.
I said them. But I lied them.

I too love Seuss's Sleep Volume (ages iv-7), which contains the immortal line: "And that'due south why I'm bothering telling you this," which comes in very handy as a sort of efficiency-mantra in graduate creative writing workshops, as in: Permit's not forget to always ask, "Why are we bothering telling us this?"

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I actually love Angus Lost, by Marjorie Flack, generally because the typography and illustrations remind me, in that weird way kids' books can, of a time and place in which I never lived, merely still somehow experience — in this case, a circa 1946 small town in, let'due south say, Massachusetts. Plot: Angus, curious and world-hungry, leaves home, gets lost, and comes back home, a changed and gladdened dog. Which is, sort of, every life, in sheathing, if we're lucky. It also FEATURES these sporadic and very FUN-to-read occasional capitalized WORDS that you meet NOW in screenplays, but here, in this volume, they are saying "GRRRRUF" and "WIDE Route" every bit opposed to "SHOOTS," "STABS," or "WITH REAL SWAGGER!"

I'd also recommend The Fable of Sleepy Hollow (and mind to the Rabbit Ears audiobook featuring scary-as-heck music, great moody illustrations by Robert Van Nutt, and a masterful reading by Glenn Close) if you want to terrify your kids and then much that they volition never leave home or go outside in fall and volition totally forevermore avoid the Catskills. And pumpkins. And Glenn Shut.

And speaking of scary, attempt The Gashlycrumb Tinies, by Edward Gorey, which is basically an alphabetical listing of twenty-6 kids who died. Cheerful! "O is for OLIVE run through with an awl / P is for PRUE trampled flat in a brawl." I run across Gorey as a modern-twenty-four hours equivalent of the Grimms, whose bulletin is cautionary more than reassuring. But there's something then bold and sly about this book and the way that, as the alphabet progresses, the deaths get gnarlier ("Y is for YORICK whose caput was knocked in / Z is for ZILLAH who drank too much gin.") And little ZILLAH is shown solemnly drinking across a skeleton doll. Sleep tight, guys!

Joyful Racket: Poems for Two Voices , by Paul Fleischman, illustrated by Eric Beddows (ages 7-12), is very cool. The poems are presented in two columns; you take one office, the kid takes the other, and yous do this sort of fugue-reading together. This, I hope, will bond you. Considering even if done correctly, information technology's sort of embarrassing. Your kid will see what you would accept sounded like if you'd gone Total Thespian. Only likewise, the ii of y'all volition occasionally corrigendum into moments of existent beauty, and look at each other like: Whoa. And and then become: MOM! (Or DAD!) Come hear this!

When I was a kid, my grandmother had a bunch of those Little Golden Books around and these left a existent impression on me. Whenever I rediscover ane, it sets off this synesthesia-like explosion of memories of Chicago in the early 1960s (Brillcream + lilacs + warm tube Tv set). I peculiarly remember I Can Wing, and The Poky Little Puppy, andMister Dog: The Canis familiaris Who Belonged to Himself (ages ii-four). There'due south something nigh the design and colors of these things that you only don't see anymore — each 1 its own little unlikely beautiful universe. I think that from these I learned that fine art does not have to be strictly representational to exist deeply and lovingly about the earth.

Beloved Mili, by Wilhelm Grimm, illustrated by Maurice Sendak (ages iv-8), is a deplorable and deep niggling book about love and loss and fourth dimension — a book that is not afraid to go toward dark, about intolerable truths. I think one affair I expect for in a kids' volume is an avoidance of a too-pervasive all-is-well outlook, mainly because it tends to exist anti-literary. I hateful, a happy ending is all well and proficient, simply many of the books I've recommended here go at it in a more complicated way; they don't flinch at ambivalence, assuming, correctly, that kids can not only tolerate complexity and ambivalence, but crave them, because in their hearts they know the world is big and scary, and crave audio counsel.

Well, that and farting cats who article of clothing suspenders.

If you want your kids to read James Joyce ane day and/or motility to an organic subcontract in Iowa, you lot might plow them on to Rootabaga Stories, by Carl Sandburg. These are wonderful nonsense (although not quite nonsense — maybe more "near-sense") prose poems that are great fun to read aloud. You can tell how fun just by the championship of one story: "Never Kick a Slipper at the Moon." This book is a great introduction to the idea that while literature is, of grade, about what happens, it is too — and essentially — about how stories happen, i.e., in what linguistic communication; and the reason nosotros believe that they happen is, in role, because that linguistic communication gives us pleasure.

And finally, in that spirit (the spirit of sound counsel, not the spirit of a suspender-wearing farting cat), Once In that location Was a Tree — past Natalia Romanova, illustrated (once more) by Gennady Spirin (ages 4-7) — is a weirdly Zen eco-tale that doesn't rush to any conclusion. And the illustrations make me desire to move to Russia. In the nineteenth century.

Let me close past proverb, from the perspective of someone with ii grown and wonderful kids, that your instincts as parents are correct: A minute spent reading to your kids now volition repay itself a 1000000-fold later, not only because they honey you for reading to them, but likewise because, years after, when they're miles abroad, those serenity evenings, when yous were tucked in with them, everything quiet merely the sound of the page-turns, will seem to you, I promise, sacred.

• Books Mentioned in This Article:





Kashtanka

past Anton Chekhov, illustrated past Gennady Spirin, translated past Ronald Meyer

























I Tin Fly

By Ruth Krauss, illustrated past Mary Blair





Mister Dog

by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Garth Williams



Dear Mili

by Wilhelm K. Grimm, illustrated past Maurice Sendak, translated past Ralph Manheim

George Saunders is the author of ix books, includingThe Lincoln in the Bardo and the story collections Pastoralia and Tenth of Dec, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the American University of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2006 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2013 he was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and was included in Fourth dimension's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. He teaches in the creative writing programme at Syracuse University.

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Source: https://www.readbrightly.com/george-saunders-ultimate-picture-book-reading-list/

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