A Plethora of Picture Books

A Plethora of Picture Books August 27, 2016

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(image via Pixabay)

I have a terrible confession to make.

I don’t really like reading picture books aloud to children.

I suppose I’m not being honest. I do enjoy reading picture books under the right circumstances, to certain types of children. If a child wants to sit quietly with rapt attention while I read a book I truly enjoy aloud in my most dramatic voice, I would like that. But this never happens in real life. In real life, my daughter gets fixated on a single book I dislike and asks for it several times before bed when I am much tireder than she is; and then she wants to switch books halfway through so that we never get to the end of one, thus foiling Mommy’s hard and fast only-two-books-before-bed rule. Lately all she’s wanted are those blasted dinosaur books I’ve mentioned in previous posts, and this isn’t helping matters. There comes a point in the evening when a grown woman doesn’t want to say “Deinonychus” fifty times in five minutes– not to mention “Mamenchisaurus,” a dinosaur I’m half convinced paleontologists fabricated specifically to tongue-tie exhausted parents. Paleontologists are a brutal lot.

I think every parent quickly develops a list of books she likes, and another list of books she fantasizes about dropping into a burning toilet. Lord knows I’ve got mine. I don’t know how P. D. Eastman got to sleep at night after foisting Go, Dog, Go on the reading public. Who would do that? Who would even think to do that? And after thinking of it, who would have the gall to approach a professional editor and pitch a book 70% of which is sentence fragments naming the colors of dogs, and the other 20% of which involves a female dog desperately preening for a mate? What editor would sign off on such a thing? And, most importantly, who flooded the market with so many copies of that ghastly book that every preschool child in America owns a copy, and no matter where you hide it, they find it and demand to be read to?

I have a similar set of discussion questions for Barbara and Ed Emberly’s Drummer Hoffwhich was not only published and distributed to libraries but somehow won a Caldecott award. Why are high-ranking officers carrying artillery? Why are severely maimed people like one-eyed Captain Bammer and whoever that was with the peg leg on the battlefield in the first place? Why is the fox hole in front of the cannon? Weren’t drummers at the time of such battles usually very small boys? Why, then, is the drummer the one who fires the cannon? And why should we care, since we haven’t been told whom they’re firing at or what the battle’s about? And, even granting the fact that it’s remarkable that a drummer fired the cannon, is it really necessary to repeat “Drummer Hoff fired it off” six times? The repetition and the rhythm in that book are an astonishing phenomenon. They sink into your very soul. I’ve found myself, two or three days out from reading the book, swaying back and forth and repeating “Captain Bammer brought the rammer, Sargeant Chowder brought the powder…” again and again like a woman under a spell. I’ve never heard of any Charismatic or Evangelical religious authorities  investigating whether the Drummer Hoff is, in fact, a diabolical grimoire, but perhaps they ought to leave Pokemon alone for a moment and get on this.

And don’t get me started on the Berenstain Bears. The only way to get through one of those books without throwing it out the window is to read sanctimonious Mama Bear in a thick, scratchy fake German accent or a Dalek voice. Try it sometime.

Now, there are some children’s picture books I genuinely love, as well.


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