A Grown-up's Guide to Reading Children's Books for fun and pleasure: Part 1

If you missed my Summer Reading Challenge yesterday, you might want to check out some great reasons I think adults should read more children's books. As promised, I am here with some reading suggestions for you, my adult readers. I've linked to the Goodreads reviews, if you'd like more information on each book. Check back soon for Part 2.

If you like historical fiction:

Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson
Sixteen-year-old Hattie inherits her uncle's homestead claim in Montana and moves there by herself to attempt to prove up. This book is set during World War I, so along with the difficult conditions of homesteading, it also deals with wartime prejudice against German neighbors. Hattie is such a memorable character, you may want to follow this up with the sequel Hattie Ever After.

Fair Weather by Richard Peck
Richard Peck's trademark humor and rich characters. Three country kids and their grandpa get a chance to visit the 1893 Chicago's World Fair. Listen to this on audio book if you can. If you enjoy this book, you will love Peck's Grandma Dowdel series, which includes A Long Way from Chicago, A Year Down Yonder, and A Season of Gifts.

If you like Science Fiction:
The Search for WondLa by Tony DiTerlizzi
Eva Nine has lived her whole life in an underground sanctuary raised by a robot. Always taught to trust technology first, she struggles to find a new way to live in the strange world above ground. As she goes on a journey to find other humans, she finds herself caught up in a battle that threatens the future of the planet. The first thing you'll notice about these books are the amazing illustrations throughout. If you are a fan of the original Star Wars trilogy, you will find a lot to love in these books. The sequels are A Hero for Wondla and The Battle for Wondla.

Larklight by Philip Reeve
If you prefer your scifi with a side of steampunk humor, Larklight and the sequel Starcross are for you. Art and his sister Myrtle live in a 1850s Victorian house that happens to be orbiting the moon. Funny, imaginative and a little absurd.

If you like Clever Mysteries Set in Art Museums:
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg
Definitely worth rereading the classic. Claudia and her little brother Jamie decide to run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Living inside the museum, they solve a mystery about a piece of art at the museum.

Under the Egg by Laura Marx Fitzgerald
I just finished this new book and really enjoyed it. When Theo Tenpenny's artist grandfather dies, she discovers that he has been hiding an ancient painting in their home. Is it a Raphael and did he steal it from the museum where he worked? How is it connected to his secret work as a soldier in World War II and the Nazis?

Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliet
An intriguing mystery set in Chicago. Two sixth-grade friends Petra and Calder are able to piece together disconnected events to find a Vermeer painting that was stolen on its way to Chicago's Art Institute. Balliet's books always leave me wanting to know more about famous artists.


If you are interested in social and environmental issues:

Same Sun Here by Silas House and Neela Vaswani
Kentucky author Silas House is well-known for his adult fiction. Here he tells the story of River, a young boy in Kentucky whose family is threatened by mountain-top removal near their home. The book is told in two voices through River's pen pal letters to Meena, an Indian immigrant living in New York City. The interweaving of the issues in their lives, commonalities and differences is really well done and thought-provoking.

Princess Academy by Shannon Hale
This is not your average princess tale. When the king divines that Miri's remote, mountain village is the home of the future princess, he sets up an academy for all of the local girls to learn to be princesses. When the academy is attacked, the girls must work together to save themselves and their mountain town. In the sequel Palace of Stone, Miri is in the big city, attending university and hearing whispers of revolution. Political intrigue and rural/urban issues make this much more complex than the title would suggest.

Why Grown-ups Should Read Children's Literature: A Summer Reading Challenge

There is some kind of condition that infects children in a library. Despite the fact that they have been happily browsing in the children’s room just moments before, the second they step foot into the adult section, they magically transform into feral cats. Soon they are crawling underneath the shelves, hissing and clawing at each other, and emitting high-pitched shrieks as they chase each other around the room. If I am not lucky enough to have another adult with me to corral them in the children’s room, my best bet is to quickly scan the nearest shelves: usually the new fiction and non-fiction, grab a few books off the shelf with attractive covers, and run for the check-out before someone is hurt in the process. 

More and more, I find myself forsaking the adult room altogether, and pulling my reading from the middle grade shelves where there is a much smaller chance the children will go feral on me.There is also a much higher chance that I might actually finish one of these books. If you are as sleep-deprived as I am, trying to read in the evening or in bed usually involves dozing off at least once. If I’m lucky, I just drop the book on the floor and not on my face. Children’s books are short (at least most of them) so you can actually finish a book, thus giving you a sense of satisfaction in actually completing something, which is rare when you are a parent of toddlers. 

Of course, when I get that question, "What are you reading?" from a more serious-minded reader, I often hesitate a minute to see if they are going to think I'm silly for loving children's books. I spent years of my life studying great works of literature, tearing books apart and putting them back together, and at the end of it found that I had forgotten how to read for pleasure's sake. It was then that I picked up my roommate's copy of Harry Potter and rediscovered what it is to read for sheer joy and no other reason. There's a reason so many adults were toting around the Harry Potter tomes: beyond being really great storytelling, it reminded us why we wanted to read in the first place: because it's fun.

C. S. Lewis said, “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.”A few years ago, I reread my absolute childhood favorite: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It came at a time when I was dealing with some deep emotional healing, and God used it to really speak to me about my identity. Coming back to a book you read as a child with your adult history and perspective may touch you in new ways that can be quite profound.Sometimes reading a children's book can help you connect with some deep parts of your heart that were more alive as a child or you might discover some long-lost interests and joys you’ve forgotten. You might find a book that shows you new things about hope or grace or forgiveness, topics that children's book writers feel much more freedom to write about than those heart-breakingly brilliant works of literary fiction that win all the awards.

So since summer is coming, and you'll be signing your kids up for the summer reading program at the library, (At least I hope you will be!) I thought you parents and other grown-up readers of my blog might be up for your own Summer Reading Challenge: to read a few works of children's literature  this summer. I will be back tomorrow with a Summer Reading Guide designed especially for grown-ups and organized by genre.


I wish I had some great prizes to give out. I still remember that year in Summer Reading when they were auctioning off the California Raisin doll. I didn't win, but I tried really hard. Brent tells me that his library had coupons to Pizza Hut! But let me know in the comments if you're up for the challenge, and maybe I will come up with something yet!

The Home for Abandoned Books

 

"Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million. books" Shirley Jackson Life Among the Savages

I have come to jokingly refer to our house as The Home for Abandoned Books. I will fully admit here that my husband and I have a problem. We cannot seem to  leave a library without books. You may say that that's the point of a library, but our problem is that we always leave having purchased more books than we have checked out. Since we are always stopping by to pick up a book we requested on Inter Library Loan and leaving with three  25-cent books from the discard rack, the books are starting to pile up around us.

Just the other day Brent called to say that he had stopped by the library and they were giving away a whole shelf of mid-century children's books and that now his backpack was extremely heavy. Yes, no one had checked out these books for years, but there they were with their tattered covers and beautiful woodcut illustrations. How could we leave them on the shelf?

Then there are the books we love; the ones it is almost painful to leave on the shelf even when we know we own them. Every time Brent has to go to New York, he visits the giant used book store The Strand. Each time he sees a copy of The 24 Days Before Christmas by Madeline L'Engle and it pains him to leave it on the shelf even though we own two copies of the book: one his own personal copy from childhood and one beautifully illustrated hardcover our friend Susannah bought us. At a library book sale the other day, I saw a copy of Understood Betsy and even though I own a nice hardcover purchased at another library book sale, I thought," Isn't there someone we know who needs this book?" So we end up with a stack of duplicates too. So many in fact that I was able to send my cousin two dozen books for a start-up library for her classroom.

Our affliction is not limited to books either. A few years ago we discovered that libraries were clearing out their books on tape and that by buying a cheap cassette player, we could have a full library of audiobooks for practically nothing. At the time, I didn't even own a cassette player, but I just couldn't leave Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Farm, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Harriet the Spy there to be thrown away. I recently heard that a local library was giving away their books on tape, and when the librarian saw me, she helpfully rolled the whole cart over to the children's section and offered me free bags. "She didn't offer to just roll it out to your car?" Brent asked me when I got home.

We recently celebrated our eleventh anniversary by going to a library book sale without the children. It was glorious and since it was the last hour, it was fill a bag for $7.00. When two bookworms get married, there is a secondary event after the honeymoon: the merging of the bookshelves. At that point our shelves were mainly filled with books we had purchased for one class or another. We met our freshman year of college when we were next door neighbors and had three classes together, so there was a certain amount of overlap that required culling, but also a reorganizing of our lives and books: my Appalachian literature on one shelf and his collection of New England gardening and homesteading books right below. Other shelves merged completely: now we had just one fiction section, one memoir shelf whereas before we had two. As the years have passed our collection of books has shifted, grown and retracted with our interests; now it's children's books I collect and foodie and farming memoirs for Brent. We've both recently felt the need to have more books of poetry on the shelf. Of course, we now have a secondary book nook in our house for our four children. My daughter alone has a whole shelf of great works of pig literature that would never have existed if she hadn't been born.

 Every few years we have a great sifting. Whole shelves of books Brent didn't read in divinity school and ones that looked good on our shelves but we never really loved have been donated to Reader to Reader. We are starting to be more honest about what we have on our shelves. Because as any book-lover knows, you can tell a lot about a person from their bookshelves.

As long as there are libraries selling books for 25 cents, our house will be full of books with other people's names written in the covers and library bar codes on the spine. Brent says that he thinks of it as a hedge against the downfall of western civilization or maybe just the advent of the kindle. It is so easy for a digital file to vanish in an instant, but an old paper book can be passed down. It is at once a piece of the past and also full of  possibility. As long as real paper books are being discarded, we will take in the lost and wandering souls and give them a place in our lives and on our shelves.

Around the World Tea Parties: Scotland

 Our school year is officially done, and we are ready for summer adventures. So, I bring you our very last Around the World Tea Party. In her book, Honey for a Child's Heart, Gladys Hunt says that the books we read aloud together become Shared Family Adventures. These tea parties were definitely shared family adventures for us, and a highlight of our school year this year.

Our final tea party took us to Scotland. We read Wee Gillis by Robert Lawson. I purchased this book used, and I do regret that I didn't spend the extra few dollars to get a newer edition because of this cover.

 

I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but this one is almost impossible to look at without getting a headache. Such a shame, when it's filled with gorgeous pen and ink illustrations by Robert Lawson (illustrator of Ferdinand and the Bull).So my advice, spring for the updated cover because this book is definitely worth reading. It tells the story of a boy who can't decide whether to live with his mother's family in the lowlands who tend long-horned cattle, or his father's family in the highlands who hunt stags. It's a great introduction to Scottish culture.

 

We pulled out all our tartan for this, of course.

 

I had some great leftover plaid wrapping paper that we improvised as a tablecloth and we made Scottish oat shortbread.

 

We also invited some special guests. Did you know that the unicorn is one of Scotland's official animals?

We also really enjoyed reading The Water Horse by Dick King-Smith as a read-aloud. It's a short novel about a family that finds the Loch Ness Monster as a baby and keeps it as a pet. At the end of the week, we watched the movie Brave,  which made my older child cry and my younger child say, "Mom, I wish you would turn into a bear." We're better with drama in books than in Disney movies, apparently.

Read-alouds: Kenny and the Dragon

I know I have a tendency to post about older books here at School of Good Books, so I thought I would recommend a newer book. Okay, so it's really a modern take on an older book, so I don't know if it totally counts, but the kids loved this read-aloud so much that when I finished the last page, they yelled, "Read it again!" and then they asked, "Do we own this or is it from the library?"

Kenny & the Dragon by Tony DiTerlizzi is a retelling of short story, The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame. It tells the story of a young rabbit who loves books. "Fairy tales and natural history were his two favorite topics, and as far as Kenny was concerned, both held the same merit in the real world." When a dragon moves on to Kenny's farm, he soon discovers that the dragon named Grahame is quite different from the description he has read in books. He is a peaceable dragon who loves reciting poetry, reading books, and eating rich desserts. When the town decides they must exterminate the dragon and they call on Kenny's friend George (who turns out to be a sainted dragon slayer) to do it, Kenny has to find a way to save Grahame.

The book is a fun read with lots of nods to Kenneth Grahame and the original story, but what really sets it apart are the magnificent illustrations. The pencil drawings throughout add so much life to the story. This book is a short, heavily illustrated chapter book, so it's great for kids moving from the easy reader section to chapter books or a wonderful read-aloud for young readers who aren't ready for scarier dragon books.

I have been reading DiTerlizzi's science fiction series The Search for WondLa, which also has gorgeous illustrations. The kids are always stealing my books to look at the vintage Star-Wars-esque illustrations, so I was excited to find a book illustrated by DiTerlizzi that was on their level.

If you'd like to hear the original story The Reluctant Dragon, you can listen to it for free at Books Should Be Free.

Also a fun fact, I had been admiring the new owl logo at Jones Library in Amherst, MA, and it turns out it was drawn by DiTerlizzi. Here's the fun story about how the logo came to be. Maybe I do need one of their t-shirts. Hmmm.

Audiobooks for Young Detectives

There are two sure signs of a good audiobook.

1.         You find yourself sitting in the driveway listening to the cd even though you’re already home.
2.   You pick up Dad from work and he says in an injured tone, “You listened to Nancy Drew without me!”

My first foray into the world of chapter books as a young child was when my mom let me read her set of Bobbsey Twins books. I loved these gentle mysteries starring two pairs of twins. When I had read all of her copies, I got special permission to go over into the big kid section of the school library and check out more. I can still remember the thrill of it all, going over by myself into these mysterious shelves of big books. 

Though I loved Bert and Nan and Freddie and Flossie, I did not ever cross over into the world of Nancy Drew. Since my oldest daughter loves listening to mysteries and had already worked her way through Nate the Great and Encyclopedia Brown, and asked if there are any girl detectives out there. I decided to check out Nancy Drew: The Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene, read by Laura Linney. We were all hooked. Laura Linney really captures the feel of the 1950s era and Nancy’s breezy confidence. In fact after listening to The Secret of the Old Clock as well as The Hidden Staircase and The Bungalow Mystery, I’m not sure I could read Nancy Drew now without hearing Laura Linney’s voice in my head. I love the way that Nancy never charges off heedlessly into a mystery. She always takes the time to change out of her party dress, put on sensible walking shoes and grab a cardigan if she's going out sleuthing. Smart lady and a great role model!

For the most part the mysteries are not too scary, mostly about inheritances and band land deals. Though the Bungalow Mystery did have a scene where Nancy and another man were chained in a basement, which was a little tense, and made us decide to hold off on the rest of the series until the girls are older.

Some other favorite mysteries:

Nate the Great by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat: The Nate the Great series are easy-readers, so it’s a great starter series for younger kids. The characters are quirky and the mysteries usually involve friends and pets. Ella listened to these each about three times

.

Encyclopedia Brown by Donald J. Sobol: Encyclopedia Brown is a classic. The mysteries are short and usually center around Encyclopedia picking up some piece of trivia or fact everyone missed. Definitely enough interesting information to keep you intrigued.

The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner: The  original Boxcar Children book was one of my favorites as a kid, but I had no idea there were so many mysteries afterward. The kids are independent and clever and the mysteries aren’t scary. I will warn you that these audiobooks do have a theme song. Yes, a theme song that your entire family will be humming the rest of the day..”Boxcar children are on the case!”

A-Z Mysteries by Ron Roy: This newer series has kids solving mysteries for each letter of the alphabet. Most sets of discs we checked out included 3-4 mysteries. I found myself often listening along and trying to figure out the solution.

6 Classic Books with Boy Heroes

I asked my friends on Facebook if they had any special requests for book lists they would like to see on School of Good Books, and my friend Libby met my challenge. She explained that when she chose classic books to read to her sons, she often reached for the books she loved most as a girl. As a result, their reading had become heavily weighted toward books starring girls. She had read the Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit, but was looking for more classic books starring boys, especially ones where the boys showed good character.

Since my older three children are all girls, and we have been happily reading all my favorites starring girls, this proved to be quite a challenge for me, especially since I didn't want to recommend something I hadn't read. That may explain why some of these are short books, but definitely worth the read. I can't wait to read these to my girls too.

 

Mountain Born by Elizabeth Yates

Growing up on  a mountain farm. Peter adopts a special black lamb as a pet, and as he learns to care for it and the other sheep from his wise older shepherd friend, Benj, he also learns about responsibility, self-sacrifice, and caring for others. A simple story, but very rich.

 

Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers by Ralph Moody

I had seen this series of books referred to as "the boy's Little House on the Prairie," so I thought it might be great for this list. My husband Brent really enjoys farming memoirs so I asked him to read it on a business trip. When he got home, he had to stay up late reading it, and then requested several more books from the series from the library. Like Little House, these books are autobiographical and tell the story of Ralph Moody and his family as they try to build a ranch in 1906 Colorado. Brent was especially impressed by the strong father/son relationship in this book. Warning: this first book does have a sad ending.

 

The Door in the Wall by Marguerite De Angeli

Marguerite De Angeli won a Newbery Medal for The Door in the Wall. Set in the Middle Ages, it's the story of a young boy, Robin, who must find a way to overcome a disability and show great courage to save the day. For older readers interested in the Middle Ages, Crispin and the Cross of Lead by Avi is a must read.

 

The Apple and the Arrow by Mary and Conrad Buff is the legend of William Tell as told by his twelve-year-old son. It's a story of courage and resistance in the fight for Switzerland's freedom. This book illuminated a part of history, I knew very little about, and was a great adventure story as well.

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
Brent is a  big fan of the whole genre of boy-survivalist children's fiction and My Side of the Mountain and its sequels are a great example. Unhappy in the city, Sam decides to try life on his own in the Catskill mountains. The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare and Hatchet by Gary Paulsen are other classic survivalist books.
 
Just David by Eleanor H. Porter
I found Just David in a list of must-read books in Read for the Heart: Whole books for Whole-hearted Families by Sarah Clarkson.  David's father has raised him in seclusion surrounded by beauty in nature and music, but when David is orphaned, he must learn to find his way in a world where life is not so simple or kind. David's love of beauty, kindness, and extraordinary musical talent shine affect everyone in this new world. The first quarter of this book is quite sad so keep that in mind if your children are sensitive, but the healing and redemption are worth the read. This book is hard to find in print but available as a free Kindle book on Amazon.

Looking for more great read-alouds for boys?:

Top 10 Read-Alouds for Boys by Walking by the Way
Living Books Library: Top Picks for Boys
Books for Boys at Story Warren

Any books you would add?