I recently asked my high school seniors what were some of their favorite book when they were younger. These are 18 year olds now, so mostly born in 2005, and while there were some older classics in the mix like Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, most of the answers were books I had never heard of before. So I went to the library and checked some of them out to see what they had enjoyed. While there, I checked out a few other books that I was curious about as well, trying to get more of a sense of what’s out now and what’s being read. I didn’t check out any of the longer books they went with from middle grades or so.
Pippi Longstocking – I read this book when I was a kid a number of times, and in addition, there was a movie that came out that would play on HBO a lot as well. The book came out in 1945, and I still think it’s weird to write book during wartime, but it happens. I don’t think it’s wrong, just interesting.
Anyway, you’ve probably read this. Pippi is a young girl who lives by herself. She says her father is a pirate, or something like one, and now she lives alone in her house. Like Peter Pan, like The Cat and the Hat, Pippi is found by two real squares with straitlaced parents, and it’s her job to bring in some chaos and joy into their lives. The kids’ parents are strait-laced, but in their defense, they’re not strict or bad. I think just boring.
From there, the book is decidedly episodic as you would imagine and there’s lots of little adventures happening throughout.
Oh the Places You’ll Go
I reread this twice in the last week, once for a student whose mom was asking teachers to sign it. I can’t say I read it that closely because of how many of her past teachers had signed it.
Rereading it again in a different form, one of the things I found about it is that it’s a lot more Robert Frost than inspirational. It’s still inspirational, but also, the focus of the book is so much about people recognizing the wonder and joy of living in the world, not just being someone in the world. It’s not a book about goals. It’s a book about life, that masks itself as a book about goals. This is a book about thinking about the life you live, not the life you could leave. There’s a great few sections about messing up, dead ends, and rethinking that really help drive home the ideas.
The Lorax
The Lorax, which is THE Lorax, is still one of those books that makes me laugh because there really is an American knee-jerk reactionary shittiness about even the hint of environmentalism. This is also a book about anti-consumerism, which is also a message people hate. What stands out to me rereading it is the reminder that the early environmentalists were the rich dudes, but something broke us in the 20th century, and by the 1970s where this book happens is just a different world. This is a world of superfund sites and rivers on fire.
Green Eggs and Ham and Other Stories
This is an audiobook collection of Dr Seuss stories, some very famous, others less so. In addition, because it’s an audiobook I had to either use my imagination or my memory to make my way through this. The two things that were also happening as I read this: 1) I was thinking a lot about not only the performances from the readings (all good), but also of the performers. The list of performers is very impressive, but I also think very tied to a particular moment from when this book came out, which was 2006. I also realized I know the art from a lot of Dr Seuss books so well from reading and rereading them a million times in my childhood. I would often get them from the public library and take them home and repeat this every few weeks. The copies I recall most are not the slick copies or the card stock with dust jackets, but those old school library edition with the rough or beveled surface with the covers of the books often printed onto them directly instead of having a dust jacket or other cover.
Featuring:
Green Eggs and Ham read by Jason Alexander
There’s obviously not a lot to say about this one, being a top five most famous of his books. I remember thinking that this book is one of those that really instilled in me the desire not to be a more adventurous eater because I was decidedly picky, but to really want to eat green eggs and ham. Both cartoon ham and cartoon eggs are especially delicious looking on the page, and this book carried on that tradition well.
One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish read by David Hyde Pierce
Like so many Dr Seuss books this one is all about the language and playfulness. The art obviously is fun as well. For me as a young reader this one always stood out as a book that was efficacy building as I learned how to learn how to read. Because of the lovely art and the rhyming I had a lot of fun with it, especially given how much I hated those kinds of books otherwise.
Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! read by Michael McKean
At first I didn’t think I knew this one, but there’s a moment where the narrator discusses a right and a left, and immediately my brain snapped right up.
I’m Not Going to Get Up Today read by Jason Alexander
I don’t know what my younger self would think about the fact that not only do I go to bed relatively easy now, I wake up early like it’s nothing.
Oh Say Can You Say? read by Michael McKean
Michaeld McKean is such a sneaky good reader with a good voice. I know that’s obvious now, but he snuck into the cultural consciousness so subtly.
Fox in Socks read by David Hype Pierce
Another rhyming fun book.
Can Read with My Eyes Shut read by Michael McKean
Not one I was familiar with.
Hop on Pop read by David Hype Pierce
Another top 5 Dr Seuss book in terms of fame. I was recently reading about parenting changes in pre-revolutionary America, and needless to say being a joyful parent is a new concept in the world (at least culturally, if not personally).
Dr. Seuss’s ABC read by Jason Alexander
Another book where I felt I knew the art without seeing it from reading this one so much as a kid.
On Beyond Zebra I think is discontinued now, but I recall how much I loved the idea of more sounds and more letters.
The Stinky Cheese Man
This book is one of those books that was making the rounds when I was a kid, and I remember thinking: this changes everything. I was in elementary school when it came out and so many kids books, as far as I was concerned were decidedly square and boring. So not only is this book fun, with weird art, and gross out humor, the fact that you could just change fairy tales around was mind-blowing to me. I know fractured fairy tales got there first, and fairy tales have always been formless things ultimately, but it planted an idea in my head about them.
The book is still funny, and still has the disrupting or ironic use of the media that it plays around with. Not only is this a book about fairy tales, but it’s a book about children’s books too, and even the “Media” qua media.
The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs
I think I probably read this one first, and because I sometimes use it even with high school seniors as a way to look at subtext in media, I have read it about a million times. The art is weird, but each page has a lot of little things going on as well. It’s a product of the late 1980s with a Paul Simon joke. There’s also a moment where the wolf calls one of the pigs a rude little porker.
The book also has a funny moment at the end with the wolf in prison with a pig guard, while the pig media writes suggestive stories about him. Given all that, it does kind of seem like maybe there is some framing happening here? Anyway, it sounds silly to have high school seniors read the book and to spend time breaking down as much of the visual information that they can from each page, consider the role of the narrator, and look at the specific language happening, as well as discussing the jokes too, but it’s an early year practice in what we do in all literacy classes anyway, and it’s a way get things started.
The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog and The Duckling Gets a Cookie!
A few years ago I was in one of the DC bookstores that you see sometimes in movies. One of the features of a book store like this is that they run with the theme a little. Dupont Circle is a very DC spot, but I think it’s more connected to the city itself or to the embassies that are close by more so than connected to politics. Anyway, they had a book called Don’t Let the Republican Drive the Bus. And I hated Mo Willems for years for that. It turns out that well, he didn’t write that, hopefully having a little more self-respect than a cheap political knockoff. But since it’s not a national scandal like women being marketed beer or whatever, I assume he had nothing really to do with it.
Anyway, if you had asked me to guess, I would have said there are 200,000 different pigeon books in this series. There’s eleven for the record. It’s the kind of series that is charming enough, and easily replicable to different topics and situations, but boy does it wear out its welcome if you’re not careful. The audiobook versions are also in the same vein with Mo Willems playing the character of the pigeon in the performances, and sometimes his daughter playing the duckling. The pigeon and the duckling have a kind of one-sided rivalry with the duckling being too naive and innocent to notice and the pigeon being too annoying to see how much the duckling loves him.
The other book the pigeon finds a hotdog and frets about this for some time. You can imagine. I am sure a city pigeon, say in DC, would gladly eat a hot dog, but I otherwise don’t know if pigeons eat hotdogs.
This is not my Hat
The Jon Klassen books, especially this one and I Want My Hat Back are especially hilarious to me, especially given how little text there is. The art is fantastic, but the text really makes things shine. The story is that a small fish has found himself in possession of a hat that is not his. And things go from there. In the other back which I am not technically reviewing, a bear has lost his hat, or had it stolen, and would like it back.
But in the text, what we’re treated to a near Dadaist exploration of consciousness. In a lot of ways this is a kind of Samuel Beckett novel, with a near-ID consciousness dwelling through the new reality of having this hat, and not quite knowing where it came from or what to do with it, but certainly allowing it to shape things for him. We are treated to the minimalist musings of this voice.
”
what would I do without this world faceless incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
spills in the void the ignorance of having been
without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed
what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die
the pantings the frenzies towards succour towards love
without this sky that soars
above its ballast dust
what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before
peering out of my deadlight looking for another
wandering like me eddying far from all the living
in a convulsive space
among the voices voiceless
that throng my hiddenness”
See?
Boys will be Boys – This short story involves what I take to be two young high school boys, but otherwise feels more like it’s written for middle-schoolers or late elementary. It’s not to say that that’s the writing level (but also it’s James Patterson, well maybe that’s just writing?) but that the ideas themselves are meant to be interesting but instructive as well. The two boys are on a light rail train in Baltimore on their way to a field trip. In messing around and making jokes about people on the train, the two boys start paying attention to older boys who seems to be discussing some kind of plan. It honestly sounds like a bank robbery, but the boys decide they must be planning some kind of prank. In the meantime other things are happening around them, including another prank. The driver hits what he takes to be a person on the track, and the train stops and they investigate and realize that it was a mannequin only. The driver is shaken and the police begin to ask questions to the passengers. The two boys need to decide whether or not they plan to tell the truth, possibly placing themselves in some kind of danger with the older boys and also missing their field trip likely, or stay silent. The end up telling the truth after witnessing some modeled behavior and learn a valuable lesson. So don’t worry, the title was meant to be a little ironic.
The Frog Prince Continued
This is another Jon Scieszka book, and another reinterpretation of a fairy tale. Here, through, this is after They Lived Happily Ever After. The Frog Prince, now a man, is married to the princess who kissed him. It turns out though this his froggishness has rubbed off on his human side and he’s starting to get annoying leading to general dismay in the relationship. He decides to go find a witch in the woods to change him back to being a frog so that he and the princess can move on with their lives. The witches end up being a problem as one is guarding Snow White and doesn’t trust princes. Another is guarding Sleeping Beauty and doesn’t trust princes. And the third is guarding Rapunzel and doesn’t trust princes. All he wants is to be a frog, but he’s thwarted at every turn. Alas he heads back, but perhaps this new time apart has offered up some perspective?
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
The classic book about having a bad day. What I like about this book is that a) it’s very funny, and b) the lesson is that sometimes you just have bad days, and that’s that. I work in a school that has some borderline toxic positivity issues with it, at least toward students. Things go more or less just fine here for employees, with some annoying, but not catastrophic issues from time to time. We’re a generally high achieving school, and that’s good, but it also means we have issues with student stress, workload, and student morale. And because not every student is high-achieving, sometimes other students have to deal with an environment where they can feel left out. So counseling puts up inspirational signs. Which I get it, that’s sure a “good” thing and whatever. But when kids are feeling super stressed, telling them to keep trying or whatever can be toxic. So a story like this is validating because sometimes days are bad, and the only way they get good is that they end and you start over the next day. Sometimes those days are bad too, but the idea that everything that happens in your life needs some kind of response, especially a positive response adds pressure. Sometimes things are shitty, and then they become less shitty or just end.
