Books

Been a while since I've done book reviews of the stuff we are currently reading. That is in good part because I've been guilt-ridden over how little time I have these days to spend browsing the shelves in libraries in search of good reads for Sava. My redemption presented itself recently in the form of the Los Altos Library's free service of "placing a hold" even on books that are currently available, which means that I tell the computer what books I want, and a librarian finds them for me and puts them on a shelf to pick up at my convenience. The challenge then becomes to pick good books without skimming them first, which I solved by looking up all Caldecott winners and ordering more than a dozen of the most recent medals. What a brilliant thought.
Every single book from the first pile I picked up last week has been an absolute treasure and a joy to read. Favorites include--

The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordicai Gerstein (about Philippe Petit, who walked on a rope between the World Trade towers in 1974; based on a real story, it is a post-9/11 celebration of the towers)
All the World by Elizabeth Scanlon (fantastic drawings)
Flotsam by David Wiesner (by far the absolute best wordless picture book I have ever come across)
Rapunzel by Paul Zelinsky (with beautiful Renaissance paintings of the classic Grimm story, which Sava did not appreciate because the sorceress scared the pants off him)

Sava's enjoyed the towers book, but he especially likes The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats, as well as two other books by the same author, Peter's Chair and A Letter to Amy.  Keats gave me the idea of getting Caldecott books after I read about him in Garrison Keillor's daily Writer's Almanac. All three books have the same character--a black boy named Peter--and they recount ordinary events of the sort that Sava has always found the most appealing; while he likes fantasy, he would pick "social realism" over a tall tale any day. He gets a special kick out of Peter's embarrassment in A Letter to Amy over having invited a girl to his birthday party; when one of his friends, Eddie, grunts in disgust upon seeing Amy, "A girl--ugh!," Sava inevitably starts giggling. (Apropos, we had to twist his arm to get him to invite a few girls to his birthday party, after he firmly declared that he only wanted to have "my boys" there, meaning his gang of boys from school.)

Besides the Caldecott winners, we've recently enjoyed: a book called Bright Star by Gary Crew, about a girl from the countryside some time in the indefinite past whose passion for math and astronomy is fueled by her encounter with an astronomer; The Alley Cat's Meow about two cats who fall in love while dancing (Sava's favorite line: "he was dashing, he was smashing, he was la di da di da!"); and a couple of Tomie de Paola books--The Art Lesson, Meet the Barkers, and The Baby Sister--the latter especially because Sava enjoys my mock Italian when I speak in the voice of Tomy's Italian grandmother, Nana-Fall-River. At least once most days, Sava can be heard repeating one or both of two favorite lines with a heavy accent: "Mangia, mangia, Tommasino! Your brother, Buddy, he eat up all nice," or, "Basta, Tommasino! I don't want to hear anymore."

Edited to add: Can't possibly fail to mention that this week marks also the beginning of Raya's reading life. While she has seen us reading to Sava, we had never purposefully sat down with a book with her until this week I took out our second, newer, copy of Goodnight Moon, which now is our bedtime reading (the first copy, which we read to Sava for much of his first year, is so battered that it deserves a place in a museum). I don't recall exactly, but I think we started reading to Sava a bit earlier. Raya has gotten a late start because bedtimes are still very unsettled, and she is usually ready to crash by the time we start winding down for sleep.