The Little Bookroom

what are books for?

What are books for? In the words of Shen Roddie’s delightful Toes Are to Tickle, “Books are to choose from.” A 5-year-old told me that books are for reading. Another child told me that books can take you anywhere, even places you’ve never been. As a small child myself, I knew that books were to sit on. Perched somewhat uncomfortably on a phonebook or encyclopedia, I would find myself absorbed in someone else’s food, someone else’s talk, as we visited the homes of friends.

But really, what are books for? Books give us evidence about the way the world works: fiction and nonfiction offer crucial information about the nature of human relationships, the way things work, the ebb and flow of time and age, and what to do with too many plums. Books answer questions we didn’t know we had.

                Books affirm our experience of the world. They leave us not so lonely. When children read about others who, like themselves, have known love and jealousy, who have struggled with fears of the dark or of speaking in class, who have lost a blanket or found a friend, who have splashed through puddles or sat in the sand, they have found a way to contemplate the events of their lives, knowing that they do so in good company.

                Books allow us to escape from the small-mindedness of daily life. Weary of the tedium of routine, we can lose ourselves in landscapes utterly unlike those that lay around us.

                Books give us entry into the lives of others. They offer us the opportunity to step out of our own way of being in the world, if only for a little while. They allow us to empathize. In so doing, they hold out the promise of change, as they encourage the capacity to imagine the world as it is not.

                Books sustain intimacy, as we sit close together, heads bent over the same page. Reading with a companion, feeling together the emotions evoked by our book, we share experiences we have never had outside the pages we read, and make friends with those whom we will never know in the flesh.

                As a small child myself, I knew that books were to sit on. I wasn’t wrong. Books give us a place at the table.

A view from abroad

Why read international children’s books? Because doing so helps us—children and adults alike—to understand the ways in which we are similar and different. When we carry each other’s stories in our hearts, we are more compassionate with each other. Yet in any recent year, only about 1% of books in print or in libraries in the United States are translations from other languages into English. Books originally published in English in other countries are more numerous on our shelves, but awareness of their country of origin is not always explicit. For those of us who live in the United States, physically isolated from so much of the world, it is essential that we find a way to foster a sense of community with the rest of the world. For young children, books are a good beginning.

Every other month, or whenever I can manage it, I'll alternate between reviews of books originally published in English and books originally published in a language other than English, so as to achieve the greatest coverage of the international titles that are currently available in the United States. At the same time, I will make an effort to provide meaningful geographical coverage, reviewing books not only from Europe, but also from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. I cannot provide a thorough examination of each national or regional literature that I take up, as in every region in which one exists it is far too rich to be examined in its entirety. Rather, I hope to open the door onto another world of writing, another way of understanding childhood, to see who else is writing for children, what the world looks like to them, and how they hope to help children to make sense of that world.

Starting now (well, really starting last Friday), I'll be looking at books from Germany. Of late, Cornelia Funke and Kai Meyer have been exciting tremendous international interest as German authors for middle readers and young adults. But what about other works by German authors? Here's a charming one for babies and toddlers, rare since books for such young children are infrequently translated--probably because many books for the youngest readers are wordless, and seem therefore not to need translation. In practice, of course, this means that they tend not published for audiences other than the original one. Look for this in the library, or via inter-library loan.

Helmut Spanner, Mouse in the Kitchen (New York: St. Martin's, 1995). This wordless book for babies and toddlers consists of a series of twelve images printed on a heavy folding panel, six images to a side. A fuzzy brown mouse explores a single kitchen utensil in each picture. And while some of the objects are immediately familiar, others--the bundt pan, the metric scale--are redolent of another place. Most charming of all is the picture f the mouse next to the bottle opener, crowned with a bottle cap. A great introduction to another culture for the very young.

bookish

About 18 months ago, I began publishing a bimonthly review of books for children and families entitled BOOKISH. And it was humming along. But then we were engulfed by a series of family crises, and I simply wasn't able to continue. In that time away from writing and publishing, I pondered the wisdom of continuing the paper version, which was costly, but so pleasurable to hold in the hand.

Why BOOKISH? Because it so perfectly captured the kind of reader I am, in an arch sort of way. But the experience of writing it eased some of that same arch self-consciousness, and allowed me a deeper engagement with the kind of reader I was as a child. And so now that I've moved online, a new name that reflects that shift in consciousness seems appropriate.

The Little Bookroom will be a place for that suspension of belief that once came so easily, and that allowed me to become the bookish adult I am today.

bookish: Pertaining to a book or to books and reading in general, usually in the literary sense. Also refers to a person who is fond of reading books or excessively studious. As a term of disparagement, any person whose knowledge of life is acquired largely by reading books rather than from actual experience. (For this and other bibliographic definitions, see The Online Dictionary of Library and Information Services, www.lu.com/odlis/odlis_b.cfm.)

Welcome to The Little Bookroom

I was sitting and staring abstractedly out of the window when my son sat down next to me. “What are you doing?,” he asked.

                “I’m thinking,” I said. “Thinking about my blog—you know, the one I’m working on about books for children. I have to write something for it that will make people want to read it.”

                “Oh,” he said knowledgably. “Like advertising. You need some of that head print—you know, those big letters—that says GET NEW BOOKS FOR YOUR KIDS or SOMETHING NICE FOR A RAINY DAY.”

                “That’s a good idea,” I said. “Can you remember that for me?”

                “I think you should remember it for yourself. Or—I know—I have some old papers in my room I don’t need anymore. You can write it on the backs of them.”

                So we did.

                What I can tell you right now is this. The Little Bookroom is a blog about books for children and families. I'll write brief essays about reading and children; capsule reviews on select topics for children of a variety of ages; extended reviews of one book that deserves to be read over and over; conversations with children, an observation of children, or an historical essay about children and childhood; and links to books reviewed. Or whatever else inspires me at the moment.

Books are the starting point of this blog, but they are not the end point. Because I believe that great books are the stuff of life, because I think that the stories they contain reflect something true about the nature of human experience and about the centrality of narrative to that experience, I will also use The Little Bookroom as a place to talk about the work of the imagination, about the experience of childhood, about time and memory, as well as more prosaic though no less important matters, like how to read with children, and where to find books.

               And why, you might ask, am I embarking on this venture? In my experience, it isn’t always easy to find something good to read, something at once challenging and comforting, something for the mind and the heart—a really good book. This is in part because relatively few publications review children’s books, and most of those that do are directed at professionals concerned with building coherent teaching or library collections—a worthy goal, but not quite what I need as a parent. Furthermore, these newspapers and magazines and journals review only what’s new. But what I want is a sense of why a book is good, how it works for a child, and if I know that, it doesn’t really matter to me if the book is this season’s publication or not, provided I can actually get my hands on it. In fact, I want my children to read old books as well as new ones, fiction and nonfiction, books written here in the U.S. and books written elsewhere. I want our reading to be as broad as possible. At the same time, my children tend to get focused on a single theme that they want to explore in depth, a theme that might then lead them in new directions.

               Am I qualified to do this? Over the years, I’ve studied children’s literature, early childhood education, and the history of childhood, among other things, and I’ve taught at the university level and at preschool. I have the research skills to find books, the analytic skills to think about them, and the experience to know what really works. I have two children of my own. I also have precise, profound memories of my own childhood, many of which revolve around books. And I talk about books all the time, with children and with adults. I buy them and borrow them and read them and dream about them, somewhat obsessively. There is a sea of stories, a forest of pages, a mountain of words, all waiting for us. Let’s begin…