This post is dedicated to Miriam as she nears her first birthday.
This post will be a little different, and concerns a few board books that I have found particularly pleasant to interact with in the first year of my daughter's life. I know that some of these books exist as regular books and not sturdy little blocks that are so great for munching on and testing gravity with, but for the purposes of this post I am refer to the board book versions. Also, while I am largely expressing my opinions here, I am very much taking into account Miriam's responsiveness to the books, as my opinions have been at least in part affected my her reactions.
1: Mon Cirque by Xavier Deneux
I got this book at the overpriced gift shop at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts but have never regretted it. The book is absolutely wonderful. The red-yellow-and-white illustrations against mostly black backgrounds are bright and extremely clear, which is exactly what excites babies and keeps their attention. Each page has one or two cut-outs in it - small holes and big ones, in all different shapes, through which one can peek, stick a hand, pass a small object, or simply trace the outline of the cut-out with a little finger. Each page tells us about some aspect of the circus - and what is most excellent, it does so in french, so you can learn important french words like the ones for tight rope walker and clown. Mon Cirque has a wonderfully wild energy about it - it actually feels like you are in the circus when reading it. It is playful, and strange, and aloft, and mysterious and distant and exhilarating at the same time. The cut outs are extremely clever, some go as far as three or four pages deep, but each page uses the back image for it's own purposes; for example a zebra becomes the pants of a tight rope walker who then becomes a juggler with another turn of a page. This is a book I can definitely appreciate without the assistance of a baby, but thankfully the baby inherited my excellent taste so we can appreciate it together for long periods of time.
2. Goodnight Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann
This book is one of my all-time favorites. A lot of people snort at it because they think it is a rip-off from Good Night Moon, but please believe me, it has nothing to do with that other book, praise the Lord. In Goodnight Moon the zookeeper walks around to all the cages in the zoo saying goodnight to all the animals, while unbeknownst to him the Gorilla has snatched his keys and is following him around setting all the animals free. They join the queue behind the gorilla, follow the zookeeper out of the zoo, into his house which is just across the lawn, into his house, and into his bedroom, and they all settle in there, with gorilla in the bed, between the zookeeper and his wife. And then the zookeeper's wife says: "goodnight!" and all the animals say: "goodnight!" and the wife gets up and walk the animals back to the zoo until the sneaky gorilla spoils the plans of the humans yet again in the most wonderful and coziest of ways.
This book is wonderful because the details are full of love and kindness in that special way that is fairly rare in the world. There are practically no words, so you can tell the story in whichever way you like - and in whichever language, which is applicable in our case.
3. The Hungry Little Caterpillar by Eric Carle
There isn't much that is left to be said about this book as it has probably outsold the bible and the collected works of Shakespeare a few times over, and has been translated into as many languages, but I do have something to say. What I have to say, is that I have a very negative opinion of Eric Carle. I think he is the biggest charlatan out there, who, through sheer luck stumbled upon a winning technique and has been milking it for decades. While I agree that his stuff is still better than a lot of children's literature out there, there a notable lack of humor in everything Carle does that I believe to be incompatible with great children's books. Eric Carle is a bit too heavy as a human being to dance his ideas around and I believe that makes them inflexible, soulless, though that might be too harsh or a word, and unable to be loved. I don't understand how any of his characters can truly be loved by children or grown-ups, because they never evolve beyond flat paper cut-outs.
And yet, The Hungry Little Caterpillar is a fantastic book. It is like a poem, in which everything is perfectly arranged, and all the information and meaning is conveyed through the smallest possible number of words and pictures. It is a wonderful book to read with a child, who can stick a little finger into all the holes on the pages, and count the fruits and the other foods it eats throughout the journey. Despite everything that goes on in the book, there is a certain calm to it, a pace, a rationality, a sequence; that makes it possible to read over and over and over again and never really get bored with it.
4. A Color Of His Own by Leo Lionni
While Leo Lionni's art could, and has been compared to Eric Carle's, I think they are as far apart as two artists could be. Lionni's protagonists are also colorful, often collaged beasties, but they are wonderful, loveable, diverse, unique, and evolving.
In a Color of His Own a little chameleon has a hard time with not having a permanent color. He tries to sit on different things but the world is always changing, and no color gets stuck. A green leaf turns yellow and red and falls off a tree altogether, taking little chameleon with it, until, in the end, the chameleon accepts his fate with the help of a friend in the same predicament; because things that are complicated about one's life are always better when you can do them with a friend.
I also love this book because the story is unpredictable and spontaneous. It starts out by pointing out over a few pages that regular animals have a personal color that belongs to them, so it looks like a book about animal colors, and then you are surprised by the appearance of the chameleon and his predicament. And one my favorite things is that at least twice in the book the chameleon sits on a tiger and turns tiger color. So you learn about tiger colors without being explicitly told what they are. You never fully see the tiger - only a part of it, with a striped chameleon. I think it is that kind of brilliant subtlety that sets Leo Lionni and his book apart from some other writers. At the end. both chameleons sit on one of those red mushrooms with white polka dots and turn polka dot color. It is all very clever, and creative, and truly wonderful and lovable.
