Library Loot #5

For the kids:



Ready for their close-ups:

Not pictured: Sit In: How Four Friends Stood Up By Sitting Down by Andrea Pinkney and Brian Pinkney, One Monday Morning by Uri Shulevitz and The Queen of France by Tim Wadham, illustrated by Kady MacDonald Benton (of A Visitor for Bear fame, at least to me).   

For me:

Not pictured: Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian, which I've now borrowed and returned twice as it's always on hold.  I'm about halfway through and while it's not amazing, I think I'm going to re-reserve it and attempt to finish it.  I'm particularly interested in The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared, about a father who read to his daughter every night, by phone if necessary, from fourth grade through the day she started college.  You can read a shorter version here although the name of the daughter, confusingly, is different.

As you can see, we've developed an interest in non-fiction picture books and picture books intended for older kids, such as What To Do About Alice?: How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy!, Emma's Poem: The Voice of the Statue of Liberty about Emma Lazarus, author of the famous poem The New Colossus which is on a plaque at the Statue of Liberty (or Litterby, as my younger daughter says), and Sit In: How Four Friends Stood Up By Sitting Down which had a rather strained metaphor regarding a "recipe" for integration.  We also have a number of books about dance (the little one is fascinated by On Their Toes: A Russian Ballet School, a book so dated that it is not only about a Soviet, not Russian ballet school but I also cannot find a link to it).  Both kids are enjoying several National Geographic-type books with photos from around the world (including Play, On the Go and my favorite, actually published by National Geographic, One World, One Day, which was pictured in my last Library Loot post).  And my five-year-old requested Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11, after seeing it at a friend's house.  I'm still on the prowl for rain and umbrella books and have been searching for one I remember reading as a child about a cloud that follows a little boy and rains only on him - if it sounds familiar, please let me know!

Taking these photos also made me think about aspects of book production that I'd never considered.  How do they (whoever they are - editors?  book cover designers?) choose where to position the book's title on the spine?  A Spree in Paree's title doesn't line up with the other books at all .  Perfect Square's title nearly disappears off the spine, making the title very hard to read.

Thanks to Storied Cities, Playing by the Book, The New York Times Book Review (which I read in hard copy, I'm old school that way), the Bank Street Bookstore, the ABC Best Books for Children (recommendations by independent children's booksellers from across the nation), Marjorie Ingall's writings on her blog, in Tablet magazine and in the Forward, my mom  and other commenters, and Amazon's "customers who bought this item also bought..." feature for recommendations.