Go Away, Book. Go Away!
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Just me on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 5:53 PM
A while ago I asked about children’s books you love, which led to a thread full of suggestions. It’s been very helpful to me on our library visits.
But - as I’m sure we’ve all experienced - not all literature is created equal, even literature for little people.
I always cringe when my daughter heads for the rack of made-from-TV books. You know the ones: books that consist of the storyline and pictures from an animated children’s television show. It’s like they figured that if they went to the trouble of making an episode, they might as well use it for a book too. But (shockingly) television doesn’t translate well to the written word. Why, TV execs? Why?
Fortunately, I’ve been able to (mostly) keep the TV-books out of our house. (The rare one that turns up in a bag from a used-book sale makes a quiet disappearance soon afterward.) UN-fortunately, there are also plenty of children’s classics that are, frankly, kind of a snooze.
I think this is a personal-preference thing. I have books I hate to read; my husband has books he hates to read; they rarely overlap. For the most part, we both enjoy reading to our kids. But there are a couple volumes that, when I see a child approaching with one in hand, make me want to whine, “Oh, can’t we read anything else?”
(It’s possible that I sometimes actually say this. I’ll leave it to you to guess whether I do.)
At the top of my makes-me-want-to-whine list is Are You My Mother?. I don’t feel as strongly about it as some people apparently do, but I disliked reading this one so much that I “disappeared” our copy a long time ago. So repetitive! So mind-numbing! And the ending is bizarre. As a child I remember being vaguely bothered by the story, because I knew that if I ever got separated from my parents, no oddly prescient piece of earth-moving machinery was going to show up and reunite us.
There must be something about P.D. Eastman, because also on my list is Go, Dog. Go! When my daughter was two she had a months-long love affair with this book, and was I ever relieved when we accidentally (really!) left it at Grandma’s house for a month and she moved on. These days it hides at the back of the bookshelf, where it belongs, but I still sometimes ponder the inanity of all those different-colored dogs and trees. And it continues to bug me that the nice lady dog rides off into the sunset with the fellow at the end. He was so rude about her previous hats! She should have snubbed him!
If you think my feelings about kids’ books are inappropriately strong… well, you’re probably right. But if you yourself have a book that drives YOU up the wall… well, jump right in! I’d love to hear about it.
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