Today in Books

Yesterday I was looking for a book for Beanie—Diane Stanley’s Michelangelo—and I kept coming across picture books I really really really need to read to Rilla. It’s that fifth-kid thing again, where I’ll suddenly realize she is missing out on one of our favorite books because I’ve read it so many times to the four above her that I forget there are kids in this house who haven’t yet had the pleasure.

I wound up with a stack of must-reads in the middle of the living-room floor. Rose teased me. “Every time you look for a book, you wind up with a pile of twenty.”

Guilty as charged.

Rilla and Huck and I squoze onto the couch (technical term, you know) and read several of the found treasures. I plopped the rest of the stack into a cloth basket and vowed to return to my habits of old: filling a basket with picture books every week or two, rotating new ones from the shelves.

Here are the books that went into the basket for this week—no particular theme to the selections; none of them new; most of them quite well known. This list is for our family chronicle more than anything else.

• The Grouchy Ladybug by Eric Carle (that crabby voice is such fun to read aloud)

• James in the House of Aunt Prudence by Timothy Bush (one of our family’s most beloved picture books)

• One Hungry Baby by Lucy Coats (see the comments for my take on this charmer)

•  Strega Nona by Tomie de Paola (like I had to tell you that)

• Crazy Hair by Neil Gaiman. (Rilla’s the one who added this to the pile—it’s a special favorite of hers.)

• Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See by Bill Martin. (Huck’s first time! Egad! It made him chuckle—a delighted, delicious huckleberry chuckle. The teacher page especially—I don’t know why.)

Meanwhile, Wonderboy continues to love Elephant and Piggie best of all. Understandably.

We did eventually locate Michelangelo; Beanie enjoyed it. It will not surprise you that today I gave her From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler. Rose recently finished Pride and Prejudice for the first time and announced that she would have liked it very much if only it contained more fantasy and adventure. If, in short, it had been more like a Warriors book. 😉

We have one chapter left in The Family Under the Bridge. As for young Mr. Copperfield, he has only just arrived in Yarmouth, where his vague misgivings about Mr. Murdstone have been swept out of his mind by the miracle of a house made out of an old boat.

“…The wonderful charm of it was, that it was a real boat which had no doubt been upon the water hundreds of times, and which had never been intended to be lived in, on dry land. That was the captivation of it to me. If it had ever been meant to be lived in, I might have thought it small, or inconvenient, or lonely; but never having been designed for any such use, it became a perfect abode.”