A few weeks ago, my son's favorite book was an alphabet by Cyndy Szekeres. I'm not sure why he liked it so much; Cyndy Szekeres is the author and illustrator of the Pippa Mouse books, which I loved when I was little, but this alphabet is not her best work-it's okay, but it's not great. She draws wonderful mice and squirrels and rabbits, but is less good at yaks. Perhaps it is its size that made the book so appealing: it is rather tall for a board book, making it seem like a big book, but it is not too wide, so it is easy for him to turn the pages. Whatever it was, he really loved that book, and preferred it to his other books.
But, babies change, and this week he seems to like his books equally. My favorites are the Maisy books, Helen Oxenbury's books, and Good Night, Gorilla.
Good Night, Gorilla is a new one for us. I first saw it at the library a couple of weeks ago, and bought a copy last week. It has beautiful illustrations that cover the entire pages in rich purples and greens and orange and pink; and the pictures have funny details that reward close attention (the gorilla has a little mouse friend who follows him around pulling a banana on a string; the elephant has a Babar doll in his cage). The text is very simple: a zookeeper says good night to each of his animals. The zookeeper never notices the gorilla stealing his keys and letting himself and the other animals out of their cages; they sneak behind him into his house and into his bedroom. When the zookeeper and his wife say good night to one another, the animals all chime in and give themselves away. The zookeeper's wife takes them all back to the zoo (but the gorilla and his mouse sneak once more into the zookeeper's bed).
When we bought Good Night, Gorilla, we also bought a new Helen Oxenbury book, Mother's Helper. It is a wordless book about a little boy who helps his mother in her daily tasks. We already had two of Helen Oxenbury's Tom and Pippo books, one where Tom (a little blond toddler) looks for Pippo (a toy monkey) all over the house and eventually finds him in the bookcase ("...where Pippo has been all the time"), and another, where a dog runs away with Pippo. I love her pencil and watercolor illustrations; she gets the bulging butts and bellies and round heads of toddlers just right, as well as their characteristic poses (standing on tiptoe to reach something a little too high, pulling on the back of their mothers' dresses). She has a subtle sense of humor: in Tom and Pippo and the Dog, Tom says, "I wasn't doing anything. Then the dog stole Pippo!" while the illustration clearly shows Tom taunting the dog with Pippo. Helen Oxenbury's world is very quotidian; her toddlers have experiences that any toddler might. And, though I don't usually think the only or best purpose of literature is to evoke the response: I know just how that feels! The same thing happened to me! - I do remember how exciting it was when I was a child to discover that experiences that I had thought were unique to me were in fact known or knowable to others, and expressible.
Maisy also lives in a very familiar world, but she is a mouse and all her friends are also animals (who are all the same size, regardless of their species). The two Maisy books we have are lift-the-flap books (my son loves lifting flaps, so much that we bought him a second-hand Thomas the Tank Engine book; I am not crazy about Thomas the Tank Engine, but that book has more than sixty wonderful [as it says on the back] flaps, and my son's love of the flaps in his books has widened to a great appreciation of the many flaps in our lives-- for are not the very pages where the flaps are found flaps themselves? The cups of mommy's nursing bra are certainly flaps, and so are cupboard doors, and the doors to rooms. Oh, flaps are wonderful, indeed.). One, a drama of the missing toy (my son does not understand object permanence yet, so toys go missing all the time for him, but are replaced with other, equally good, toys. No big deal.), and the other about activities Maisy enjoys. Simple text, great illustrations: chunky, crude black outlines filled in with bright, saturated primary and secondary colors.
We have a book called First Book of Sushi. It's pretty good. The illustrations are beautiful, done in collage with decorative Japanese papers, and the text rhymes nicely. I have to say, though, I am amused to imagine the cosmopolitan child who gets "Miso in [his/her] sippy cup" and needs this rhyming mnemonic to remember the different kinds of sushi.
We also have a bunch of Sandra Boynton books. I was dubious about these books at first, because I find the illustrations ugly. Does Sandra Boynton make greeting cards? With humorous messages about being fat and old and loving chocolate and cats? If she doesn't, I'm sorry to have implied that she does, but that is what the aesthetic of her drawings suggests to me. However, I really like her counting book, Doggies. She has spelled out the different kinds of dog barks wonderfully, and the text is excellently paced (there is one page where the dogs are all silent, and another where they all howl). I also like her book of colors, with its turkey who puts his clothes on all wrong (silly turkey!).
We have some of the classics in board book form: Goodnight, Moon (a book my husband finds bizarre: "Good night nobody? Good night, air?" What the fuck? - I like it well enough, although I feel it's metrically a little off in a couple of places ["The cow jumping over the moon" rhymes with "And a red balloon" but has too many syllables {I think}; then "And a young mouse" rhymes with "And a little toyhouse", but has too few syllables], and I can't read it aloud without my husband asking me what I think of saying good night to nobody and the air) and The Runaway Bunny (which I liked as a child, and still like, although I had a conversation with my sister about whether or not it is overprotective and stifling of the mother to insist on chasing the little bunny everywhere he goes - we decided it is age-appropriate, surely when the bunny gets older his mother will give him a little more space); The Hungry Caterpillar (a book I haven't been reading, although I've always liked the changing dimensions of the pages and the holes through them - I think it's simply been out of sight, hiding); and Are You My Mother (ugly but good; I love the hen's response when the baby bird asks if she's his mother: "No." That's it; just, "no.")
A co-worker gave me a little slipcase with five or six Raggedy Ann and Andy books in it. My son likes these books as objects-they're probably 3"x3" and less than a half inch thick, so they're easy for him to hold, and he enjoys taking them out of their case, but I have not really been reading them because they are adapted from the Raggedy Ann and Andy books and there is far too much text on each page. My baby has things to do! He can't sit there and listen to a whole grown-up length paragraph! This evening, though, I read Raggedy Andy's Numbers, and it is weird! Consider this, for number seven: "If you should see this many ducks/ All going to the store/ To have an ice cream soda/ There'd be seven/ and no more." Well, okay.