February 24, 2013
"Worse still, her parents were always bringing home MORE books."
The Girl Who Hated Books by Jo Meuris, National Film Board of Canada
Three years ago, I posted about this short film, but I’m returning to it again because this weekend I purchased the book upon which it is based for 50 cents from a bake sale/book sale taking place outside Harriet’s swimming lessons (along with a rice crispie square and two slices of cake). The book is The Girl Who Hated Books by Manjusha Pawagi and Leanne Franson, and we love it. I like the glimpses of storybook characters we know and love, but also how the family in the book is a little bit like our own, only far more eccentric:
“There were books in dressers and drawers and desks, in closets, cupboards and chests. There were books on the sofa and books on the stairs, books crammed in the fireplace and stacked on the chairs.
Worse still, her parents were always bringing home MORE books. They kept buying books and borrowing books and ordering books from catalogues. They read at breakfast and lunch and dinner…”
We’re not quite that bad, and while we do have books crammed in the fireplace, on the stairs, and even on our ceiling, we have not yet had to resort to the sink. And reading at dinner is strictly forbidden, though breakfast and lunch is all right, Saturday paper breakfast in particular. Obviously.
I like this book also because it’s a perfect addition to the excellent list we posted at 49thShelf last week, Picture Books Featuring Canadian Children of Colour, compiled by TPL librarian Joanne Schwartz.
February 7, 2013
A Big Week
It has been a very big week in the life of Harriet, who successfully underwent her first trip to the dentist (without a cavity to show for it!) on Tuesday and who this afternoon was registered for kindergarten in September. Initially, she was nervous about all the big kids and stuck close to me, until she was whisked away by a group of grade 6 “school ambassadors” who played with her while I filled out the paperwork. And then Harriet was presented with a brand new book, her own copy of Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten, which we’ve had out of the library many, many times. It was a wonderful introduction to the kindergarten life, and Harriet is looking forward to it. I only cried a little bit.
January 29, 2013
Welcome to our new arrival!
Life has changed forever in our home since the delivery of our newest household member on Saturday morning. Labour was a breeze, performed by two strong men who apparently carry appliances up rickety staircases and install them in attics all the time. And thereafter we fell upon gazing at it, unable to get over the beauty, the shine, the rocket-ship-ness. It plays music when its cycle is completed. Our previous washing machine was so old that when we asked our landlord to replace it, she reminisced that she’d used it to wash her kids’ diapers, and her kids are now in high school. Our old washer was Shirley Jackson eccentric, and it had a dial, but the label had worn off so we could never tell what the setting was, and there only seemed to be one setting anyway which mainly involved the washing machine dancing across the floor, and leaving the clothes inside not only not clean, but usually ripped. And don’t get me wrong–it was better than nothing. And certainly better, being close at hand, than the washing machines at the laundromat on Harbord Street which I’d frequented before we moved here, having to queue, and then remove other people’s manky underpants before using the machine for myself. But now this is a brand new washing machine, and it’s never known any manky pants but my own. When the clothes come out, they’re so clean you can feel it, and they’re nearly dry from the spin. And only a few months down the line, when I’m up to my ears in cloth diapers, will my love for this machine fully blossom. I’m almost excited about it. Almost.
August 19, 2012
How to keep more books
I had a revelation yesterday afternoon: if we had a taller bookshelf, we could keep more books. And as we’ve completely run out of floor/wall space for book storage, this revelation was truly a revolution. I did a search for tall bookshelves on Craigslist and very nearly forgot my recent vow to buy no more furniture that isn’t really furniture (bookshelves with cardboard backs or made of particle board), and then I found a listing for a solid wood bookshelf for only $40. The ad had been up for a week, but I got an immediate response from a seller who’d only just started answering her responses and who’d recognized my name as we had a mutual friend. She also just lived up the street, which was handy, so I took a trip there last night in the Autoshare cargo van, and brought this beauty of a bookshelf home. Of course, its arrival has instigated a massive clear-out/re-organzation that has since turned the entire house to chaos, and resulted in a massive pile of free books being put out on the curb (which were gone in two hours, and yes, my bookish garden is better for the pruning). The task before me now is to clear out our garret-turned-overstuffed-storage-closet, which is totally terrifying. But in the meantime, there is the brand new bookshelf, and we’re absolutely in love with it.
June 14, 2012
A Page From the Wonders…
This is the book I bought tonight in celebration of the Literary Press Group having their funding restored— Stephanie Bolster’s A Page From the Wonders of Life on Earth. The news was a surprise, and I’m only one of many readers who are overjoyed. You should be too, and your reading life will be better for this news, even if you don’t know it yet. And if you’d like to have a celebration of your own, I’d recommend any of the ones I mentioned in my original post, and also Sheree Fitch’s extraordinary new picture book Night Sky Wheel Ride, which Harriet shouts along to when we read it to her. Please also read Sheree’s gorgeous post on LPG funding and I dare you not to be moved.
March 22, 2012
A splendid day
“Albert collected good days the way other people collected coins, or sets of postcards.”– Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Oh, we’ve had a good day. Sunshine , popsicles and a brilliant morning in the park with wonderful friends, after which Harriet went straight to nap without lunch (at her own request) and slept for 3 hours. And then we headed down to Queen Street West to Type Books where Kyo Maclear was launching Virginia Wolf and her novel Stray Love, which made it the perfect mother/daughter occasion. The event was great, with snacks (pocky!), music (Waterloo Sunset!), and company (my best friend, Jennie!, who took our picture). It was also nice to meet Kyo Maclear, whose work I’ve admired for a long time. And then Harriet and I took the streetcar home, which was fabulous because transit is Harriet’s favourite part of being alive, and the driver on the Bathurst Streetcar rang his bell for us! Also exciting, I thought, was that the entire Queen St. W. area smelled like farm, which was curious, yes, but mostly importantly, which Harriet recognized before I did, and how wonderful that my streetcar-riding city girl knows what just what a farm smells like.
January 16, 2012
New kids books to start the year right
This Christmas was exceptional for the calibre of picture books that we were given as gifts– so many new discoveries, books exactly in line with the kind of stuff we like, books we’d long been waiting for, though we hadn’t even known it. It was quite a novelty, because as bookish people, we’re used to making our own literary discoveries, used to friends buying us something other than books because they assume we’ve read them all already. But not so! What follows is an absolute trove of delights.
When I Was Small by Sara O’Leary/Julie Morstad: I’ve been buying Sara O’Leary’s Henry books for little people since long before I had a little person of my own. This latest installment is as lovely as the rest, as Henry asks his mother to tell him stories of that long-ago never-never time before he was born, back when she was small. In the pattern of the previous books, she tells him about the small girl she once was, back when she wore the same shoes as her doll, when she had a ladybug for a pet, slept in a mitten, and bathed in a bird bath. And then she shares with Henry a dream she had that connects her past to his present.
There Were Monkeys in My Kitchen by Sheree Fitch/Sidney Smith: We love Sheree Fitch, and 
Nimbus Press’ re-issue of her books by (with new illustrations by Sidney Smith) is cause for celebration. In this rollicking rhyme, Willa Wellougby discovers that her house has been overtaken by a variety of simian creatures, including go-go apes and square dancing monkeys. The monkeys are agents of chaos, and poor Willa has to contend with them alone, because she’s been calling the police and the RCMP and getting no response. And when the Mounties finally arrive, it might just be too late.
I Want to Go to the Moon by Tom Saunders: A picture book biography of Neil Armstrong, in verse! Tom Saunders’ story began as a song, and it’s recorded on the CD included with the book. The illustrations are vivid and engaging, the bouncing verse outlining Young’s story and underlining a message that impossible dreams can be realized. Only problem is that the verse stays in your head, and in our family we’ve taken to hurling, “You’ll never go to the moon, Neil,” as a cryptic insult.
The High Street by Alice Melvin: The Tate publishes books– who knew? And it’s no surprise that 
they’re gorgeously designed and illustrated. This was one of two books that Harriet received for Christmas intended to nurture her inner consumer. In this story, a small girl goes shopping with a rhyming list of things to get, and knocks items off one-by-one. But the best part is wall of the shops cut away so that we get to see inside, and also what’s going on in the space above the shop. A must-have for the English fetishists among us.
The Cow Who Fell in the Canal by Phyllis Krasilovsky: Harriet’s grandmother picked this one up on a recent trip to Holland, and we adored it, as we like vintage picture books in general, and the illustrations are reminiscent of Marjorie Flack’s. This story of a cow who (surprise!) falls into a canal is simple and funny, and its illustrations offer marvelous glimpses of Dutch landscapes.
The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by Dubose Heyward/Marjorie Flack: 
Speaking of Marjorie Flack, here she is, illustrating this ahead-of-its-time feminist tale. Basically, this is Dee Dee Myers’ Why Women Should Rule the World compressed into storybook bunny form. A single mother bunny is chosen to become the new Easter bunny because the skills she has acquired managing her brood and her household are applicable to the competitive world of egg distribution. Apparently, we can do it all!
Who Will Comfort Toffle? by Tove Jansson: Our first Tove Jansson picture book was The Book of Moomin, Mimble and Little My, much beloved. And we like this one even better, the story of lonely Toffle who’s content to haul his suitcase about and remain the fringes of society. Then he discovers a Miffle who’s in need of comfort as much as he is, so he makes it his mission to track the Miffle down and discover the pleasures (and comforts) of friendship with her. The last page is unbelievably lovely, and I only wish I’d known of it during that period about five years ago when everyone kept asking me to do readings at their weddings.
On Market Street by Arnold Lobel and Anita Lobel. Our second shopping book, written by Arnold 
Lobel (!) and illlustrated by his wife Anita. And it’s an ABC book, and B is for books, so basically this book is perfect, and when T is for toys, we discover a Frog and Toad allusion in the picture. I can’t believe I’d never heard of this one, which won the Caldecott Medal in 1982.
Press Here by Herve Tullet: A book like none I’ve ever seen, but maybe a bit like the iPad. But better. Because it requires imagination to make it go, not to mention fingers for pressing, arms for shaking, breath for blowing the dots away. A truly engaging book with great design, and a lot of fun to “read”.
January 12, 2012
Nursery Rhyme Comics: 50 Timeless Rhymes from 50 Great Cartoonists by Chris Duffy (ed)
For me, motherhood has been a portal to the wonderful world of comics, and I’ve been making more frequent visits ever since Little Island Comics opened up around the corner from my house. As a child, I never got past Archie, which is not to say I was not a devoted fan, but Archie is hardly the cream of the comics crop. In the company of Harriet, however, I’ve been working my way through Tintin’s adventure The Red Sea Sharks, which is wonderful, and Harriet loves it too, though I’m pretty sure she understands about none of it. She also has a Silly Lilly book that I quite enjoy, and we enjoy the Moomin storybooks so much that we’re going to have get started on reading the comic strip collections.
I also think that it’s rude to hang out in bookstores and not buy anything, so when we were all there a couple of weekends back, we picked out Nursery Rhyme Comics, which was edited by Chris Duffy. Now, you mightn’t have thought that our household needed a fifth Mother Goose Collection, but we did! We did. If you scroll down to the photo of Harriet reading in bed, you’ll see that this book is what she’s been lost to, and her parents like it just as much. It includes some rhymes we didn’t know before, all the favourites we knew already, and each one reborn in the style of a notable contemporary cartoonist. (I am not very cool. The only one I’ve heard of is Kate Beaton, but I know that she is very cool.)
The old woman who lives in the shoe has a rock and roll band, Jack Be Nimble is petulant and ashamed with a hole in his pants, the King of Hearts is a terrible, terrible tyrant who gets what’s coming to him, Little Boy Blue’s sleeping is cause for a party, the hickory dickory dock mouse is actually a bell ringer. The cartoonists’ styles are remarkably contrasting, each one interesting and vivid in its own way, rendering simple nursery rhymes into stories, and this book a remarkably rich collection.
November 26, 2011
A pile of books
Today we went to a book and toy sale at Huron Playschool, where Harriet will attend next year when she is three (and “when I am a boy,” she has noted, intriguingly). The sale was to support a trust fund for the son of Jenna Morrison, who was killed in a cycling accident two weeks ago, and whose death has profoundly affected our community, even those of us who didn’t know her.
We got a pile of books, happy to be able to do something to help. We brought them home and began to read through the stack, which wouldn’t have made for a blog post normally, except that every single book that we read was so incredibly good. We got Silly Lilly by Agnes Rosenstiehl , Owl Babies by Martin Waddell and Patrick Benson, Paddington Takes a Bath by Michael Bond, A Difficult Day by Eugenie Fernandes, Beneath the Bridge by Hazel Hutchins and Ruth Ohi, and The Alphabet Room by Sarah Pinto.
November 3, 2011
What I found: Childcraft- The How & Why Library
Blog fodder is something I’ve been thinking about as I finish up writing my lectures for SCS 2114, and I’ve been thinking about how often I stumble upon mine by the side of the road. On Tuesday, it was a stack of encyclopedias from the Childcraft- The How & Why Library, an edition published in 1987. There’s a volume of fairy tales and nursery rhymes, another of contemporary stories (Amelia Bedelia, Where the Wild Things Are, etc.), one of art projects, another about dates, festivals and celebrations, one about How Things Work, and Numbers and Math. We’ll have to edit Space and the Universe so Harriet understands that there is no such thing as Pluto, but so much of the content here will never go out of date, the books are in perfect condition (except for the page that Harriet ripped), are still attractive-looking, and (best of all) they don’t smell like a basement. (We might ignore the parenting guide in Volume 15 though, with its topical chapters of latchkey kids and working mothers.)
I’ve been longing for an encyclopedia in the same way I wish I knew how to use my sewing machine. I love its containment of the universe, the order of its numbered spines, its place of honour on the shelf, and that if anyone in our household ever wants to know what a cloud is and the internet’s down, it’s no problem. I love that you can open any volume to a random place, and discover something completely fascinating.
The downside to all this, however, I discovered after lugging the whole stack home (while pushing a stroller whose basket can no longer accommodate books after too many gluttonous trips to the library, though that I carried a stack of encyclopedias home really might be the most remarkable part of this story): two volumes are missing! Volume 3 Stories and Poems, and Volume 7 Story of the Sea might just have to tracked down and purchased online for the sake of completion.
