thanate | Books to chew on (Reply)

There would be a picture here, except that my computer is *still* not talking to the camera, and has now given up talking to the other camera & card reader as well. Restarts have been attempted, and it's not the USB ports, since other things still work with both of them. Not quite sure what to try next... Ok, card reader is dead, and Cannon doesn't think anyone should have their drivers without working through software that's about five levels of inconvenient for how I want to process photos, but I have achieved pictures. So:

Anyway, the B&N gift cards that I ordered with the hope of taking them to the Bujold reading last weekend arrived in my mailbox at about the same time as the reading was going on, so I went in to wander the Baltimore Harbor B&N on Monday after my aquarium shift on other quests. They failed to have

sartorias's latest (Revenant Eve, which I completely forgot to mention in my list of things other people should read because I haven't gotten the chance to yet), or the book I was hoping to get for grauwulf. But I did spend an hour reading board books, and came away with almost exactly a gift card's worth of selections.

Due to my book-hoarding nature and the fact that my mother was a children's librarian before I was born, I've got upwards of six shelf-feet of picture books already in the house, but aside from a couple cloth books (which, er, I need to figure out where I put...) I didn't previously have anything that could stand up to a six-month-old without supervision. I was a bit disturbed by how many of the things I considered were from familiar names and faces: The Carrot Seed is from my mother's childhood; the Peach/Pear/Plum thing is a I-spy book of cyclic nursery rhyme/fairytale characters by the people who did the Jolly Postman books, which I was introduced to by a 3rd grade project. The others are all somewhere in between. While there were a lot of things I didn't recognize, none of the ones I picked up to read passed my basic criteria. I want things that have some basic attempt at story, that aren't so inane I object to reading them multiple times, and that make sense as early reading material. One of the things I passed up was the Pride and Prejudice counting book (...Two eligible bachelors, Three manor houses, Four proposals, Five sisters Bennet...) which I'm sure is entertaining to those of us who have already read and enjoyed the real thing, but isn't exactly a useful way to introduce a new generation to the story.

Also of note, while I knew that But Not the Hippopotamus was on my list of things I wanted, I had not quite realized that Sandra Boynton (who I think of as the cartoonist of Chocolate, the Consuming Passion and various greeting cards & mugs) had quite so thoroughly taken over the board book section. She accounted for about 2-1/2 shelves out of the three shoulder-high units that were alpha by author. And apparently several of them came in special 30th anniversary editions, so they were at least around when my brother was little enough for them, even if I don't remember hearing about them until years later. Crazy.

Also on my potential to-buy list are some of Rosemary Wells' Max & Ruby books, and perhaps a couple of the Jane Yolen dinosaur manners-teaching ones (which were actually not around when I was a kid! Madness!) And anything we pick up from the library and don't want to have to give back, of course.

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