I subscribe to a great weekly Newsletter called Brain Pickings. Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large, who has also written for Wired UK, The New York Times, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, and The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. In the latest post Maria lists the 13 Best Childrens books of 2013. Her list is interesting and well worth the read. For the entire newsletter and to subscribe, go here. I will post the rest of her list tomorrow. The hard to please child will love anyone of these books.
This is The
13 Best Children’s, Illustrated, and Picture Books of 2013 by
Maria Popova
Young
Mark Twain’s lost gem, the universe in illustrated dioramas, Maurice Sendak’s
posthumous love letter to the world, Kafka for kids, and more treats for all
ages.
“It
is an error … to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a
different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular
family, and of the human family at large,” J. R. R. Tolkien wrote in his superb
meditation on fantasy and why there’s no such thing as writing “for children,”
intimating that books able to captivate children’s imagination aren’t
“children’s books” but simply really good books. After the year’s best books in
psychology and philosophy, art and design, and history and biography, the
season’s subjective selection of best-of reading lists continue with the
loveliest “children’s” and picture-books of 2013. (Because the best children’s
books are, as Tolkien believes, always ones of timeless delight, do catch up on
the selections for 2012, 2011, and 2010.)
1.
ADVICE TO LITTLE GIRLS
In
1865, when he was only thirty, Mark Twain penned a playful short story
mischievously encouraging girls to think independently rather than blindly obey
rules and social mores. In the summer of 2011, I chanced upon and fell in love
with a lovely Italian edition of this little-known gem with
Victorian-scrapbook-inspired artwork by celebrated Russian-born children’s book
illustrator Vladimir Radunsky. I knew the book had to come to life in English,
so I partnered with the wonderful Claudia Zoe Bedrick of Brooklyn-based indie
publishing house Enchanted Lion, maker of extraordinarily beautiful
picture-books, and we spent the next two years bringing Advice to Little Girls
(public library) to life in America — a true labor-of-love project full of so
much delight for readers of all ages. (And how joyous to learn that it was also
selected among NPR’s best books of 2013!)
While
frolicsome in tone and full of wink, the story is colored with subtle hues of
grown-up philosophy on the human condition, exploring all the deft ways in which
we creatively rationalize our wrongdoing and reconcile the good and evil we
each embody.
Good little
girls ought not to make mouths at their teachers for every trifling offense.
This retaliation should only be resorted to under peculiarly aggravated
circumstances.
If at any
time you find it necessary to correct your brother, do not correct him with mud
— never, on any account, throw mud at him, because it will spoil his clothes.
It is better to scald him a little, for then you obtain desirable results. You
secure his immediate attention to the lessons you are inculcating, and at the
same time your hot water will have a tendency to move impurities from his
person, and possibly the skin, in spots.
2.
YOU ARE STARDUST
“Everyone
you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was … lived
there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” Carl Sagan famously marveled
in his poetic Pale Blue Dot monologue, titled after the iconic 1990 photograph
of Earth. The stardust metaphor for our interconnection with the cosmos soon
permeated popular culture and became a vehicle for the allure of space
exploration. There’s something at once incredibly empowering and incredibly
humbling in knowing that the flame in your fireplace came from the sun.
That’s
precisely the kind of cosmic awe environmental writer Elin Kelsey and
Toronto-based Korean artist Soyeon Kim seek to inspire in kids in You Are
Stardust (public library) — an exquisite picture-book that instills that
profound sense of connection with the natural world. Underpinning the narrative
is a bold sense of optimism — a refreshing antidote to the fear-appeal strategy
plaguing most environmental messages today.
But rather
than dry science trivia, the message is carried on the wings of poetic
admiration for these intricate relationships:
Be still.
Listen.
Like you,
the Earth breathes.
Your breath
is alive with the promise of flowers.
Each time
you blow a kiss to the world, you spread pollen that might grow to be a new
plant.
The book is
nonetheless grounded in real science. Kelsey notes:
3.
THE HOLE
The
Hole (public library) by artist Øyvind Torseter, one of Norway’s most
celebrated illustrators, tells the story of a lovable protagonist who wakes up
one day and discovers a mysterious hole in his apartment, which moves and seems
to have a mind of its own. Befuddled, he looks for its origin — in vain. He
packs it in a box and takes it to a lab, but still no explanation.
With
Torseter’s minimalist yet visually eloquent pen-and-digital line drawings,
vaguely reminiscent of Sir Quentin Blake and Tomi Ungerer yet decidedly
distinctive, the story is at once simple and profound, amusing and
philosophical, the sort of quiet meditation that gently, playfully tickles us
into existential inquiry.
What
makes the book especially magical is that a die-cut hole runs from the
wonderfully gritty cardboard cover through every page and all the way out
through the back cover — an especial delight for those of us who swoon over
masterpieces of die-cut whimsy. In every page, the hole is masterfully
incorporated into the visual narrative, adding an element of tactile delight
that only an analog book can afford.
4.
MY BROTHER’S BOOK
For
those of us who loved legendary children’s book author Maurice Sendak — famed
creator of wild things, little-known illustrator of velveteen rabbits,
infinitely warm heart, infinitely witty mind — his death in 2012 was one of the
year’s greatest heartaches. Now, half a century after his iconic Where The Wild
Things Are, comes My Brother’s Book (public library; UK) — a bittersweet
posthumous farewell to the world, illustrated in vibrant, dreamsome watercolors
and written in verse inspired by some of Sendak’s lifelong influences:
Shakespeare, Blake, Keats, and the music of Mozart. In fact, a foreword by
Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt reveals the book is based on the Bard’s
“A Winter’s Tale.”
It
tells the story of two brothers, Jack and Guy, torn asunder when a falling star
crashes onto Earth. Though on the surface about the beloved author’s own
brother Jack, who died 18 years ago, the story is also about the love of
Sendak’s life and his partner of fifty years, psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn, whose
prolonged illness and eventual loss in 2007 devastated Sendak
Indeed,
the theme of all-consuming love manifests viscerally in Sendak’s books.
Playwright Tony Kushner, a longtime close friend of Sendak’s and one of his
most heartfelt mourners, tells NPR:
5.
DOES MY GOLDFISH KNOW WHO I AM?
In
2012, I wrote about a lovely book titled Big Questions from Little People &
Simple Answers from Great Minds, in which some of today’s greatest scientists,
writers, and philosophers answer kids’ most urgent questions, deceptively
simple yet profound. It went on to become one of the year’s best books and
among readers’ favorites. A few months later, Gemma Elwin Harris, the editor
who had envisioned the project, reached out to invite me to participate in the
book’s 2013 edition by answering one randomly assigned question from a curious
child. Naturally, I was thrilled to do it, and honored to be a part of
something as heartening as Does My Goldfish Know Who I Am? (public library)
As
was the case with last year’s edition, more than half of the proceeds from the
book — which features illustrations by the wonderful Andy Smith — are being
donated to a children’s charity.
The
questions range from what the purpose of science is to why onions make us cry
to whether spiders can speak to why we blink when we sneeze. Psychologist and
broadcaster Claudia Hammond, who recently explained the fascinating science of
why time slows down when we’re afraid, speeds up as we age, and gets all warped
while we’re on vacation in one of the best psychology and philosophy books of
2013, answers the most frequently asked question by the surveyed children: Why
do we cry?
6.
LITTLE BOY BROWN
“I
didn’t feel alone in the Lonely Crowd,” young Italo Calvino wrote of his visit
to America, and it is frequently argued that hardly any place embodies the
“Lonely Crowd” better than New York, city of “avoid-eye-contact indifference of
the crowded subways.” That, perhaps, is what children’s book writer Isobel
Harris set out to both affirm and decondition in Little Boy Brown (public
library) — a magnificent ode to childhood and loneliness, easily the greatest
ode to childhood and loneliness ever written, illustrated by the famed
Hungarian-born French cartoonist and graphic designer André François.
Originally published in 1949, this timeless story that stirred the hearts of
generations has been newly resurrected by Enchanted Lion.
This
is the story of a four-year-old boy living with his well-to-do mother and
father in a Manhattan hotel, in which the elevator connects straight to the
subway tunnel below the building and plugs right into the heart of the city.
And yet Little Boy Brown, whose sole friends are the doormen and elevator
operators, feels woefully lonely — until, one day, his hotel chambermaid Hilda
invites him to visit her house outside the city, where he blossoms into a new
sense of belonging.
