Thank you, Maurice Sendak

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Yukari

I woke up to the news that Maurice Sendak has passed away.

I love children’s books and Sendak is definitely one of my very favourite authors, along with Dr. Seuss and Chris Van Allsburg. (Jumanzi, The Polar Express)

I have always loved Sendak’s illustrations. I tend to pick children’s books based on whether or not I like the pictures. I believe it’s an important part of what makes a good children’s book.

My 3 year-old and I read a lot and Where The Wild Things Are is of course our staple.

and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max

and he sailed off through night and day

and in and out of weeks

and almost over a year

to where the wild things are

Our other favourite is In The Night Kitchen. It’s a story of a boy, Mickey, who

fell through the dark, our of his clothes

past the moom & and his mama & papa sleeping tight

into the light of the night kitchen

It’s wonderfully weird and crazy. We love it. We often quote the book “Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter!” and laugh.

My own personal favourite is this little book called A Hole Is To Dig. It’s “A First Book Of First Definitions.” This is not written by Sendak, but by Ruth Krauss. Sendak did the illustration.

Dogs are to kiss people

Children are to love

A brother is to help you

Steps are to sit on

This little book is adorned by many lovely pictures of children by Sendak.

It’s easy to love his illustrations. It’s beautiful and imaginative. Many of his stories are so unique and unconventional — almost weird. But that’s what makes his books so special.

Thank you, Mr. Sendak for your amazing gift — Rest in peace.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Yukari

I have been meaning to write on Dr. Seuss. I swear. Seriously. Ask my boyfriend. The everyday busy-ness has prevented me from actually writing it, but after learning that it’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday today, I could not not do it today.

Sadly, I never grew up with Dr. Seuss. I’m from Japan. I started reading Dr. Seuss with my first born. He is 14 now, but I still have the same copy of Green Eggs and Ham, except now I read it with my younger son (3 year old).

Who doesn’t love Dr. Seuss? His books are just pure fun to read aloud.

When my toddler was born, a friend gave me this book – Your Favorite Seuss: A Baker’s Dozen by the One and Only Dr. Seuss.

It’s a collection of 13 of Dr. Seuss stories, including “And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street” “The Sneetches” etc…the stories are all wonderful as you know it, but what is equally wonderful is the introduction by Janet Schulman, who used to be Dr. Seuss’s editor at Random House. She writes how Dr. Seuss was known to everyone who knew him personally, as simply, “Ted”. I was fascinated to learn more about Ted Geisel, his life, his personality, and his humanity.

I particularly loved this anecdote :

“In spite of his ban to appearing on television, Ted did suffer through a good number of press interviews. One of the questions he frequently got was, “Where do you get your ideas?” At some point he concocted an answer and delivered it with deadpan sincerity: he got his ideas in Über Gletch, a small hamlet in the Swiss Apls, where he went each summer to get his cuckoo clock fixed. It annoyed Ted that many of these same journalists would describe his books as “whimsical.” Ted once said to me, “‘Whimsical’ means that the books say nothing. Look it up in the dictionary. It means capricious, without reason.””- Your Favorite Seuss: A Baker’s Dozen by the One and Only Dr. Seuss

Few months ago, I wad thrilled to purchase Dr. Seuss’s latest book;The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories. My friend Drew at Tall Tales Books (Awesome children’s bookstore) knew I liked Dr. Seuss, and he told me about this collection of “lost stories” by Dr. Seuss. (Top photo)

These are mostly stories that were published on magazines, and never made it to books. For this book, Introduction is written by Charles D. Cohen, the world’s formost Seuss scholar and collector of Seussiana(!), and the author of The Seuss, the Whole Seuss and Nothing But the Seuss: A Visual Biography of Theodor Seuss Geisel. Don’t you just love the title?

This book contains seven stories. My favourite story in this book is the titled one, The Bippolo Seed. A duck finds a magic seed that will grant you any wish, and he hopes to wish for a week’s worth of food, but a cat comes over asks, “Now why. Did you wish for just that?” ….just like many of Dr. Seuss stories, this has a moral background and in this case, it’s a warning about greed.

Cohen has many great stories about Dr. Seuss in this introduction, such as a fan whose mother used to read her “The Rabbit, the Bear, and the Zinniga-Zanniga” and when the magazine pages had worn to shreds, typed the story up to her…also about Dr. Seuss’s revelation to write books for children to be read aloud, after hearing a three-year-old boy reciting his book by heart. “Ted marveled, “I don’t wtite for kids that young…how does he do it?”” - The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories

I highly recommend you pick up this book.

It is so hard to pick just one favourite Seuss story. My top 3 favourites are:

-Horton Hears A Who!

(“A person’s a person, not matter how small.”)

-The Lorax (Classic Seuss)

(“I am Lolax, and I speak for the trees!”)

-Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

(“You’re off to Great Places! Today is your day!)

Celebrate Dr.Seuss’ birthday with reading his book with the little people in your life. Which one is your favourite?

Disclaimer: This is NOT a sponsored post. Nobody asked me to write this and I wrote this just because I love Dr. Seuss. However, the links are all Amazon affilite links. Just thought you should know that. BUT, if you are in Victoria, BC, you should just buy these books at Tall Tales Books.(Again, I’m saying this on my own discretion)

New category: Children’s Books

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Yukari

I LOVE children’s books. I have always liked reading, but I think my earliest memory with children’s books is actually when my youngest brother was around 3-4 years old. He is 10 years younger than I am, and probably because he was the baby of the family… my parents got him a big set of children’s books. It was a collection of “masterpieces” and I think “The Very Hungry Caterpillar(Japanese version)” was in it. He also had this awesome gigantic book you can spread open with various shops and people in town drawn in it. You can make a mock town with the book. I remember playing with it with my lil’ bro.

About 10 years ago, when my first born son was around 3 or 4, I was visiting my parents’ place in Sasebo. My mom is an notorious pack rat, and I was going through one of the closets to see if there’s anything worth taking back to Canada. There I found my brother’s book collection. At that time, my brother was probably just finishing high school and he had no interest in his childhood books. He’s not much of a reader anyway. I remember I was so excited to see those books and brought some back to Japan.

Since then, I had my second son and he is almost 3 now. To my delight, he loves reading. We read every night before bed, but it’s not uncommon for me to catch him pouring over his books alone or he brings me a book and ask me to read it for him. I have kept my little brother’s Japanese books and my older son’s books, so he has a pretty good collection now. Besides, we have Tall Tales Books, locally owned bookstore specializing in children’s books in just a walking distance from my house.

We love going to Tall Tales and I love chatting with the owner Drew (and sometimes his wife, Kate) about kids’ books. I have come to realize, for me, kids’ books need to have beautifully illustrated and has to have a good story to make the cut to be my favourite books. Drew is well aware of this, and he often makes good recommendations for me, which I really appreciate.

The reason why I love children’s books is probably because usually they are short and we can enjoy them again and again. And because they’re for children, you are almost forced to keep it simple, yet to create a good story.

I was just reading to my son tonight, (we read 5 books tonight) and since I love them so much I thought I should really write about them. I think I’d start a new category on my blog on “My favourite children’s books”. It would be my pleasure if you could learn about them and also give me your recommendations.

So, without further ado….the first book I’ll write about is one of the books I read tonight, “Something from nothing”

Something from Nothing

Written by Phoebe Gilman

“When Joseph was a baby, his grandfather made him a wonderful blanket…to keep him warm and cozy and to chase away bad dreams”

But as Joseph grows older, of course the blanket gets older too. His mom tells him “It is time to throw it out!”

But Joseph says “Grandpa can fix it!” and every time, his grandpa manages to make something from the old material.

It’s a story adapted by Jewish folktale. I remember first seeing this book at a friend’s house. I was intrigued by the title and soon got a copy for myself.

I love the detailed illustration. Each page is a portrait of people’s lives in Joseph’s village. There are also separate pictures of a mouse family underneath the texts. My toddler is still a little too young to notice them, but my older son loved following the mouse family’s story, too.

Repetition is the key in children’s books. There is this wonderful repetition part in this book that goes “”Hmm”, he said as scissors went snip, snip, snip and his needle flew in and out and in and out…”, where I made up a move to gesture the scissors and sewing with my hand, and my toddler loves that. We always do the movement together.

Some might say the story is a little predictable, but I absolutely love the ending. Still makes me smile every time I read it. If you haven’t read this yet I highly recommend it.

Recommended age: 3-8

Scholastic Canada Ltd.

ISBN: 0-590-74557-3