What I am reading to my kids, part 2

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
by Bill Martin, Jr.
Illustrations by Eric Carle

I have a great deal of fondness for Bill Martin's books. He didn't write many of them, and many parents probably find them repetitive and simplistic, even for toddler books. I find them deceptively simple. Each page is a repetition of the same two sentences, a question and then the answer, each involved a different animal in succession: "Brown bear, brown bear, what do yo see? I see a red bird looking at me." Then, "Red bird, red bird, what do you see? I see a..." and so on.

What makes it so deceptive, or to use a better word, mysterious, is that you don't really know what you're seeing at first as you read the book. The animals seem to be inhabiting different spaces, but then by the end they seem to be inhabiting the same space and are all connected by in a mysterious way that's revealed at the end. This sense is heightened by Carle's illustrations, the visual sibling to Martin's writing - simple, flat, unnaturally colorful, and always with a white background that places the animal that's being shown in a ethereal space. In some ways, Brown Bear is a toddler version of a mystery novel, because at it's most elemental, an adult version is discovering how all of the characters in the book fit together. That is probably what draws kids to it, and why it has done so for so many years.

The book was Martin's first, published in 1960, and he wrote it at the age of 44 after a career as an educator in Texas. The book was also Carle's first, asked to illustrate it by Martin after his career as a magazine artist.

What's the big mystery? As you get to the middle of the book, with the blue horse and the purple cat, you realize that these aren't real animals, and by the end it's revealed that they are children's drawings gathered together in a classroom. The educational part, beyond the teaching of language through repetition, is that the simple story grounded in the real world. There are many kids picture books these days that are without any sense of meaning that is significant to kids. They fall into two camps. The first are superficial stories, i.e. the bunny did this and the bunny did that without any sense of narrative. Others books of labelling stock photographs that are the equivalent of disjointed imagery of television, just naming and identifying without any emotional investment into what the pictures are really depicting. Brown Bear requires kids to think and put together the animals significance, rather than just having them there as a pretty picture.

My son is only one year old, and can't grasp this at this point, but it is one of his favorite books. Someday he will grasp the Brown Bear mystery, and I hope it will continue to be one of his favorite books until he outgrows it. For now, he likes to look at those mysterious pictures of blue horses and purple cats. My daughter loved the book as well, and at the end of the book, where all the animals are together on the same page, we would play a game of find and point to each animal.

The only problem is that we have the board book version, and for some reason the publisher saw fit to change the ending. The teacher at the end of the original version was definitely a man, but in the board book version, they turned him into a hermaphrodite. Or a cross-dresser, I can't tell which. The publisher thought it would be less controversial to not have the teacher fit a gender role is my guess. Why do we feel the need to not offend anyone - in a children's book, for Christ's sake! Who cares if the teacher isn't strictly defined as a man, just in case the child's actual teacher is a woman and so the kid won't get confused? If you don't want to cause controversy, stick with the stock photo books.

What I am reading to my kids, part 1

Title: The Berenstain Bears Get Their Kicks
by Stan and Jan Berenstain

This is one of a series of, I don't know, 5 million different Berenstain Bear books and I have to say I'm pretty indifferent to reading them. My wife hates them, she thinks they're very preachy, and I can see her point. Some of the books in the series are literally preachy, since they cover the topics of religion and God, but this one has a topic many people are religious about - soccer. Yes, a boring book about the world's most boring sport, soccer. Playing soccer is indeed more fun than watching it (unless there's a hooligan riot) but much of playing soccer is the equivalent of watching it. When you play it as a kid, and you get the passed the ball, you get determined to make a goal. You push and push that ball down the field, and kick it toward the goal and ... the goalie catches it. Then you repeat. And repeat. You get a lot of running in, so it is a good cardiovascular workout. I often see Latin American guys at the park playing soccer...excuse me, futbol...and it seems like the most fun they're having is in taunting and cursing each other while running around. You could well do that while hanging out on the corner, but it doesn't make much for an organized sport.

The plot of the book involves the "traditional" woodsbear Papa, who loves American sports like baseball and basketball, being incensed that his kids would like a sport like soccer. Eventually, when he sees that they've developed a level of skill at it, he starts to appreciate the sport and gives his kids the acceptance they crave. In other words, if he thought they sucked at it, he wouldn't be so approving of it. Nothing is more frustrating than having talentless children. If they had not been good at soccer, and not made their pee-wee teams, then Papa would have felt OK about forcing them to play baseball.

The Berenstain Bears series' biggest crime is that they are written like a car care manual. The illustrations are cute (yes, that is the best word to describe it) but don't seem to be 'illustrating' much because the books are so damn talky. This particular book is late in the series that they started publishing in the 1970s and this is from about ten years ago. You sense that there's a template the Berenstains are following, and there isn't much flair or creativity in their use of language. In the book's defense, they are designed for young readers so their language has to be simple. But does it have to be so joyless? Consider word choices like this; in one scene, Papa expresses his disdain in this sentence - "'Humph,' humphed Papa." Who writes like that? How about "Humph, snorted Papa" or even "Papa thought it silly." Something along those lines. Another example; when Papa sees the field where the soccer tryouts are being held, it's described as having kids kicking the soccer balls around with coaches and men "writing things down on clipboards." Really brings reading to life, doesn't it? Men writing things on clipboards? Wow, I have to go there. The men with clipboards, it turns out, are the team officials noting who's going to make the cut. Perhaps soccer isn't an exciting sport to represent, but the major turning point of the story here is the soccer tryouts and the posting of who made the team. That's it, that's the story of the book? How about some exciting goal scoring or butting the ball with the head? The thrill of competition? Believe it or not, the high point of the story is Papa Bear talking to the soccer league commissioner, a smirking guy in yellow sunglasses who looks like a meter maid in a sweater. "My kids made the team?" That's it. The high point of the story. No thrilling soccer game, no triumphant display of athletic prowess. Just soccer drills that impress one parent.

The Berenstain's try hard to discuss modern issues with their characters, but take everything so literally. Plus, it's hard to take their discussion of contemporary issues seriously when the missives or life lessons come out of the mouths of parents who look like Ma and Pa Kettle. Brother and Sister Bears' parents might as well be a mammy doll and a lawn jockey.

Assessment: Though I find reading this book a chore, my daughter loves it. I've seen her kick the ball around the yard, so maybe she's gearing up for a career in soccer. But she likes all of the Berenstain Bear books for some unfathomable reason. Perhaps it is their simplicity and lack of florid language. My daughter also likes to eat plain white tofu.

What I'm reading to my kids, the preamble.

Every night, I sit on the bed next to my daughter before she goes to bed and we have a storytime by flashlight. The flashlight was something I used to read by in bed when I was small, not because I was reading something I didn't want my parents seeing, but because I always had trouble going to sleep. So now, I use the same tactic with my own daughter who also has trouble getting to bed. I've always read to her, but a year ago she had a little trouble getting to sleep under the blare of the overhead light. Now we turn the lights off, turn on the flashlight, set a nice, quiet relaxing mood, and I read to my daughter while writhes on the bed and makes demands for milk or something to eat every two minutes.

This is going to be a periodic review of books that she has in her collection, and since we are frequent library visitors there is always a rotating slate of books to talk about. Kids books are....I don't want to make any general decrees about them, rather, I'll let each book speak for itself. Or...I'll give you a bleary-eyed opinion of the whimsy and overt crassness of each book. I don't know I want to do this, but I spend so much of my life reading them they have become a preoccupation.