What will you read to your children? That question has been asked for centuries now. Conveniently, there are classics now, well established books that are perfect for children (a truly top 10 essential books will be a future post). So now the question becomes, how will you read to your children? Will you pull out a Kindle? Or an IPad, because it’s bigger? Or will you continue to pull out the wonderful books that are still lying around.
Of all the books that I read to Thomas, the one I am most established at is I Was So Mad. It’s one of the Little Critter books by Mercer Mayer. I have a particular way of reading it to him and I have read it a lot of other kids along the way now. I think I might have begun reading it when I still worked in child care back in the mid-90’s. Either way, it is one of our favorites. Thomas loves to hear it. I love to read it. (more…)
First Line: “Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it.”
Last Lines: “Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kid looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough.”
ML Edition: #357 (Rabbit, Run combined with The Poorhouse Fair – two dust jackets – 1965, 1969)
Acclaim: 2 Pulitzer Prizes, 2 National Books Critics Circle Awards, National Book Award, All-TIME Top 100 List, New York Times Best Work of Literature in the Past 25 Years (Runner-Up)
Note: Updike remains one of three authors to win the Pulitzer for Fiction twice (the others being Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner) and his two wins were for the last two Rabbit books; Rabbit is Rich is the only book to ever win the Pulitzer, National Book Award (when it was still the American Book Award) and National Book Critics Circle Award; the last two Rabbit books are 2 of only 7 books to win both the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Awards; Rabbit is Rich is one of only 4 books to win both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award
Film: Rabbit, Run – 1970 – nearly impossible to find
First Lines: “The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?”
Last Line: “The strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below.”
ML Edition: none
Film: 1988 (**** – #5 film of the year – dir. Philip Kaufman)
First Lines: ” ‘Hey, Mouse! Play us something,’ one of the mechanics called from the bar.”
Last Lines: “I want to. I really do. But I’d be fighting a dozen jinxes from the start, Mouse. Maybe I could. But I don’t think so. The only way to protect myself from the jinx, I guess, would be to abandon it before I finish the last”