The kids got tagged
Jun 20, 2005 Parenting, The Story of My Life
kayoz tagged my kids with the book meme that’s been going around. I’m answering only for the children’s books in the house.
Total number of childrens’ books owned:
Hard to say how many picture books we own because they’re such funny sizes. Generally I figure one shelf of books in the shelves upstairs is about 50 grown-up books, give or take. But picture books are so much skinnier so it’s about twice that. So I’d say we have approximately 500 picture books. We probably have more chapter books than picture books so I’ll say 600 but really I have no idea. I need to cull through the picture books but even though we have so many, when we take ‘em out and look at them individually, they all seem important on their own.
The last children’s book we bought:
We buy most of our books from library sales and thrift shops. Noah recently bought a new Garfield book. I just got a Jerry Spinelli book that we hadn’t had in our collection (Crash — it’s excellent). The last new-to-her book that Madison got was a DK one of opposites.
The last book we read:
Noah reads his Calvin & Hobbes books over and over again so I’m thinking the last one he read was one of those. Madison’s favorite board book of the moment is a Mother Goose one by Lucy Cousins. The last night-time book that Noah and I read was “Over Sea, Under Stone” by Susan Cooper.
Five books that mean a lot to us:
Hmmm. I’m not sure how to answer that. I’m going to have Noah name his five favorite books:
1. My Father’s Dragon
2. The Narnia books
3. A Little Princess
4. The Little Prince
5. any Henry Huggins books
And he wants to add a shout out to “Over Sea, Under Stone.” We tried reading “The Dark is Rising” but stalled out; it’s just not hitting him like that first one in the series although this one is my absolute favorite.
June 20th, 2005 at 12:37 pm
Re: The Dark is Rising series… did you just try The Dark is Rising, or did you maybe try skipping to Greenwitch? That one has Simon, Jane and Barney in it again (as does Silver on the Tree, the last in the series, but that one gets a little more surreal than the others). These were my absolute favorite books for a while when I was eight or nine, and I recently reread them because a local school had their kids read The Dark is Rising, and so now the kids are coming into the library wanting to read the rest of them.
Susan Cooper also wrote a really neat book about a young Shakespearean actor getting sent back in time who ends up working with Shakespeare. The title is escaping me, but I could probably find it.
I also have to give Noah a big yay for liking A Little Princess. That’s one of my favorites.
June 20th, 2005 at 2:12 pm
A Little Princess was one of my favorites too– the edition I had was a hardback that came paired with The Secret Garden, another favorite of mine.
June 21st, 2005 at 12:28 pm
We have a lot of picture books, too, and it’s amazing how they would each be missed if they disappeared (and are, when they walk to strange places, like behind the couch).
But, a followup question is how many picture books did you have as a child? I’m a weird case, ’cause I was 6 when I came to the US, but I probably had about 10 picture books, compared to my daughter & son’s 100s.
bj