New York Times Parent's Guide to the Best Books for Children

This book is for people who care about honest-to-goodness children and who want to instill in them a love of reading. It is for adults who understand that reading is the key to the future--indeed, to the preservation of civilization--but who also read for their own entertainment and hope their children will, too. In other words, as I said a dozen years ago when the firstNew York Times Parent's Guide to the Best Books for Childrenwas finished, "This book is for the converted." That much hasn't changed, but a great deal else has. The youngsters I knew best back then are nearly all grown now, and within the breadth of their memories, the childhood experience changed as surely as it did when the radio and then television first entered the home. I wrote that edition on the first computer in our house, a large contraption that occupied the space of honor in the living room, just the way those other newfangled machines had in earlier times. The new world--for children as well as adults--is filled with batteries and magical electronics, with computers, cell phones, beepers, interactive activities and games, and elaborate merchandise tie-ins. It is also a world in which many American children lead far more restricted lives than their parents did. They move about less freely; they have less unstructured time; they are bombarded by commercial entertainment. One of the pleasures of being a parent--grand, god, surrogate, or just Mom and Dad--is helping to choose books. They are wonderful gifts. They cost more or less the same as old-fashioned (i.e. nonelectronic) toys, last much longer, and give boundless satisfaction. But the worlds of publishing and book buying and borrowing have also changed. Giant international conglomerates have swallowed up and eliminated many smaller imprints, though brave, independent publishers do still exist. (Indeed, there seem to be new ones each season.) For a time, there were hundreds of independent "children's only" bookstores in the United States. Now the chains so dominate that few of those specialty shops survive. The Internet offers endless goodies, only a click away. Libraries, hit hard by budget cutbacks during the early '90s, are regaining acquisition budgets, although as a nation we are not training or supporting enough librarians. And then there is Harry Potter. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the surprising success of J. K. Rowling's series of adventure fantasy novels about that orphan wizard. It has brought hundreds of thousands of adults--directly, not just vicariously--back to the pleasures of children's books. Curious about the phenomenon, they find themselves rediscovering the delight of a galloping adventure. Without sex or violence! Part of the sheer delight of the Potter phenomenon is that the focus was solely on the books, at least during the reign of the first four. Each reader or listener imagined it all. Each had an intense personal vision, for example, of what a game of quidditch, that sky-high broomstick game they play at the Hogwarts School, looked and sounded like. Chris Van Allsburg said in his 1982 Caldecott Medal speech that children give a book "life" by understanding it, that they can "possess a book in a way they can never possess a video game, a TV show, or a Darth Vader doll." He was, is, right. As an insightful eleven-year-old toldThe New York Times: "You know how they make books and movies for TV? I've read the books, and my mom would get the video. I've noticed that every single time the book is better than the video." It is a variation on the mantra I taught my own children: the book is always better than the movie. Of course, as Katherine Paterson, the Newbery Medal winner, has pointed out, "If we prescribe books as medicine, our children have a perfect right to refuse the nasty-tasting spoon." Use this guide to choose booksLipson, Eden Ross is the author of 'New York Times Parent's Guide to the Best Books for Children', published 2000 under ISBN 9780812930184 and ISBN 0812930185.