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Do I sound old and crazy when I talk about the declining quality of children’s books–available at our local libraries, at least?  We take out about 50-60 new library books every week.  Homeschooling is a part of it, but mostly we just read, a lot.  I have wondered whether or not I’m just experiencing the “getting old bias”: everything was better way back when.  But I think maybe I do have a point, based on my recent experience at the Florenceville book sale this past weekend.  I have mentioned before, that I do vet and cull the books that we end up taking home from the library.  And while some of my criteria include “appropriateness”, I am mostly curating based on quality, beauty, and whether or not the books we have at home involve the opportunity for real challenge, growth, a stretching of the intellect–yes, at 2 and 3 years old–and almost-33.  Horus is becoming acquainted with what he likes a lot:  Tintin, graphic novels, books on natural history, especially spiders and bats.  And all that goes into the book bag.  But Treva and Felix are somewhat less judicious…At the library, everyone reads what they want, and I go through the stacks, choosing most of the books that we will take home, and I have found that the ratio of books that I reject out of hand is much higher than it was, say, ten or even five years ago.  There is only one book I tend to want to read, for every 10 or 12 that I flip through.  My criteria for children’s fiction?  Literature, art, perspective, and some kind of immediately perceptible value…Lofty, yeah.   What do I not generally take home? Books that involve hideous graphics in lieu of pictures, paintings, or art as illustration; blatant moralizing; anything that *I* am not really drawn to, personally.  I will, after all, be sitting, immersed in this stuff for hours on end, and then in deep discussion about it afterwards.  And to clarify, I never stomp around saying “No!  that book is awful!!”  That part I keep to myself.  The kids sit reading, and I fill up our book bag, and they bring me books they’d like to read.  Sometimes, books are quietly and discreetly put back on the shelves before we check out, that’s all.  *Is* there a paucity of quality children’s books?  I don’t know, but I do sometimes feel as though we are exhausting our local library’s repertoire of high art in kid lit.  And I had also been feeling, lately, as though some of my favourite and most beloved books are less frequently available at our local libraries.

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And then we showed up at the book sale.  Downstairs, boxes and boxes of books, and in the centre of the room, the children’s section.   It was with a mixture of delight and horror that I came across piles and piles of, not just passable books, or ok books, but some of the very very best and most cherished picture books of my own childhood, as well as books that *we had checked out* many times, but which I hadn’t come across in a little while.  Books from authors like Kit Williams, Tomie DePaola, Helen Oxenbury, and Edna Miller.  Older books, but books in fine condition.  I took a couple of boxes on the first, day, not wanting to be excessive, or to deprive others from the treasures.  But when I went back two days later, I grabbed another couple of boxes of the books I had been eyeing earlier.  To be honest, it actually made me physically ill to see some of these absolutely gorgeous and precious books being sold off by donation, rather than kept in circulation for all families to enjoy.  Upstairs, there are heaps of the unbearable “Caillou”, and tons of uninteresting books with garish cartoonish computer-generated illustrations, whereas I picked up four “Mousekin” books by Edna Miller–frankly, a treasure.

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Edna Miller was born in 1920, and she wrote 14 books in the “Mousekin” series.  The “Mousekin” books do not look contemporary, it’s true.  These are painted with absolutely beautiful, lifelike watercolours, with simple, yet stunningly poetic text.  They are evocative non-fiction, or realistic fiction, following a mouse through the seasons of life and nature.  They are Real Art for children: lyrical, enthralling, accurate, and above all, respectful of the audience, which includes everyone.  I love reading these books, and I read them first to Horus when he was younger than a year old, and we have been sitting with them now, with 1.5 year old Felix, 3 year old Treva and Horus, now 5, in rapt attention.  We used to check these books out from the library, and now, bittersweetly, I own them.  I also found “I’ll Always Love You” by Hans Wilhelm, and “Badger’s Parting Gifts” by Susan Varley.  These two books are some of the very best books on death and dying for children that I have ever come across.  Again, well-used, but still in perfectly functional condition.  These are real stories that *I* feel enriched by.  These books are perfect examples of the ability of literature to teach and impart empathy. And in fact, it was just the other day that I was looking through the section of books on that somewhat challenging subject at the library, and finding only pedantic, frankly insulting “educational” stories, written for the heavy-handed purpose of “teaching” our children about death, while with their sad absence of substance or texture or poetry or narrative, doing no such thing.  I do think it’s all a bit scandalous, and tragic.

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Wow.  What a rant.  I am the child of two almost-obsessive collectors and readers.  I came back from my most recent trip to Vancouver with two duffle bags full of historical knives, statuettes of the Buddha and Krishna, and the very outer limit of what was allowable weight-wise on the flight, in the form of books from my dad’s house.  I love books, and their physical presence, and I love that our kids are growing up surrounded by them, with access to them.  I also love living with a piano, and it was such incredible fortune that I found a piano being given away for free in Fredericton.

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Thank you so much to our wonderful, wonderful friends, who dropped everything in Freddy, and again in Florenceville, to help us move a mid-sized ancient upright piano in our New Brunswick January.  I’m so thrilled to have a piano in the church again.  It is abominably out of tune, but all the keys play, and I couldn’t be happier.  The kids and cats have been banging away, and I feel safe.  I *love* that I have a piano, and I am so genuinely grateful to the former owner who just wanted to get rid of it…but I also feel anxiety about all the pianos in the world, as apparently decrepit pianos are not especially cherished.  Anyway.  Just my little effort to save the world from wholesale digitization.  It’ll all work out.  Happy playing & reading <3