You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Lover
By Tiffany Lewis

Some people are compulsive gamblers.  I am a compulsive reader.  I get distracted reading cereal boxes and junk mail.  Reader’s Digest and Time magazine are my guilty pleasures.  I have five books splayed open at the foot of my bed, from which I select my nighttime reading like a bedtime snack.  My kids have learned that if they want to get my attention while I’m reading, they either pull the book out of my hands or scream like a limb has been chopped off.

My children have inherited my insatiable appetite for books.  They devour books.  They value the written word so much that I sometimes have to remind them that if we actually eat the pages, we can’t read them again.  I’m still waiting for this to sink in.

My taste in literature is fairly snobby.  I like a good, well-written story.  Bad dialogue makes me cringe.  If a book is poorly written, I get distracted re-writing the entire plot in my head.

Unfortunately, kids don’t seem to have discretion when it comes to good and bad children’s literature.  I didn’t think there was such a discrepancy before I had children.  I thought all picture books were created equal.  What was the big deal with the Caldecott Award?  And why does everyone adore Dr. Seuss?

It didn’t take more than five times of slogging through What Made the Snowman Smile to realize the vast chasm between well-written children’s books and the rest of the literary muck available.  The bad stuff comes disguised in cute packaging featuring its own little carrying case.  The cuter and fuzzier the outside, the more abhorrent the writing within.  We own a series of books that look as if the pictures were drawn first; then someone decided to paste together a story around them, translated from Swahili.  I can’t bring myself to read the sentences out loud, so I re-write as I go, improving the punch line, cutting out superfluous detail, and giving it a snappy finish.

I also can’t bring myself to throw away books, no matter how bad, but I will hide them in obscure places.  Somehow my son always manages to unearth these tomes of terror.  A look of triumph always passes over his face as he holds the book up and declares, “Oh, do you remember this one.  We love this one!”  Then he insists we read it ten times over, so we can savor the scintillating story.

The re-written Disney movies rank up there as some of the most dreadful.  I usually finish these books wondering, “What off-hours animatronic parrot from the Tiki Room is writing this?”  I almost always conclude that I could probably have wild success publishing a story I wrote in second grade about Gupfunkel the snake.  Just stick a few glittery pictures on the page and a set of wheels to make it look like a truck, and I’m set.

After almost three years of bad children’s literature rolling around in my brain, I have infinite gratitude for the Caldecott Award, for Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle, Margaret Brown and Sandra Boynton.  They came to earth to bless parents everywhere who are stuck on the couch reading Goodnight Moon seventeen times in a row. That’s one I can still stomach, because I can search for the little mouse on every colored page. I love reading Fox in Socks as fast as I can. I quote from Dr. Seuss’s “ABC” book on a regular basis. After dinner I usher my “tired turtles from their tuttle-tuttle tree” up to bed.  I love the illustrations in the Caldecott winners, and also the multi-layered meaning behind the drawings in Officer Buckle and Gloria.

“Thank you,” I say silently to the author, “I know you put that in there just for me.”

I like to hope that my children will someday appreciate good books for more than their pictures.  Lately, my son has picked up on some of my re-writing techniques.  When we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, he inserts words as we go along.  “By the light of the moon,” I begin, “a little egg lay on a…”

“Sheaf!” he’ll shout out.

“Pajama Time” has become “Kakama Kime.”  I was beginning to think that I had a poetical genius on my hands until the other day, when I was singing “I Am a Child of God.”

“Has given me an earthly home…”

He interjected:  “—with parents kind and queer.”

Deep down, I would love for my children to be the next Ken Jennings, reading Little House on the Prairie at the age of three, so I could introduce my entire Newbery collection and open up a vast array of higher literature.  But reality tells me What Made the Snowman Smile is going to be around for a very long time.  Which means only one thing: I need to find a better hiding place.