The Worst Children's Books Are The Ones You Make Up Yourself

Did you know that last week’s “How to Brush Your Baby’s Teeth” was The Chatner’s 1,000th post? (Although the most widely-read post on baby toothbrushing came back in September, after Rocco sprouted his first nubbin.) The first post, from March of 2017, was about my inability to appreciate Sondheim, a failure I am pleased to have subsequently corrected.

The most popular post, according to the Substack algorithm, is a paid post about Jane Austen’s Persuasion, but I’m inclined toward suspicion here, and think the second-most popular, 2019’s “I am the horrible goose that lives in the town” is the real winner. You don’t have to go read any of these posts, or do anything with this information. But a thousand posts in eight years – that is a period!

---

We’ve been reading a lot to the baby lately. Some of his favorites include Strega Nona, Curious George, the “Baby Go ____” series, Keith Haring’s Big, Dear Zoo, anything by Sandra Boynton, We’re Going On A Bear Hunt (a very good book about bears) and, regrettably, How To Talk Like A Bear (a very bad one). Usually I try to hide the books he likes that I don’t, so he won’t ask me to read them so often, but as I always use the same hiding space (behind my back, against the couch cushion) he pretty quickly figured out how to get around that strategy.

The baby’s worst reading habit, incidentally, is that lately he will thrust a book into my heads, demand I read it, then thrusts another over the top of that one before I am barely two pages in. Lily and Grace will patiently start reading the new book at once, but it drives me crazy. “We have to finish the other book first,” I say, like it’s a serving of vegetables. “We have to finish the narrative,” even if it’s just a book of pictures of boats.

I like a lot of children’s books, I ought to say, even the ones I’ve gotten tired of reading. There comes a point where you get tired of being tired of something, because you are called upon so ceaselessly to re-experience it, and you get to pass through the great veil of boredom into something entirely beyond it, like the cloud of unknowing. But to my mind, the worst ones include a lot of frantic denials like “It’s not bedtime” or “I am not who you think I am” or “This forest animal did not do XYZ.”

I don’t mind a certain element of wackiness, but forced zaniness puts my teeth on edge, and is often accompanied by very bad typographical choices. The baby already produces sufficient zaniness! Trust that he will bring the needed energy to the page himself.

It is frighteningly easy to begin to think of oneself as an expert after a year or two of reading aloud, of course. Yesterday, after reading Hop on Pop I could not help but imagine a Dr. Seuss book for our transsexual family:

Come hear the story of Lester McSlaughter

With a girl for a son and a son for a daughter

And last week I cracked myself up with the invention of a character called “Little Grandma Darling,” described in the style of James Whitcomb Riley:

Little Grandma Darling is as tiny as can be

as small as she is little — as little as she’s wee —

take the smallest thing you’ve got, then divide that thing by three;

little grandma darling is the size of nobody

little grandma darling stands at only two feet tall

her bedroom is a teacup — she got lost in our front hall —

if she ever gets much smaller then we won’t see her at all —

little grandma darling! there she scuttles up the wall!

little grandma darling swims across the kitchen sink

I hold her to the faucet when she says she’d like a drink

little grandma darling sleeps inside a robin’s wink

She’s smaller than she seems (but not as small as you might think!)

Feel free to describe her to your own children, if you’ve got any, and tell me if it captures their attention as successfully as, say, a few pictures of boats.