In the past month, the question I was asked most often when meeting with friends was, “What are you reading?”  Well, not what am “I” reading, but what am I reading to the girls.  I don’t need to ask you what you are reading.  You are apparently reading The Hunger Games. I made it to Page 9, and am trying to decide if I should go forward, and face months of bad dreams, or quit while I’m only moderately disturbed.  Is it good?  Oh yes, even in just a few pages, I’d say it’s awesome.  Do I have the kind of psyche that can handle these kinds of books?  Let’s just say I’m not yet over The Lovely Bones.  And I’ll never forgive Dennis Lehane for Mystic River.  Greg really wants me to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which moves at a pace so defiant of time, I’ll have to live another 3 lifetimes to finish it. If I do read it, Greg will never be allowed to call me verbose again.

After the whole “Lori’s starting a Tale of Despereaux” fan club, we went back to our normally scheduled programming of The Fudge Series, Rainbow Fairy Books, and The Boxcar Children.  Through an assignment in Sara’s class, we discovered an amazing book titled The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. Every page is an engrossing black and white picture, almost as if it were a photograph, with only one, cryptic sentence, leaving you in utter suspense.  Therefore, it is your job to finish the story.  Sara completed one about a nun, suspended in mid-air in a Cathedral with a group of Bishops staring up at her.  It began, “And the fifth chair ended up in France”.  Quite fun.  I like to pull this book off the shelf and let them pick a page and tell me a tale.  Kelly’s all begin, follow, and end A LOT like Disney fairy tales, but you gotta start somewhere.

Our newest picture books are by Matthew McElligott.  He visited the girls’ school, and they are huge fans.  Sara’s favorite is Bean Thirteen, and Kelly’s is Absolutely Not. So she says.  When given the chance to pick a book, she had to have Backbeard and the Birthday Suit. Personally, I love Even Monsters Need Haircuts, and I might just buy it for myself. I sent Mr. McElligott a fan letter on the girls behalf, and he wrote back the loveliest response.  When should kids outgrow picture books?  NEVER.  The answer is never.

But the top of my list?  The chapter book that held me spell bound and left me weeping in bittersweet joy at the conclusion?  Another by Kate DiCamillo of course, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. She writes as a painter paints.  The images in your head will be of nothing you’ve ever thought before.  No place you’ve ever been, yet through the entirety of the book, you are just so very there. This is the journey of a very vain, 3 foot tall china rabbit, commissioned to be made for a little girl as a gift from her grandmother.  The rabbit wears fine silk clothes and a pocket watch.  The entire tale is told by him, yet he cannot move a limb on his own, nor close his painted eyes.  He is lost overboard on a trip to England, and the book follows the story is his life as he moves, almost serendipitously, from owner to owner.  He doesn’t love anyone as the story begins (except perhaps himself, but even that felling is reflected as only a hubris-tinged vanity), and the book is a lesson about learning love through hardship.  It’s unusual and gripping.  The chapters clip along at only a few pages at a time, so quite good with a 4 year old in our midst, but we could never stop at 1 chapter.  Every night…we just had.to.go.on.

I hope you are knee deep in a great read too!  Tell me all about it!