Children's Book Week

Today is the first day of Children’s Book Week, a week in which the Children’s Book Council “encourages young people and their caregivers to discover the complexity of the world beyond their own experience through books.” Since the official focus of the week appears to be on reading, we'd class works about the week itself in 028.5 Reading and use of other information media by young people. Children’s books themselves are classed in the number appropriate for each work.

In honor of Children’s Book Week, the Dewey editors are sharing our favorite books from childhood. I’m still carrying around my childhood copy of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (the 1962 edition published by Lippincott with illustrations by Tasha Tudor).  It has survived many moves between and within several states and my own two children reading it. You can find various summaries on the web and I won’t repeat them here.  I just remember the feelings of mystery, empowerment, and hope that I felt reading it (and re-reading it many times). The Secret Garden is classed is 813.4 American fiction, 1861-1899.

Now over to Juli: My favorite children's books are the ones my mother read to my sister and me at bedtime when we were small.  Among those favorites are Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books, especially the Mowgli stories, about the man cub raised by wolves, and Rikki Tikki Tavi, the brave mongoose who killed poisonous snakes.  The stories are engaging, imaginative, and full of adventure. You'll find Jungle Books in 823.8 English fiction, 1837-1899.

Here’s Giles: My favorite children’s book is Arthur Ransome’s Swallows & Amazons, with variant title on some later editions Swallows and Amazons. (You can take the boy out of cataloguing, but you can't take cataloguing out of the boy.)  Arthur Ransome was born in Leeds, where I lived between the ages of 2 and 9. What I liked about this book was not only that the Walker children and the Blackett children had adventures relatively unsupervised by their understanding parents -- the Walkers' absent father sent a telegram saying "BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON'T DROWN" -- but that the girls were at least as adventurous and competent in adversity as the boys were.  This gender balance was rather unusual in books published back in the 1930s.  There were later titles in the series, generally with the same characters, and taking place in the Lake District, and it was adapted for TV in 1963 and into a film in 1974. The DDC number for Swallows & Amazons is 823.912 English fiction, 1900-1945.

Winton simply could not pick a favorite: I read a lot of books as a child, but I do not remember having a special book.  I read mainly science fiction (authors such as Andre Norton, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein) and fantasy (especially collections of fairy tales).

Comments

[Marisa James]

Delicious choices! Along the same lines, I'll add Lucy Maria Boston's lovely book "The Children of Green Knowe," as well as the rest of the books in the series. Amazingly, the house she wrote about was her own, in a tiny town near Cambridge, which was originally built a short time after the Norman conquest and expanded and renovated several times over the centuries. My guess is that it's also 823.912, but sadly, my local library lumped it in JFIC - Bos.

[Anne Wayman]

thanks for the reminder... with 4 grandkids I ought to remember this!

[virus classification]

The books are the smartest way of fun, you can learn & enjoy at the same time!!!!!!!