Our Family's Holiday Book Recap

Heidi and I just got back from a long holiday break, including three family xmases and a New Year's trip to Vegas (in which we learned that 8-month-old Silas could care less about the Bellagio's fountains, but he loves fireworks and trying to eat Keno tickets). Silas and his cousin got plenty of books, so I figured I'd share some of the highlights:

• Winter in White: A Mini Pop-up Treat: For my money, you can't beat The Night Before Christmas for yuletide Robert Sabuda pop-up madness, but my mom got Silas this smaller, more subtle Sabuda pop-up and it seems like just the right scale.
• Gallop: Why hasn't this been done before? The low-tech, zoetrope-like animations (patented as "Scanimations") in this stout little board/pop-up book are weirdly compelling. A horse, cat, turtle, eagle, etc., comes to life on each page--without batteries or a screen--looking much like primitive Muybridge animations. The effect is too subtle for Silas (who finds everything fascinating), but kids who are even a little older will appreciate the coolness. I'd think that Robert Sabuda would be kicking himself over not thinking of this first, but he's got an admiring blurb right there on the back cover.
• Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See?: I'm such a sucker for Eric Carle's illustration style, and this board book has fun rhymes and repetition, too. Plus, all the animals in this particular book are endangered, so you can have fun reading a loud while also feeling terrible about destroying the planet. (How much habitat did I destroy from buying yet another board book? I don't even want to think about it.)
• Moomin books: My comics-loving friends and my Finnish friends (okay, one Finnish friend) couldn't believe that we'd never heard of Moomin. Moomin "is, like, the Mickey Mouse of our country"--with, I now know, an amusement park and everything. I loved a clever and goofy die-cut kids' book with the Moomin characters called The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My, but grownups and older kids will get way more out of the popular and very fun comic strip, a densely idiosyncratic serial that's more like Barnaby or Krazy Kat than more current strips. It was originally published in English in the 1950s in the London Evening News and has been collected in nicely oversized hardbacks by Canadian comics publisher Drawn and Quarterly. I devoured volumes one and two.
• The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: This was the sleeper hit of Christmas, for Silas' almost 5-year-old cousin, and for me and his dad. It should be noted that this was from the library, because we couldn't find it anywhere--despite trying, since Silas' cousin carried it with him everywhere, even though the entire beat-up book was in black and white, and he couldn't read the entries. He just kept asking, "Who is this? Who is that?" And we'd tell him, "Oh, that's Kang the Conqueror. Let's see, he's, uh... from the 40th century. And... he traveled back in time to become a pharaoh." And so on, through hundreds (thousands?) of entries. This seemed like classic, mastery-of-arcane-knowledge boy reading--like the way I (and his dad, coincidentally) would read the Guinness Book of World Records cover to cover and back again growing up. We never did find the Marvel guide in print before Christmas, so he could have his own copy, but it looks like an updated edition is coming out this spring. (We got him another slightly age-inappropriate book instead, DK's Spider-Man Ultimate Guide, to feed his growing Spidey obsession. We got bonus points because it matched his pajamas.)
• Drawn to Enchant: This wasn't a gift for anyone but just a book that I was carrying around reading, which has a ton of amazing illustrations, images, and ephemera, from children's books going back well over a century. I wouldn't recommend the book to anyone who isn't particularly interested in kids' literature, but Slate (where I originally learned about it) has a great slideshow of the highlights, including my favorite, an early sketch of Gandalf and Bilbo by Maurice Sendak, from a book that was never produced:

--Paul