Children's Book Week

It's Children's Book week. Children’s Book Week was started way back in 1919 (the year my mother was born). It was considered a way to honor teachers, librarians, authors, and parents who all play a part in placing a book into a child’s hands.

According to the Children’s Book Council,

A celebration of the written word, Children's Book Week introduces young people to new authors and ideas in schools, libraries, homes and bookstores. Through Children's Book Week, the Children's Book Council encourages young people and their caregivers to discover the complexity of the world beyond their own experience through books.

BlogHer is celebrating all month long with a campaign called Books Make a Difference! From May 3 to May 28th, BlogHer is teaming up with the nonprofit organization First Book and BookRenter. With your help, they will be donating a book that will be donated to a child in need. Go here to see how you can help! All you really need to do is to make a comment on the entry about books that impacted your life. Takes hardly any time at all.

I don't remember the first book I read or when I read a lot of books that I read as a child. I was ten years old before we had a television, and our TV watching time was limited, so for most of my childhood books were my escape into a better world, a fantasy world.

Not surprisingly, most of the books I read throughout grammar school were about animals. I was animal crazy and desperately wanted a pet, but my sister was allergic to animal fur, and we didn't know about animals that might possibly be acceptable for an allergic child. So I immersed myself in books about dogs, anything from "Lassie Come Home" to the Albert Payson Terhune books, to "White Fang," to "Old Yeller." If it had a tail that wagged and somebody wrote a book about it, I probably read it. I dreamed about "my dog," and how inseparable we would be, how well I'd train him/her and how famous we would become.

I also wanted to learn horseback riding, but in San Francisco, that was an activity for the very rich, so instead of learning to ride, I gobbled up books about horses -- all the Black Stallion books and any other book by Walter Farley (later in life, I would get hooked on the mysteries of Dick Francis). Dorothy Lyons' books were all about girls and their horses and I named my blue bike "Midnight Moon" after one of Lyons' books, though my favorite of her books was "Dark Sunshine," about a blind girl and her horse. I still remember vividly the scene of Flicka trying to give birth to her son, Thunderhead, on a stormy night while the stubborn foal fought to stay in his warm womb home.

And there were other animals too, like Bambi.

But as I got older, my interests broadened. I still read animal books (still do!) but there was first the Bobbsey Twins and The Five Little Peppers And How They Grew. Oddly, I never read the Little House books (though Jeri did), and then as I got older there were the careerbooks, the Sue Barton and Cherry Ames books about nurses, and a series of fiction books about all sorts of careers for women. At one time I thought I'd love to be a survey taker.

Whenever I got sick and was in bed for a couple of days, my mother would go to the library and bring home books for me. She presented me with Kipling's "Kim," which had been her favorite book as a child. I desperately wanted to love it the way she did, but it just never grabbed me. I still have never read it.

My chidren didn't all become readers. Jeri did and David did, but Ned, Paul and Tom were more TV kids. I wanted Jeri to love the books that I did when I was a child, but, like my experience with "Kim," she chose her own books. I was just glad that she enjoyed reading. I'm also thrilled that Laurel is such a book reader and that Brianna already has a fairly good sized library of books.

I can't imagine a world without books. If Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" were to come to pass, I'd be one of those "book people," living in the woods, passing along the text of my favorite book to one of the younger people. I would probably choose "Marjorie Morningstar" as my book to memorize, since I just loved that book as an adolescent and read it whenever I was feeling needy.

Now I have books and e-books (Kindle type) and audio books. I find that I'm filling my Kindle app with as many books I probably won't have time to read as I have filled my house with books that I probably won't have time to read.

I am glad that there is an organization out there that is working to get books into the hands of children. I hope that lots of people go to the BlogHer site and participate and help get a book into the hands of a child.