Kids’ Favorite Books
Posted by Julia Einstein, Coordinator of Youth and Family Programs
Here’s a stack of my favorites books with my most favorite on top! Mostly because I love looking back at my first grade self. I remember this being my first book purchase–it was when the scholastics (or was it R.I.F.?) came to our classroom.
This week, in our Museum kids’ morning and after school program, Artsquad, we were inspired to look at the Kertész photographs through the lens of our “reading cameras”! Then, we took turns photographing each other in the act of reading.
Favorite Illustrated Children’s Books
Posted by Vanessa Nesvig Coordinator of Community Programs
On Saturday, November 8 at 10 a.m., we have two illustrators coming to the Museum, Wade Zahares and Matt Tavares. Both will be showing their incredible art work and talking about their styles and what influenced them as a child. It gets me thinking about the books I loved as a kid and those that had great illustrations.
The first ones that come to mind are the Babar books we had. The Story of Babar, Babar the King and The Travels of Babar were some of my favorites with their simple line drawings that had great charm and empathy. Similar to those were the Madeline books by Ludwig Bemelman. Still to this day, when doing pen and ink drawings I try to get feeling in the lines like those French stories. I always liked the ivy on the buildings, the way he drew them like w’s.
When my daughter was young, I would say the emphasis of my book collecting for her was the style of illustrations. Some of my favorites of hers were Kevin Hawke’s Lady Bugati, Christmas Trolls by Jan Brett with all their details, David Kirk’s Miss Spider books and my daughter’s favorite, very different and a little spooky, was David Christiana’s White Nineteens. It is fun to think of all the books we read and reread probably a thousand times.
What were your favorite illustrated books as a child? Hope to see you Saturday.
Your Favorite Books
Posted by Vanessa Nesvig, Coordinator of Community Programs
Friday night we hosted an evening where people could come and share with other book lovers some of their favorite books. A passionate group, everyone passed on what they have loved and people wrote down suggestions. An evening that could have gone on for hours!
Here are what some people brought in…
Cally brought in New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver, Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakn, and A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas. Susan mentioned A Feast of Love by Charles Baxter as one of her favorites. David brought in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, all three volumes, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, and Patrick O’Brien’s The Hundred Days. In our Education Department, people also brought in some books; Emma brought in The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant, Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, and Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg. Dana also brought in a Stegner, Angle of Repose, and Ian McEwan’s Atonement along with a favorite book of her mother’s, The Forsythe Saga by John Goldsworthy. Each person talked about how hard it was to pick just a few but it certainly got the conversation and memories flowing!
We’d love to hear more about your favorites, and what you are reading right now that is good.
Our Favorite Books
Posted by Vanessa Nesvig, Coordinator of Community Programs
In celebration of the André Kertész: On Reading exhibition we are hosting an evening of sharing our favorite books. So I thought I’d start thinking about what I have loved and why. In college I loved Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Far from the Madding Crowd, and all the Russians: Turgenev; Fathers and Sons, Gogol; Dead Souls, and of course, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Vanessa Bell by Frances Spaulding was very influential to me when I was a young adult, as I yearned to have a life like the Bloomsbury artists. I loved all things Bloomsbury then including Virginia Woolf’s works. Then I was obsessed with reading nature writers, and I especially loved Michael Pollan’s Second Nature and Woodswoman by Anne LaBastille. Many things I read now take place in other cultures, one of my most recent favorites was Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai and Empress Orchid by Anchee Min. What have been some of your favorite books?
Hope to see you Friday evening, October 17, when we will be able to see and talk about our favorites in the McLellan House parlor at 5:30 p.m. There will be refreshments too!
On Reading Online
Posted by Dana Baldwin, Peggy L. Osher Director of Education
Welcome to the first post on our new Museum Blog. To celebrate National Book Month in October, we’re blogging about our exhibition André Kertész: On Reading. Kertész was a master of modern street photography as you can see when you visit the show. The photographs are intimate views and stolen glimpses of people in the act of reading, wholly absorbed. They bring us together by eliciting a response to shared experience. They show private moments, but for those of us who love to read, the photographs illustrate a shared experience.
For many of us who love to read, there’s a special place in our memories for the book that turned us from people who read to Readers. The book that made you think, “Wow! Who knew? Books are really great–and time flies when you’re absorbed in a really terrific book!” I always read, but I wasn’t a complete convert until East of Eden. My husband calls the state of being when you’re completely lost in a book being in “deep book.” As in–”Don’t bother her. She’s in “deep book.’” I was so consumed by East of Eden (it’s still my favorite of all time) that when I got to the last words of the text, I closed the book and threw my head back and just started laughing. East of Eden made me a Reader. How about you? Add a comment, keep the conversation going, and share the book that made you fall in love with reading.
