SEE ALSO: bath, not wanting to have a • hands, not wanting to wash your
bookworm, being a
FIND FICTIONAL FELLOW-OBSESSIVES
One minute all they want to do is play with their friends. The next their face has been replaced by the cover of an open book. Your previously sociable child has become a silent semi-presence, blind and deaf to the goings-on in the actual world. They walk to school without looking at their feet; they fork food into their mouth sight unseen; and when they come home, they’re a guided missile locked on their reading nook. Your child has been bitten by the bug.
But that doesn’t mean they’re not being social. Ensure they meet people of like mind in the books they read by scattering some of the titles in the following list in their path. Here they’ll find characters who, like them, devour books – and not just the words and the stories, but the paper they’re printed on. Here they’ll meet people who inhabit books, lose themselves in books, live through books and have their lives invaded by the characters in their books. Even as a bookworm they can be surrounded by soulmates. One day they will emerge from their chrysalis with new wings, enriched by their understanding of narrative, psychology and the world.
THE TEN BEST BOOKS ABOUT BOOKWORMS
boots, being too big for your
Children who think they are particularly wonderful inspire a mixture of admiration and horror. Their confidence will no doubt take them far, but one can’t help notice the disparity between the size of their ego and the size of, er, them. Basque author Bernardo Atxaga visits this idea in his story about the inflated Shola. When a well-travelled friend visits Shola’s human owner, Señor Grogó, and shares his tales of African kings and voracious wild animals, he leaves a book behind: The Lion, King of the Jungle. Shola laps it up, recognising herself in the description of the powerful, noble beasts who hunt for their food rather than suffer the indignity of being served ready-made mince (aromatic and alluring though mince is). Off Shola then heads to the jungle – er, park – to track down her next meal. Unfortunately all she finds is rotten food from the bins, a rather terrifying Burmese cat, and an impertinent duck. Slowly, she begins to see the truth for what it is and goes home to Señor Grogó, who, fortunately, has the mince still waiting. Valverde’s quirky line-and-watercolour drawings perfectly capture the contrast between Shola’s view of herself and the real her – a small and somewhat unimpressive white dog. Those with a bit of Shola in them will be nudged very gently into the appropriately sized boots.
SEE ALSO: bossiness • in charge, wanting to be • precociousness
bored, being
In these days of electronic devices – eagerly waiting to occupy the slightest unfilled moment – it’s rare to catch sight of a bored child wandering disconsolately from room to room, complaining to whoever will listen that ‘there isn’t anything to do’ and occasionally kicking the cat. In the circumstance that you find one, seize the opportunity to re-set expectations with the ultimate paean to making something out of nothing, Harold and the Purple Crayon.
It’s over half a century since Crockett Johnson’s onesie-clad toddler went for a walk in the moonlight and, realising there was no moon, drew one into existence. He draws the path he’s walking on and everything it leads him to – including, eventually, his room and his bed, when it’s time to go to sleep. The fetching shape of the toddler as he reaches up to the far corners of the page with his crayon pulls us ineluctably in; as does the fact that the crayon is presented as just an ordinary crayon. Bring this classic out for entertainment-challenged kids of all ages, together with pens and a pad of white paper – or, even better, a wall – and encourage them to invent what they will.
Older kids can graduate to Aaron Becker’s sumptuous graphic trilogy, beginning with Journey, which plays on the same idea. A little girl sits on the steps of her sepia-tinged house, fed up. We can see a man at a computer upstairs, a woman stirring something on the stove downstairs, and a sister lying on the sofa engaged with – you guessed it – a screen. When the little girl’s attempts to lure each of them out to play come to nothing, she drifts to her room and slumps on her bed. But then she notices a stick of crimson chalk . . .
The wood she finds through the door she draws on her wall is enchanting: lanterns swing from the branches and a river threads between the trunks. At the end of a dock, she draws a crimson boat that carries her downstream to a city full of spires and domes. Uniformed guards welcome her in with waving arms. Architectural complexities abound as we follow her across a raised canal, complete with locks, down which city-dwellers are propelled in Venetian-style gondolas, shaded by fringed parasols. Waterfalls cascade from great heights. When her canal ends, mid-air, it catches her out – but she quickly draws a hot-air balloon as she falls . . . The absence of words makes this picture book and its sequels gloriously untaxing for the irritable brain, while there’s enough detail in the watercolour fantasyscapes to warrant a careful poring-over of each page. A cure for boredom in itself, Becker’s work is also brilliant for launching kids into their own inner landscapes.
boring relatives, having
SEE: bored,