Finally today, Martha and Grant talk about two books they love to recommend as gifts: Idiom’s Delight by Suzanne Brock, and Karma Wilson’s book for children, Bear Snores On, illustrated by Jane Chapman. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Grant and Martha Recommend Books”
These days I’m often asked what books I recommend to give as gifts, and there’s one on my shelf that I keep giving over and over and over again, and that book is Idioms Delight.
It’s by Suzanne Brock, and it’s a book that gives you a little bit of different perspective on ideas.
For example, we say it’s raining cats and dogs. In Spain, it comes down in jugs. In French, it comes down in ropes. And there are lots of wonderful idioms. Like in Spanish, there’s one that translates as even if you dress a monkey in silk, it’s still a monkey. Does that sound sort of familiar when you think of lipstick on a pig? Sure. Yeah. Sure, absolutely.
And the book is Idiom’s Delight by? Suzanne Brock. Suzanne Brock. Sounds like a delight. Yeah, yeah. You have to dig around on the Internet to find it. I’m not sure it’s in those brick-and-mortar bookstores anymore. But again, I can get my hands on it on the Internet, and I highly recommend it.
Well, I get asked that question all the time, too. What books would I recommend? What do I buy somebody? And you know what I’ve started recommending since I became a father is children’s books. Oh, yeah. Because if you go to the store, there’s a wide variety of books. And you’re kind of at sea there if you’ve never bought children’s books before. You’re not quite sure what’s going to work for the kid. You think anything with colorful pictures might do or if it’s got bright lights in it or sparkly pages or something. That’s just – it’s not the case.
The kids like the same things, fortunately, that we like because you read them so often that you tend to memorize the whole thing without really trying, you know? Sure. So what do you recommend? My favorite books to read to my son are the ones written by Karma Wilson and illustrated by Jane Chapman. The first one that we read, and still the favorite one, is Bear Snores On.
Bear Snores On? Mm— It’s about a bear and his woodland friends. Can I read some of it to you? Please. All right. Here’s a little bit of the beginning. In a cave in the woods in his deep, dark lair, through the long, cold winter, sleeps a great brown bear. Cuddled in a heap, with his eyes shut tight, he sleeps through the day, he sleeps through the night. The cold winds howl, and the night sounds growl, but the bear snores on. And it goes on like this.
I love that. It’s not too difficult. It’s easy on the eyes and the brain. The pictures are beautiful. And the story is both simple and complex. That is, there’s enough there for the youngest child to get engaged with, and then a child that’s a couple years older will still be engaged. And the poetry, and it is poetry, is sophisticated. It’s got a careful use of alliteration and clever compounding.
I’m going to read you one more stanza. This is actually the next stanza. An itty-bitty mouse pitter-pat tiptoe creep crawls in the cave from the fluff-cold snow. See what she did there? Pitter-pat tiptoe creep crawls. I love that. She turned creep crawls into a compound verb, right? She made something new there, and it works. It works because of the alliteration, because that is what a mouse does when it comes in from the snow.
And all of the books written by Karma Wilson are like this. That’s a wonderfully musical book. I wasn’t thinking so much about the compound verb, but the tippy-toe, tap-tap, and the rhythm of it is very musical, too. Yeah. Did you notice when I said the night sounds growl that I growled at growl? Yeah. The book lends itself to that. The book lends itself to she chooses the right verbs and she chooses the right adjectives so that she leads your voice where it needs to go in order to make the story more interesting.
So there’s a whole cult of these books. What are they called again? They’re all about bear. She has some others that aren’t about bear, but there’s bear wants more and bear feels scared. There’s five or six of these. The author is Karma Wilson and the illustrator is Jane Chapman. I highly recommend them. They have them in big books, chapter books kind of, and then small little board books. Nice. Yeah, good stuff.
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