Grant’s List of Children’s Books

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

I was raised in a house where reading was considered doing nothing. You’d be reading a book and somebody would say, “You’re not doing anything, come help me with this.” I’m like, no, I’m reading. This is a thing, yeah?

Yeah.

And books weren’t a priority in my house. We had just a handful, an old encyclopedia set, I think Anne Goodman’s Sun Signs or whatever her name was. You read Little House on the Prairie, I remember that. I read all my sister’s books, but the books that we actually owned were few.

My wife and I, however, we are both big readers. And despite having it kind of ignored while I was a kid, our house is an explosion of books. We read all the time. And we love to read paper books because we want to demonstrate to our son that reading is a thing. So he totally loves books.

And what I’m starting to find in his reading and the things that we’re checking out from the library for him and the stuff that we’re buying him because we’ll go to thrift stores and used book sales, just any place that we can find books very inexpensively, I find that he’s attracted to a certain type of character. And you won’t be surprised to find that the kind of character he likes in his books is the character that’s just like him. Only a little better. A little bolder, a little smarter, a little braver. Maybe a little more style.

He likes, for example, he likes Yatsuba. Yatsuba is a Japanese manga character. She’s five or six, depending which book you read. She has green hair with four sprigs sticking out, kind of four ponytails. Yatsuba means four leaf in Japanese. And she lives with her adopted dad in Japan. And there’s a whole cast of neighbor characters, her dad’s friends. And she encounters life with a kind of enthusiasm that most of us have missed since we were five or six, where we had the chance to see things with fresh eyes, to love, for example, just seeing cows and thinking seeing a cow was an amazing thing.

And so Yatsuba, we are now working, I think, on our eighth book. So these are Japanese manga books. You start from the back and you read right to left. But everything has been translated into English. And he loves her because she’s funny and cute and a lot like him.

Cool.

Yeah.

And there are more, I mean, of course, we could talk about Pippi Longstocking. She’s a great character. We could also talk about Encyclopedia Brown, who’s a little older than my son, but he’s a detective. He is respected by his father, which my son likes to see in the book. I mean, I respect my son, but he’s looking for models of behavior. And he’s understanding that Encyclopedia is not only respected by his father, but trusted by the people around him.

Right.

And I love the fact that he likes Sally Kimball, Encyclopedia Brown’s tough, attractive female friend, right?

So there’s another female character he likes as well.

And this may be the most interesting of the bus. I mean, I love Yatsuba. I think she’s cute and funny. And this is Franny K. Stein. Do you know Franny K. Stein?

No, I don’t.

Does that sound like a word to you?

Oh, yes.

Does it sound a little like Frankenstein?

Yes, I’m picturing what she must look like. Yeah, Frannie K. Stein is a really interesting character. She makes creepy, weird inventions in her attic laboratory. She makes strange machines that transform people. She makes things that require lightning and electricity. And she has problems with the way the world works. Everybody else thinks things are cute. She might think they’re disgusting. She makes something and brings it for show and tell. Everybody is afraid of it. And so she has this kind of discrepancy about the way she sees the world and the way she feels that she’s being treated.

The book is funny on one level, right? But on another level, this is what my son sees in these books. He feels misunderstood. He is the least powerful person that he knows in his world. He doesn’t, of course, realize that all of his classmates in kindergarten are also not very powerful. And so through Franny K. Stein, he can see that somebody else is having this difficulty of not being believed or not being trusted or not being admired for the things that they think are awesome and nobody else buys into. And then she overcomes them.

She does, yeah. So the Franny K. Stein books written by Jim Benton are really instructive for us. Plus, of course, she makes wicked inventions, just amazing, funny stuff that you would never think of. And that’s fun, too. The Yatsuba books are written by Kiyohiko Azuma, A-Z-U-M-A. We’ll share a link to that. We’ll talk about Franny K. Stein. And I’ll throw some other things in there as well.

He loves Calvin and Hobbes. And he loves the Captain Underpants books. I want to hear your books that I should be reading to my son. He’s six, just so you know. And I think he’s kind of bright. So just tell me if you’ve got any books for a kid like that. 877-929-9673. Or email us, words@waywordradio.org. I think I’m going to try to put together a big list. So your recommendations will go on my list. All right?

Very cool. You can put them on Facebook and Twitter, too.

Yeah.