The Art of Reading a Picture Book

REBECCA SCHULTZ: Apparently, picture book sales are down as parents are pushing chapter books on preschool-age children:

Publishers cite pressures from parents who are mindful of increasingly rigorous standardized testing in schools. “Parents are saying, ‘My kid doesn’t need books with pictures anymore,’” said Justin Chanda, the publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

This is sad for several reasons.

First, means-to-an-end education is always sad. If picture books are a mere stepping-stone – a road to chapter books and a way to learn how to read – then the delight that children take in them becomes secondary and skippable. After chapter books, presumably, comes something else, and the possibility of reading as an end in itself is continually postponed. Education becomes an uphill battle, whose final reward is abstract, untenable, and probably doesn’t exist. Meanwhile, “Goodnight moon, Goodnight cow jumping over the moon, Goodnight light, and the red balloon” loses its poetry.

Second, picture books are just better than children’s chapter books anyhow.

Chapter books are plot-driven and often serial; picture books, on the other hand, are a celebration of words, of images, and of objects. The Amazon.com list entitled “Chapter Books: Series Young Readers Will Love” recommends, for instance, the Magic Tree House series, the Boxcar Children, and Cam Jansen and the Mystery of the Babe Ruth Baseball. These are about adventures and mysteries, exciting things that happen to ordinary kids (or, in Cam’s case, extraordinary: she has a photographic memory). They make you want to find out what happens next: go on the next adventure, open the next gate. The writing is consistently pretty bad.

On the other hand, there is Goodnight Moon, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Brave Irene. These books are all pretty different from one another, but, in general, the emphasis is on lyricism, and on particular, arresting images: the moon, the light and the red balloon; a caterpillar egg on a leaf; Irene lugging a heavy box through snowy woods. You’re supposed to spend a lot of time on each page. You’re supposed to look at the shape of the words, tease out meaning by comparing the words to the pictures. These books teach ritual, they teach aesthetics, and they teach a kind of study that has to do with looking closely, celebrating particular moments, not rushing. They probably make your kid smarter in the end, anyhow, more likely to choose better chapter books when he turns five, or six or seven.

Recklessly Curious wishes you a Happy Halloween!