What is your favorite children's book? Perhaps you appreciate it for its humor or wisdom, for the family memories it brings back, for its adorable or awe-inspiring illustrations, or for all that you learn in its pages. If you bring to mind many children's books you love, you will realize that they embrace joy and sorrow, facts and fantasy, friendship and loneliness, fear and courage — and the list goes on, because children's books bring together the polar strands of life. They introduce us to our own present and to people and lands far away. They bring together sight and sound, too, at the perfected intersection of art and literature. In all these ways and more, they are magic vehicles.
So we are delighted that a whole week each Spring is devoted to their appreciation. The 2019 theme — Read Now. Read Forever — ushers in the 100th anniversary of Children's Book Week. The longest-running initiative in the U.S., this week comes to us from Every Child a Reader, a non-profit devoted to to inspiring a love of reading in children and teens. Now is an especially good time to check out our hundreds of children's book reviews and find some new titles to introduce to the children in your life.
You can read more about Children's Book Week and this year's special events on this page from Publishers Weekly.
To Name This Day . . .
Quotes
There's virtually no end to the quotable quotes from children's books. We've gathered a variety from our recent reviews and from books now considered classics, and we hope you will pick one that you love to specially cherish this week.
“I don’t understand it any more than you do, but one thing I’ve learned is that you don’t have to understand things for them to be.”
— Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
“On the night you were born, the moon smiled with such wonder that the stars peeked in to see you and the night wind whispered, ‘Life will never be the same.’ ”
— Nancy Tillman, On the Night You Were Born
"A person's a person, no matter how small."
— Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears a Who
“Let the wild rumpus start!”
— Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
" 'I would ask you to remember only this one thing,' said Badger. 'The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memory. This is how people care for themselves. One day you will be good story-tellers. Never forget these obligations.' "
— Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel
“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”
— C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
"Numbing the pain for a while will only make it worse when you finally feel it."
— J. K. Rawlings, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
"if you were a firefly
and i was the dark
you'd call me everywhere
and i'd call you spark."
— Julie Fogliano and Loren Long, If I Was the Sunshine
"People stirred music into words and sang lullabies."
— Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, When God Gave Us Words
“Sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
"The Silence will come back, whenever you call it. Whenever you need it. Even in the midst of the Noise and its ruckus."
— Alison Hughes, The Silence Slips In
“Reading never wears me out.”
— Ian Falconer, Olivia
Spiritual Practice
This week, find out from a child in your life — or someone else close to you — what their favorite children's book is ... or what books, if they can't narrow down the list! Ask for one or two things they especially love about each book they mention. If possible, read that book or books out loud together.
