Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day

My favorite local bookstore, Wild Rumpus is participating in Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day. If you live in the Twin Cities, you must check this place out, they have cats and chickens that roam the store while you shop!

Tomorrow (Dec.3rd) is the 2nd annual Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day, have you heard about it? It's purpose is to not only support independent booksellers, but to give children the opportunity to spend time in a bookstore around the holidays. It's so easy to shop online, something I am very guilty of! But the experience of browsing through the shelves and hand selecting titles is so special.

I honestly wish that we didn't even need to have a specific day to reinforce the importance of this kind of experience, every day should be bookstore day! But it's nice to have a yearly reminder, especially around the holidays.

Will you be taking the child/children in your life to a bookstore tomorrow? If you are interested, this website has a list of the participating bookstores through out the country.

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Rooster, Owl, and a Little Chicken

Beth is right about how being scared is a matter of perspective, age, and experience. While I was perusing picture books at Wild Rumpus, I was followed by a very curious, and persistent, bantam rooster. I remember being terrified as a child by these creatures when I visited my Great-Uncle Maynard’s farm in southern Minnesota. Of course, now that I have grown taller since then, roosters (or chickens) no longer frighten me, although they still creep me out.

I sat down in an overstuffed chair at the shop, with my arms full of books. The rooster followed. It stood a few feet away and stared at me. Clucking. It could probably smell my fear. (Can poultry smell?) In any case, I tried to distract myself by picking up a paperback reader from a nearby spinner rack. It was Arnold Lobel’s Owl at Home. It was written over 30 years ago, but it was still compelling. Lobel’s stories are simple, appropriate, intriguing, and never condescending. They even have touches of true poetic beauty. I thought of the new Stone Arch Book reader sets we had completed this season, and the impact they will have on our youngest readers. Hopefully, the stories we tell will stay with a child long after they’ve grown and moved on to chapter books and graphic novels. After they’ve outgrown their fears, too. Like beady-eyed roosters.

What's scary?

Michael touched on scariness with his post last week, and I was thinking about it again yesterday while a bunch of us were at Wild Rumpus (a great Minneapolis children's bookstore). They have a special spooky cottage toward the back of the store, where all of the scary books are kept--I spotted the Twilight books, There's a Monster at the End of This Book, and The Graveyard Book, among many others. If you look down while you're standing in the spooky cottage, you can see the store rats through a special clear floorboard. It's a really cool place--perfect for raising some goosebumps while you look for that great scary book.

While my colleagues and I were perusing the shelves, I noticed a little girl standing with us--I think she was probably about four. She seemed perfectly comfortable with the books themselves, but when she looked up and realized that she was surrounded by grown-ups--none of whom were her mother--she started to cry. I helped her find her mom and little brother, and she seemed to be relatively untraumatized, but it got me thinking--for a little kid, so many different things can be scary, and not all of them are the ones we grown-ups expect them to be. Some things--like scary books--aren't scary at all; they're exciting. But looking up and seeing a bunch of strange grown-ups (all of whom, I might add, are on the bookish-nerdy-quiet end of the spectrum)? Nightmare.