Many of our favorite children’s books end up at our house after I see them on the internet and decide to have our local indie bookstore order them for us. I try to support my favorite bookstore because it’s the sort of place that will hunt and hunt and hunt all over until they locate the perfect fat Henry Darger book and where it might live in the world (and exactly how it can come live with me).

The thing about the books you read to your children is that the more the book appeals to you, the less onerous the task of reading aloud is. I know–reading aloud to your wee bairns is a fantastically fun task and you never read with one eye on the clock worried about the precious moments of time its eating up. You are a better person than I am. But, the more I like the book (or three) we’re reading right then, the better I am at reading it with great joy. The more joy my children get from me, the more they want to read and write and make fun, silly books of their own. Hunt down books that make you happy to read them.

Everyone at my house adores Oliver Jeffers. The man is a genius. The Incredible Book-Eating Boy is a masterpiece of collage artwork and simplicity and the story is hysterical. The page near the beginning when our protagonist , Henry, accidentally licks a book instead of his popsicle because he’s looking away from his food and instead at his cat making a stinky poo on the floor? HYSTERICAL. Even the littlest kid can tell that the poo is especially stinky, too. There are wavy stink lines radiating from the poop. Radiating stink lines mean seriously stinky stuff.

Later in the book, when our hero has eaten way too many books, he begins to go green, Greener, GREENEST, when: BORK! (The Irish word for “barf.”) At my house, we all like to make a very loud vomiting noise. We are successful at this and we know it because one or both of the dogs always goes running from the room.

We have all of Jeffers’ books and we give them as gifts, either in stacks (to those we love) or singly (to those we love but are not related to by blood or marriage). If you want a first taste of Jeffers’ work, I suggest you dive in with The Incredible Book-Eating Boy. Pay special attention to the back cover. (I love a publishing company whose designers go out of their way to make a book reflect the work. Love.)

P.S.: In blog-related business, I changed up my list of links to include blogs I look at nearly every day. In fact, I even logged into google whatever yesterday and put these blogs into my google reader. Before yesterday, I didn’t know what google reader was. I am learning Deeply Important Internet Things.