Books Books Books

We go through an average of 8 books per child per week. Mostly thanks to the local public library.

As usual the books are spread on the living room carpet and the house looks like some trinket store on North Mada street in Mylapore during off season where the store owner spreads everything too thin to make it look like he has many items.

An inventory of sorts is done by the kids (mostly the little one) to verify that all books that she picked were indeed checked out! Then the books are all put back in the bag and are brought out in the order in which they were prioritized. Top seeded books come out first!




Keep telling myself to write reviews for some fantastic books that come our way and some books that are really not tasteful for 5 or 8 year olds that end up in that section of the library or at least drop a short note in the blog about the books.

Never seem to take that note to self very seriously...

These two are so good that they need a mention.

The first one is "Miss Nelson is Missing". A fantastic book (which also happened to be the play that the little one got to see as part of her school Kinder field trip). She can read the entire book (has probably memorized it by now).

The funny thing about this book was that it was part of the blue book project for Jr. two years ago! However Jr. never understood the surprise in the book, or forgot about it. She had a "oh.. so that is what happened" light bulb moment last week on doing a second read.

The second book is "Sometimes I like to curl up in a ball". This is a rhyme or "intro to poetry" book that is very well written and beautifully illustrated. The wombat is incredibly cute and both Jr. and the little one love this book.




There should be a service (maybe it exists already?) where all books for kids get two questions..

a. how old is your kid?
b. on a scale of 1-10, how does your kid rate the book?

with that info we can figure out the ideal age group that loves the book and how much that age group loves that book on a scale of 1-10..

On a similar thought blockbuster/netflix etc.. have a rating scheme for movies. If only they had the age demographic to go with it we can go straight to

"movies rated by people in your age group" ranked by number of stars... that way the movies favorited by young teens won't be recommended to me strongly by Blockbuster!


As usual, I digress for purely selfish reasons.

These two books are great for 5-8 year olds. Now that is a wide spectrum these days considering 3 years is a big gap in that age group when it comes to book trends based on our observation in this house!


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