Curious

It's amazing to me how many "children's" books there are out there on the market.

What is more amazing to me is that there are SO MANY BAD children's books out there on the market.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised - not every adult book is a good book.  In fact, there are only a few rare gems that are really worth reading when you consider the vast quantities produced since the time of, oh, Shakespeare.  I guess I shouldn't expect children's books to be any different.

Which is sad.

Take for example a board book.  They didn't really have those when I was a kid- there were books and there were plastic baby books.  That was all.  The plastic baby books had a word and a picture on each page.  Paper books had a full story.

The Little Golden Books were the only real mid-way between the two for kids.

Now you can go to Barnes & Noble (which unfortunately seem to be the only bookstores around except for the used bookstores) and there are a couple of shelves of board books.  The stories range in content from just random pictures with little organization to actual stories.  If the book actually does have a story, then the story itself can vary in quality quite a bit.  But what I find in most of these books is that either:

The content is not age appropriate (the story is too complicated or too simple, or has difficult concepts like truth and honesty, or the words are too big, etc),

OR

There are too many words on a page,

OR

The font is difficult to read.

Even the Dr. Seuss/Cat in the Hat Early Reader board books aren't not infant appropriate- the majority of them use nonsense words when the kid is trying to learn REAL worlds and REAL concepts and associations.  It's amazing, frankly, what people think should pass for a children's book.  Some books were originally written for much older children, but the publisher, in their infinite wisdom decided to publish as a board book.  The stories may actually be great, but they're just not infant material.

For example, The Grouchy Ladybug.   Great story, but not infant material.

But I have managed to find a couple of good books that my daughter absolutely loves:

Curious George Goes to The Zoo (Touch and Feel) and Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb.

The stories are great.  The pictures are great.  The touch and feel patches are large and have unique textures- not just all fur.

What's sad, though, is that Curious George In the Park (Touch and Feel) is not as good.  The story is over simplified with nothing tying the pages together into an actual story.  I had such high hopes.  In addition, the last page is a piece of checkered cotton so you can feel the picnic blanket.  It's lame.  Very sad for George.  Still, it's better than most touch and feel books- the patches are still large enough that you can actually feel the textures.