Issue link: https://h2.relevantize.com/i/468109
/ . - B O O K S / . / B O O K S Why Books? con't remember a moment, when DALS was still in its infancy, that Jenny and I sat at the kitchen table and debated the idea of writing about children's books on a site that was all about, you know, dinner. Would it be weird? Would it fit? Would it be true to the DALS mission? The answers to those questions, as best as I can recall them, two years later: 1. Maybe a little. 2. Maybe kinda? 3. Yes, absolutely. It would be true to the DALS mission because the DALS mission, as we saw it, was not, in fact, dinner. It was family. I'm talking family on the broadest, most basic level here; Jenny's salmon salad, to take just one delicious example, is about a recipe that you can pull oZ on a Wednesday night, and that tastes really good, but it's also—deep down, realizing that I am in danger of overstating things here—about the intensely good feeling that comes from giving your kids something they love, and from sitting around the table, enjoying it together, maybe even high-fiving each other because of its excellence. It's about pleasure and fulfillment and, really, isn't that what a story, properly executed, does too? Don't stories exist beyond those moments where your face is buried in the book? Don't they infect our lives, as well? The bus ride home? Those last moments before sleep? Or even the dinner table? Yes, we decided. If we talked about these books— about which TinTin adventure was the best, or whether Kate DiCamillo was in the same league as Judy Blume—at the table, that was enough justification for us. Books would be part of the mission. (Also: we needed more stuZ to write about. You can only come up with so many chicken recipes before a little piece of you dies.) Here's another reason we write about books: we like books, and believe in them, and like it when other people believe in them, too. I'm not so good with remembering the everyday details of my life. I can't tell you the name of my eighth grade math teacher, or my freshman year dorm room phone number, or my cholesterol reading from my last checkup, or even who I had lunch with last Thursday (at least without checking my calendar first). Compared to Jenny, whose institutional memory for every moment and triumph and hiccup of her life is downright scary photographic, I'm like the amnesiac guy from Memento: I should probably start tattooing every inch of my body with the little stuZ—i.e., the important stuZ—before it fades away forever. You know what I do remember, though, with almost perfect clarity? Finishing The Trumpet of the Swan when I was a kid. (I was eight years old. Or maybe nine. I forget!) I remember turning that last page, and not wanting it to end, thinking this was the best book I'd ever read, and having this vague sense that something was going on here that I didn't quite understand—at least, not enough to articulate it—except maybe to say that the words on the page, and the way they made me feel, were a whole lot more powerful than what I was getting from Strange But True Sports Stories. The last paragraph still crushes me: On the pond where the swans were, Louis put his trumpet away. The cygnets crept under their mother's wings. Darkness settled on woods and field and marsh. A loon called its wild night cry. As Louis relaxed and prepared for sleep, all his thoughts were of how lucky he was to inhabit such a beautiful earth, how lucky he had been to solve his problems with music, and how pleasant it was to look forward to another night of sleep and another day tomorrow, and the fresh morning, and the light that returns with the day. The cygnets crept under their mother's wings! Such a beautiful earth! The light that returns with the day! Dear, dear God. I would never forget this one. The Trumpet of the Swan was the book I would always think about when I thought about books from my childhood, the book I would use to forge an identity apart from the big brother I revered (he was a devoted Stuart Little guy), the book I always imagined reading aloud to kids of my own. Which, thirty years later, I did. As friend-of-DALS and writer-extraordinaire George Saunders (see page 11) puts it, "A minute spent reading to your kids now will repay itself a million-fold later, not only because they love you for reading to them, but also because, years later, when they're miles away, those quiet evenings, when you were tucked in with them, everything quiet but the sound of the page-turns, will seem to you, I promise, sacred." Why do we write about books? That's why we write about books. –Andy, April 2012 We picked books that we loved most, and that we think have a better-than-decent shot of turning your kids into geeked-out book-lovers and readers, too. 2