JFC, heebie, you are compulsively numbering everything.
My kids love Hilo, Bone, old Uncle Scrooge collections and literally any newspaper comics (like, my MIL got Mother Goose and Grimm from the library and they're into it). The 6yo is obsessed with the Humphrey books, which I haven't read but my wife despises. I read him Harry Potter (have you heard of it?) which is over his head but he doesn't care.
Omg, Bone has become sacred canon over the years at our house. We love it so much.
Hilo is one of the recs from last year that I just ordered the other day!
On the comics: yes, Ace is going through a bit of a Garfield mania phase. That's a good thought. (And we've got the Calvin & Hobbes in place.)
Oooh: the Phoebe & Her Unicorn graphic novels are completely charming and funny, and have been a huge hit.
Counterpoint: Garfield is objectively shitty.
Garfield is shitty, but if you don't build your foundation, you may never grow up to fully appreciate Garfield Minus Garfield, which would be a tragedy.
I dunno Garfield Minus Garfield Minus Garfield sounds good to me.
I might suggest Pogo books. Hard to tell if they would resonate with any kids now. But at some point as kid I really came to appreciate them and as an adult found them to be a pretty good safe harbor in emotionally tumultuous times.
Probably the kind of book(s) best left lying around and having a kid pick up out of their own curiosity. (So maybe buy it for the adults.)
People just like to stare at Jon's crotch because Jim Davis knows how to draw to bring in the audience.
This made me appreciate Garfield a bit more: http://wondermark.com/garfield-color/
The kids also enjoy cookbooks like Pretend Soup and Cooking with Bear.
maybe just compromise and only give a printout of the Garfield dog semen joke.
I have somehow never read them, but everyone who has is crazy about them: the Moomintroll books? They seem like the right sort of age and tone.
Do you guys ever give books to adults? That seems like a very specific thing, unless you're in the habit of giving coffee table books. I can't think of a time that I've given a book to an adult specifically for a gift occasion.
Wow, this is not my experience. I give and receive books with other adults regularly. Not just for special occasions either. I don't give books to people who don't read much. But most of my friends and family do enjoy reading.
2. Definitely too intense and violent for Pokey right now, but in a few years he might enjoy Blade of the Immortal, which is hands down the best manga I have ever read. Truly bonkers (and hyperviolent) storyline, amazing art.
4. I give books as gifts all the time. I have two friends who have similar reading tastes, and giving/receiving books and recommendations is a cornerstone of our friendships. My siblings' interests are different from mine, but finding those areas of overlap is fun and affirming of our relationships. You have to find a book that you genuinely love, that you believe they would genuinely love, or at least be notably interested in reading. (This year, my brother's getting Boom Town, and my sister's getting Long Bright River). Once in a while I'll find a book that I love so much (In the Heart of the Valley of Love, The Library Book) that I buy up a bunch of copies to give away.
We just finished High Rise Mystery, which is fantastic, and which they loved. Took a while to get into, but by the end, they were practically dying with anticipation as the mystery unfolded. The narrator's voice and the dialogue is fabulous. A kid 10-12 would probably read and enjoy it by themselves; younger that that, a read aloud (which is what we did).
I just skimmed the rest of this thread and lol obviously I have no idea what children are like. Disregard 16.1, only a psychopath would give their kid Blade of the Immortal to read.
I confess to reading C.S. Lewis to my 6 (now 7) year old. Starting with The Magician's Nephew. He liked that, although TLTWTW seems to hold his attention less (and it is drippier, somehow). Still, I find I can stand to read them, not least because it is fun to quietly mock Lewis's terrible philosophy and do Aslan's pronouncements with a less than serious tone. I had a mini seminar all lined up on the ventriloquised 'Lord, Liar or Lunatic' trilemma that Lewis does, but the kid was not playing.
At some point, hope to move onto Alan Garner's 'The Owl Service', which scared me shitless as a kid.
Also, and this is OT, but I'm glad to finally see some pushback in a minor recent episode of the ongoing culture war:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/eton-was-right-to-sack-will-knowland
Confess to having been doing activism work, essentially, in the YouTube comments. The whole thing is fucking appalling and must be destroyed utterly.
xelA likes the Beastquest books (there are hundreds of them) which are quick comfort reading for him.
He's also read the first three Harry Potters, which he liked, but then he got bogged down in the immense length of the fourth, and has given up on those. He's also read the first His Dark Materials book, which he really loved (he cried at the sad bits, was vibrating with excitement at the scary bits), but he's found the Subtle Knife (book 2) hard to start. I'd probably recommend it for a good reader around his age and up (he's 7.5) all the way into teenagers.
He's also really enjoyed, and laughed out loud a lot at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53414233-the-danger-gang
This made me appreciate Garfield a bit more: http://wondermark.com/garfield-color/
That's interesting. As far as newspaper comic strips go, I really liked Foxtrot
18 made me laugh. And I'm ordering 17.
Some books I remember liking as a kid (numbered list in solidarity with heebie):
1. The old Carl Barks Donald Duck comics (I think the same ones Yawnoc mentioned in 2). They're seriously amazing.
2. Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe. I just had a few of the early ones in the original comic book form that my dad got from one of his professors, but now they're probably easier to find in the bound collection volumes (there are at least two, maybe more). The history is a bit outdated in places, but generally accurate and pretty accessible even to kids.
3. Comic strip collections of all sorts. Garfield and Calvin & Hobbes, of course, but there are so many more out there. Seconding Stormcrow's recommendation of Pogo; a lot of the topical allusions will go way over the heads of kids these days, but it doesn't really matter in terms of enjoying them. Even older and weirder, and now easier to find in recently published collections, is Krazy Kat. We had an old collection of that that I loved.
4. For non-comic books, I liked the Rosemary Sutcliffe historical novels set (mostly) in Roman Britain. They're not a continuing series but there are a bunch of them.
14: you should read them! Absolutely suitable for adults, and they range from "diverting" to "masterpiece." The comics are good for kids too. I really hate whimsical, gimmicky shit that tries to sum up life in series of whimsical, gimmicky, precious one-liners, as you can tell from the waves of hate coming off this sentence, and that is not what's going on with Tove Jansson at all despite appearances. She was an actual genius.
Have they tried Ranma 1/2, the comics? I think appropriate for the upper end of your specified age range. Silly, addictive, and its gender content, while trafficking in stereotypes befitting an eighties-nineties product, is a gentle all-ages gateway to more active and critical thinking about gender. Old enough it might be available at libraries, or cheap used copies.
1. Rand McNally Atlas
2. Cecil Adams' Straight Dope newspaper column books (adults and older kids for a bunch of them I guess)
3. Coffee table books are underrated
a) Codex Seraphinianus
b) Conversations with Wilder
c) Butterflies of the World
d) Krazy Kat
Cecil Adams' Straight Dope newspaper column books
"Mom, is Uncle Cecil right about the nutritional content of semen?"
My oldest (almost 10) plowed through all the Unwanteds books. He liked but perhaps didn't love them. But they kept him busy for a while.
On the semi-cartoon front (or at least it will look like that to a kid), if any of your kids have some macabre in their sense of humor I might suggest some Edward Gorey. My parents had The Willowdale Handcar which I re-read many times trying to "get" it. The Amphigorey collections are the best value. Once again an indirect approach is probably best.
For more kids' stuff, John Ciardi's The Man Who Sang the Sillies was good (I think Gorey illustrated it). And I believe Ciardi had others in that vein.
Also classic Thurber. The best two are probably and My World and Welcome to It. Although most of those are in a collection called A Thurber Carnival which has some other of his best stuff as well as some of his cartoons.
The best two are probably and My World and Welcome to It.
I'm having trouble counting.
Should have been My World and Welcome to It and My Life and Hard Times. (The latter may be the only one that is the original collection...)
Graphic Novels:
Zita the Space Girl a little intense, but Pebbles adores it.
A To Z Mysteries
The 13-Story Treehouse (closer to a chapter book.)
Chapter Books:
The Wild Robot
The Calabat has read the first three Harry Potters and I'm having him hold off on #4 because I feel like murder of a student might be a bit much for age 7?
Zita was another rec that I fished off last's years thread, and just recently ordered it!
And the 13-story treehouse books have been huge in our house since you recommended them last year. Like, they're the go-to books for Pokey and Ace to re-read when they out of books. (Those and Phoebe and The Unicorn, but PaTU are quicker to zip through.)
The Wild Robot looks really charming, too.
In the course of the pandemic, I went back to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the Great Glass Elevator for the younger two Giblets. The older kids and I had never gotten around to the Great Glass Elevator.
Boy is the Great Glass Elevator a stupid story. They all enjoyed it well enough, but he goes deep into dumb puns and racist jokes based on people in other countries being unable to pronounce English words with an American accent.
I remember the Verminicious Knids being terrifying as a kid, but now I was like "So there's no story involving them? It's just escape?" For some reason I'd imagined that there was more story and exploration of the Space Hotel that'd I'd forgotten. Nope.
And then the last third of the story is just stuck on, like a weird short story, where the old people are greedy and gobble down too many youth pills and turn into babies and minus babies, and then turn too old, and then settle down where they started, and it's very unsatisfying because after all that, they might have enjoyed to knock off 20 years or so as originally intended.
After all that, we watched the 1970s and 2000s version of CATCF. I'd never seen either version before. I enjoyed the Gene Wilder version. But in the remake, for some godforsaken reason Johnny Depp adopts this wispy breathy man-child voice, and it's super unpleasant and a little gross IMHO.
Final conclusion: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is an opus to Dahl's loathing of American children. Each of the first four is a caricature of how Western excess becomes grotesque, even if the locations are ambiguous in the books (and more international in the movies.)
Also: both movies do really incomprehensible things surrounding accents, like mixing English and American accents up in a single town and even household.
Now I'll go back and delete all the numbers in front of the paragraphs of this comment. Why can't I stop numbering my paragraphs?!?
1) Paragraphs belonging to the Emperor.
2) Paragraphs drawn with a very fine camel hair brush.
3) Embalmed paragraphs.
∞) Innumerable paragraphs.
∞ + 1) Paragraphs included in this classification.
I haven't read them in ages, so I don't know if they hold up, but I remember loving the Lloyd Alexander Chronicles of Prydain books (I expect that the gender roles are awfully dated, but they were important to me).
I love Prydain books too. I think the gender roles aren't too bad, but Eilonwy isn't well served by the third book.
Oh, ha, I forgot I'd recommended that last year. Calabat also likes Franny K. Stein (graphic novels.) But he's definitely the sort of kid that will read whatever is in front of him.
The boys very much enjoyed the audiobooks of Roald Dahl's autobiographical books.
I bet I have my childhood copies of those laying around. Aren't they super dark, IIRC?
I didn't listen to all of each, so couldn't tell ya.
Because books are for losers, what about a VR headset? Is that the kind of thing a high school kid would like?
When I was a high school kid I was interested in bongs.
3. You've done Danny, the Champion of the World? May work less well than when I was a kid, and food treats were only an occasional thing. This is a world where sausages in pudding batter (toad-in-the-hole) sounds appealing.
2. And Asterix?
4. Sometimes. Got my Dad Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads (Persia as the centre of world history) last Father's Day. No idea how good/convincing it is, but the thesis seemed interesting.
8. I approve of the numbering thing, but may have misunderstood the principle.
Normally wouldn't gift a book I hadn't read, or didn't at least have a better idea about, but I was pressed for time and decided to take punt. I'm meant to read it along with him when he gets around to it, so I'll find out eventually,
The Smurfs is also good. If you are into Smurfs.
Speaking of Harry Potter, why would wizards even bother to poop when they could just vanish the shit while it's still in the butt?
Because vanished objects go into "non-being, which is to say everything," and over time every being and object in the universe would become suffused with infinitesimal increments of everyone's vanished shit.
That's how agriculture works anyway.
The Wild Robot looks really charming, too.
Why, thank you!
Did anybody else read Howard Fast as a kid? Historical novels about Tom Paine, Spartacus, Moses etc all portrayed as heroes that fought for the people against oppressive rulers.
I always reckon that from age 7 to 14 you can't really go wrong with Diana Wynne Jones.
I'll also recommend the Prydain books and just about anything by Lloyd Alexander. My nieces loved Eilonwy in The Book of Three and the Black Cauldron. When the story got too exciting, we had to let them work off steam with a sword fight on the couch. His Vesper Holly books are also a lot of fun, but, as I said, just about all of his children's books are kind of wonderful.
59: I just reread a number of Diana Wynne Jones books because I was going to send some to my nephew, and at the risk of embodying a stereotype myself, there were a number of things that made me uncomfortable. Besides the occasional racist remark, DWJ regularly engages in fat-shaming. Mean comments about the weight of various characters were almost shocking in their ubiquity, to such a degree that I'm no longer giving these books as gifts or recommending them, even though I used to love reading her work.
58: I've always known he was a Communist, but TIL that he won the Stalin Peace Prize. I suppose he should be cancelled.
AJ's stepsiblings set up those gift games at Christmas where everyone brings a wrapped gift (according to a theme, limit $25) and there are arcane rules about choosing and stealing, etc. I find it stressful and not fun at all, and we have wildly different taste/budget/interest than most of them. They did a book one several years ago. I tried to rig it by telling AJ's sister what to pick (we have similar taste in books) and asking her to buy something for AJ I knew he'd like. I bought We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. by Samantha Irby. It turned out that all the stepsiblings understood that this book exchange was meant to be "bring a book meaningful to you" or "bring your favorite book" complete with a reveal of who brought what and an explanation of why you loved it. My book ended up in the hands of a conservative Christian minister, and I ended up saying "The author has a hilarious blog I like?" as my explanation and oh thank goodness for holidays being so cancelled this year.
Let me also tell about the year they did "favorite drink" and we were the only ones (save one other) who brought alcohol. I went home with a 2 L bottle of a local treasure called Vernor's.
That's the nice thing about my family. Nobody is goes on the wagon until after a divorce or arrest.
I mean, that and the loving support.
Ooh, and Dad's girlfriend loves to read. She reads "spiritual books about animals" which AFAICT means "rescue dog helps woman find closeness to god" or similar. She has a wish list a mile long. I was embarrassed last year, in the wake of Mom's death, standing at the bookstore counter asking them to special order How My Rescue Dog Rescued My Soul (kidding about the actual title but not far off).
64 seems so much more normal! Plus, I bet you don't have to remember Christmas gift exchange rules and whose turn it is in reverse birthday order.
Is it just me or is that putting a lot of pressure on a dog that just wants out of the pound?
We used to have a gift exchange among siblings and spouses, but it kind of fell apart. I have no idea what to do this year. We used to just get gifts for the kids, but now there's only one sibling without kids, so I think she should get something.
It turned out that all the stepsiblings understood that this book exchange was meant to be "bring a book meaningful to you" or "bring your favorite book" complete with a reveal of who brought what and an explanation of why you loved it.
That seems like a very weird rule for a gift exchange.
But how can you top peace and quiet and disposable income?
That's close to what my one sister used to say before she had three kids. Her actual words were "always a pallbearer, never a corpse" when people asked her about getting married.
71 to 69, obviously.
70: Yes? I think the goal was to learn new things about each other? And they all seemed to get it and enjoy it? I think they like me OK, but I really, really don't fit in.
Speaking of books, somebody made a version of Hercule Poirot starting John Malkovich and I wasn't informed.
The thirties had a lot of problems, but it's hard to argue with the aesthetic.
At least in men's non-fascist clothing.
I wish I knew enough to know if Malkovich was doing the accent right.
So, did anyone else watch The Minions of Midas?
Every time I see the title of this post Camera Obscura"s "Books Wright For Girls" goes through my head:
I pretty much always ask for books as gifts, books and socks. I rarely get the former--people in my family feel that giving books isn't special enough despite being literally what I ask for. In recent years I've taken to giving more consumables as gifts. None of us need more stuff anyway, but a bottle of very good scotch or some very fancy olive oil always has a place. It gets enjoyed, then it's gone and no longer taking up space, and I can buy something in a similar line next year. I did get one of my teenage nieces Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts last year, which seemed a good book for an older kid interested in goth and queer stuff. But between this year and her being a teenager, I never found out if she read it or liked it.
I give adults books as gifts all the time. I tend to get people books that I feel guilty for not having read yet, so that they, too, can feel bad about not having read them. I think it's because I'm a terrible human being.
I feel like Infinite Jest was written for just that reason.
85: If you read the book you would know that is the jest referred to in the title.
I couldn't even manage the plot summary on Wikipedia.
66 needs a burner Amazon account (probably quite a difficult thing to achieve versus the AWS machine learning infrastructure)