21 June 2025
Sharing Saturday - Favorite picture book
Last week we talked about the movies we’ve been watching. This week, let’s go back in time to our favorite picture books from childhood.
My parents’ household didn’t have a lot of books until I started reading. My dad preferred newspapers, magazines, and a few reference works he’d collected over the years. My mom (although I didn’t realize it until I was in my 20s or 30s and became familiar with the concept of ‘functional illiteracy’) was only barely literate. She was able to read picture books to me—indeed, she ‘taught’ me to read by doing this—but when I had measles at the age of seven and wasn’t allowed to strain my eyes, she floundered trying to read me the Henry Huggins book I’d been in the middle of. Normally, she was very clever at hiding the disability, so it took a lot of little things falling into place for me to finally realize the truth.
It’s quite humbling to realize that the woman who taught me to read could barely read herself.
My library of picture books (chosen and purchased by my parents) was fairly small until I started school. But my favorite—one I still love all these years later—was a book called Four Puppies (apparently written by Anne Heathers and illustrated by Lilian Obligado).
It follows the adventures of four Collie puppies through the first year of their life. Ultimately, it’s a book about the changing seasons, but those seasons are described through their specific effects on the puppies’ lives and activities. It instilled in me early the reality and natural inevitability of change.
To see it read aloud, watch here.
What’s your favorite picture book from childhood?
Reading was never introduced in my childhood home. My mother had educational problems, so we never saw books in our home. It wasn't until I was a pre-teen that I ever saw my father with a book in his hand, and in 1958, he was reading a book about the holocaust, complete with photographs, that I picked up one day. It was then that I realized that I could learn a lot about the world that was never explained to me as a child.
My first picture book was the "Dick and Jane" books I saw in first grade in a Catholic school. For some reason, be it familial indifference or just my immaturity at six years old, I didn't pick up on reading in First grade, and was aty danger of being held back unless I joined the Library's Summer Reading Club, for which I was required to read ten books, and then to give a vocal report to an attending librarian.
Picture books never entered into the lists of books to read, so by my third year, I was reading all of the books in the children's section of my local library. By fifth grade, I was reading Jules Verne and Mark Twain.
Never were "picture books" a part of my upbringing and education. Yes, many children's books were enhanced with attendant pictures, but it was the WORDS that I concentrated on. I learned to read because I was given the tools to do so, and I had a desire to learn about the world around me.
Sometime in my pre-teen years, I lost the desire to read, and it wasn't until I graduated from High School that I regained my desire to read. Part of that was that my girl friend was an AP student, and was reading stuff that I had never heard of, such as e. e. cummings.
After High School, I began reading everything I could find in an old used bookstore. I found a copy of Les Misérables, printed in the 1800s, and devoured it in a two-week span. 1000 pages! This began my journey into reading, and picture books played no part in it.
I don’t recall having any picture books when I was growing up - my grandma told me many stories. My daughters loved when we read together “If you give a mouse a cookie”. I still use it as an analogy when someone wants more and more.