Welcome to Kids Lit Express!

This blog is for people like me who loved reading books as a kid and who still enjoy reading childrens books, not because I have kids or work with kids -- simply because I really enjoy childrens books. There are a lot of wonderfully written and illustrated books for children, and it is their simplicity that always amazes me. You have to be a good writer to write for children, because you don't get a lot of words to convey your meaning.

So, do you enjoy reading children's books? What are your favorite books or authors? Do you like picture books? Why do you enjoy reading books for children? Is there any one book that got you started?


You can share your favorites using the form at the bottom of this page.

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Friday, July 31, 2009

A is for Art by Stephen Johnson

So, I LOVE picture books and have read a lot of them while I was working on my dissertation. We have the largest collection of international children's books in the country here on the ground floor of our college, so all of my classes had lots of opportunities for browsing great picture books. I particularly like multicultural books (my dissertation was on bilingual books from small presses), books about art, ABC books, and books with awesome artwork. A Is for Art: An Abstract Alphabet is an incredible alphabet book like none I've ever seen before. Johnson, who is a fantastic artist, doesn't portray apples and zebras -- each letter is a painting that uses that letter in really creative ways. For example, the letter F is a painting of "Fourteen hundred and fifty-five fake French fries were flipped, flicked, and flung onto a full-size field of faint fuchsia." WOW! I can't imagine how he thought up all these pieces, much less created them. Johnson also wrote Alphabet City, where he created paintings of normal city scenes that contained letters hidden in them.

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