Soak the nut

Growing up in my family, my sister and I took turns with the chore of washing dishes every evening. This was not a job I liked, and there were many ways I tried to get out of it:

• Before dinner, I would do some other extra chore, so that when the calendar was checked to see whose turn it was, I could exclaim with indignation, "It's my turn? But I set the table!"
• Right after dinner, I would conveniently have to go to the bathroom. For me, the toilet has always been a place where I feel I can dawdle guilt-free, because after all, who can seriously tell you to hurry it along if you need more time? But this was more procrastination than a ploy to get out of dish duty.
• When I finally did drag myself to face the mountain of dishes in the kitchen sink, anything that needed to be handwashed or that didn't fit in the dishwasher I would squirt with a generous helping of dish soap and fill with water. If anyone asked, I would say they were "soaking overnight," and—ta-da!—the next day they wouldn't be my problem anymore.

This all changed when I started living on my own, without the never-counted blessing of a dishwasher, and with no one else to wash my dishes if I didn't. I realized that it was much easier to clean up if I did so right after each meal, rather than waiting for food bits to harden and then be soaked and scrubbed later. I resolved never to procrastinate by soaking dishes again.

But when Clara and I moved to the Netherlands, the rhythm of our life changed from me preparing and cleaning up after each meal at home, to me scooting out the door right after breakfast, bringing home dried-out leftovers containers, and doing all the day's washing-up after dinner in the evening. I was back to scraping dried food off of dishes, perpetually wishing I had gotten to them sooner.

One day, I guiltily tried soaking a stubborn pot in soapy hot water. But so as not to break my resolution, I only left it a few minutes before giving it another scrub. When I did so, I was amazed how much was already coming off—not everything, but more than I expected after such a short time. So I dumped the now very dirty water out of the pot, refilled it with more sudsy water, and left it again for another few minutes, after which it practically wiped clean.

This reminded me of what a famous French mathematician, Alexander Grothendieck, had to say about problem-solving. He compared the idea of cracking a mathematical nut by hitting it as hard as you can with your sharpest chisel to the approach that he usually took himself:

I can illustrate the second approach with the same image of a nut to be opened. The first analogy that came to my mind is of immersing the nut in some softening liquid, and why not simply water? From time to time you rub so the liquid penetrates better, and otherwise you let time pass. The shell becomes more flexible through weeks and months—when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough, the shell opens like a perfectly ripened avocado!

—Grothendieck's Récoltes et Semailles, p. 552

translation by Colin McLarty

Now this soaking technique is a regular part of my dish-doing routine. I look around to see what dishes look most difficult to scrub, give them a quick swipe with a soapy sponge as I get started, and periodically rinse them out and swipe them again as I wash everything else. Usually by the time the other dishes are done, so are they, and with almost no effort.

But what really struck me when I thought of the Grothendieck quote was not a low-effort way of washing the dishes, but a low-effort way of making life changes. When I dread the effort required by a change I want to make, I remind myself to "soak the nut" and consider the small things I can do now that will make bigger changes easier later. For example, I've wanted for a long time to be a writer, but I've always felt like I'm not talented enough and don't have anything to say. So last year, I ditched the big heavy journal I never used and started keeping a smaller one nearby, just in case I had any thoughts I considered interesting; I only wrote in it about once every month or two. Eventually that increased to about once a week, and later I committed to writing every day. Then I started picking out the ideas I wanted to share, and wrote a blog post occasionally. Now I've committed to a post a week, and my list of post ideas just keeps getting longer. And it all started by making a tiny change that made it a correspondingly tiny bit easier to write down my thoughts.

Photo by Rusty Clark, under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Announcement

I've decided to officially change my posting schedule from Mondays to Wednesdays. I originally chose Mondays so that I'd have the free time in my weekends to mull over what I wanted to say, but now the weekends are the only days I get to spend with Clara and I have more free time during the week. I'll kick off the new schedule this week by posting a followup to this post, containing more examples from my life and an exploration of when tiny life changes encourage growth ("keystone habits") and when they just defuse the energy that could have gone into something greater ("token actions").

Dual Adverbs

Recently I discussed my new project for trying to benefit the people I talk to and make them feel more comfortable. One of the ways I've been trying to do this is to find two ways of saying the same thing (like "Have you taken out the trash yet?" and "Have you taken out the trash already?") and look for subtle differences in meaning.

And sometimes I get distracted by patterns.

There are several pairs of words like "always" and "sometimes" that I've been calling dual adverbs, because "not always" means the same thing as "sometimes not":

• "Strangers are not always nice." = "Strangers are sometimes not nice."

"Everywhere" and "somewhere" work the same way, in that "not everywhere" means the same as "somewhere not":

• "It's not messy everywhere." = "Somewhere it's not messy."

(These are reminiscent of the dual quantifiers "for all" and "there exists" from logic: If it's not true that all cars are red, there must exist a car that is not red, so "not for all" = "there exists (such that) not." That's why I'm calling these pairs of adverbs dual.)

Another example with a similar flavor is "totally" and "partially": not totally = partially not.

But here are some examples that surprise me, where it's not so easy to see it as an instance of "for all" versus "there exists":

not often = usually not

• "It's not often raining" = "It usually isn't raining."

not yet = still not

• "It's not ready yet" = "It still isn't ready."

My pattern-collecting self wants to keep on looking for more pairs of dual adverbs, but let me ask you: what do you think are some of the subtle differences between the meanings of these sentences? What does one suggest that the other doesn't? Let me know in the comments!

On not exuding confidence

I'm what you could call shy. Here's what happens when I am in a conversation with people I don't know very well.

1. My joints start to feel stiff and my breath gets shallow. Everything feels hard to move and I have to concentrate on breathing normally and not clutching one arm with the other.
2. When I have something to say, I run it through my mind several times to see if someone could misunderstand it. But by then the moment will have passed and I keep it to myself. The result is that I sit around for a long time feeling like I've been working hard at the conversation, but without actually saying anything.
3. Eventually I realize that if I want to speak up I'll have to forgo the review process and just say something as it occurs to me. Often what comes out is indeed insensitive or ungracious in a way I didn't mean, but apologizing feels like it would just make the whole situation even more awkward (and would mean looking for another moment to interject), so I clam up again.
4. Finally, I retreat into my own world for the rest of the conversation.

Guess which alpaca I am.

I know that this is something I should work on if I want to make new friends more easily. The internet advice on becoming more self-confident in social situations generally falls into three categories, and I can see how they would be helpful:

Get comfortable being uncomfortable

• Practice coping with discomfort by trying new things regularly. Do something daily that's a little scary. Accept that meeting someone new may always be uncomfortable but resolve not to let it stop you.

I'm 100% on board with this idea, especially since trying new things is something I already approve of, although I'm not systematic about it in any way yet.

Fake it 'til you make it

• Smile, adopt an open and expansive posture, and generally do what you think someone who feels at ease would do. Eventually, you'll feel genuine self-confidence.

I do sometimes "fake it" in this way—I have yet to "make it," but it does make the process less awkward for the other person.

Think positive

• Tell yourself that people will be happy to get to know the real you. Imagine yourself interacting with people and it going smoothly and easily.

I don't do this so much, because it feels silly, but I imagine it would help.

So I have this problem, I've known for a while what I should be doing about it, but I haven't made much of an effort. Why not? If you're being charitable, you could say that I just haven't gotten around to it yet, but after some introspection I realized there is another reason:

I don't want to be confident.

Here's why: when I think about people I've met who seem to exude confidence, I have no desire to be like them: they take up too much space, they talk over me when I try to get a word in edgewise, and in general they make me feel even more like retreating into myself. I don't want to do that to other people. So I may not enjoy being shy, but I don't approve of the alternative.

Or rather, I don't approve of what I have perceived as the alternative. But here's what I realized next: Self-confidence doesn't mean being the "alpha male" in the room, someone who gets a boost by being superior to everyone else. No, it is the opposite; self-confidence is freedom from needing anyone else's approval. That led me to my third realization:

If I learn self-confidence, and feel free from trying to earn others' approval, it frees me up to pursue other outcomes for my conversations. In particular, if I value making other people feel comfortable, then I can spend my self-confidence on that, thinking about how I can help people feel at ease and safe. I can aim to have the people I meet leave feeling good about themselves if I'm not worried about whether they feel good about me.

So that's my new goal for developing my social skills: learn to feel sufficiently at ease in social situations that I can stop thinking about myself and focus on how to benefit other people.

Care to help me with this project? I have some questions for you.

• Have you had a history of social anxiety or awkwardness? What has helped you?
• What are some times you have really felt comfortable around someone you didn't know very well yet? What did they do to make you feel safe or understood?

Let me know in the comments!

To create is to commit

I love yarn. I love blank journals. I love new boxes of crayons. But when it comes time to cast on for a knitting project, put pen to page, or make the first waxy mark on a clean sheet of paper, I hesitate, vacillate, and procrastinate. Why?

These objects embody creative potential. That yarn could become a cozy sweater or a pair of mittens, that journal could be for research or sketching or the things I encounter that surprise me. But as long as I haven't started, these are all still possibilities. So to get myself to get started, this is what I say:

To create is to commit. 

You can't erase crayon, and you can't be creative without making some irreversible choices. Sure, most word processors let you hit backspace, and unknitting isn't that hard either, but eventually you will have to hit submit, or wash and block your finished garment. The potential in yarn and paper is only there if you can choose to do something with it.

This is why I'm writing a blog post here every week. I've "started" several blogs with no blog posts because I haven't decided yet what I want my theme to be. Life? Habits? Communication? Books? Math? I could dither forever. But waiting to start until I have the perfect idea will mean I never start, so I'm starting before I feel ready, and I'll figure it out as I go. And then every week, I wonder whether one of my other post ideas would be more timely or important than the one I'm working on, and equally whether maybe I should wait to post that one until I can really do it justice. So I tell myself that to create is to commit, just pick whatever topic I feel like I can manage to write about in one weekend, and do it whether what I make is any good or not.

And sometimes I manage to use those crayons too.

Leiden in June: News and Snapshots

This blog post is going to be pictures and short descriptions, because some of you still want to hear how things are and what we've been doing and discovering.

Hofjes

In Leiden there are dozens of tiny garden courtyards that used to be associated with almshouses, but are now simply open to the public. However, they're not particularly well publicized, and I had never been inside of more than one or two of them until this Spring when I went with a friend on a self-guided tour, and found the doors to the secret gardens everywhere.

This isn't even the prettiest one.

Waterlilies

In June it gets warm enough that some canals turn green with algee, and some are covered with lilypads.

I like to think the ducks enjoy the lilypads

Butterfly installation

We had been wanting to do some sort of origami installation for a long time, but this May before my parents came to visit we put it together. You can see it here in the dark, as it took us a long time to put it up, but the night is a rare sight these days. This far north in June the sun doesn't set until well after 10, and it stays light a good while after. We have hardly used our bike lights in ages, and sometimes we still wake up confused very early in the morning, because at 4 am it is already light again. It reminds me of nothing so much as a chorale we sang in college choir which ended with a triumphant phrase about heaven: "and there we shall walk in endless light."

They're made from tracing paper

Neighborhood Party

Our neighborhood had a party this weekend, complete with a band, lots of free food, information about a community garden starting up, a place to sign up for helping out elderly neighbors (which we successfully negotiated in Dutch!) and arts and crafts. There were photographs of our park from previous decades, and prints of paintings from before then all on display. There was even an association handing out beautiful gift bags of looseleaf tea to everyone from the neighborhood. Often at festivals I get a little overwhelmed by the crowd and the noise, but this was nothing like a typical festival. We bumped into our Dutch teacher, our friends from church, and walked around with them, and painted some mugs, we felt like this is our home. The girl singing and playing guitar was doing a lovely cover of "fix you" by Coldplay, and we walked around the park, happy and content.

We painted these mugs!

Teaching violin--sometimes in Dutch!

On a more practical side, I'm now registered with a music lesson association and have found several more students, many of which I am teaching almost entirely in Dutch. The children have very understanding parents, and they help me translate when I need help with a few words, but for the most part it's been going really well.

I have no pictures of my violin students but here is our orchid!

Knitting

Because so many of our good friends are having babies (last count it was more than 30 friends in the last two years), Owen and I have decided that knitting some baby hats is an order, and have gone on a trip to the yarn shop accordingly. It's really nice to be knitting again, as both Owen and I had taken a bit of a break, and find that we've missed it.

Let there be baby hats!

Summer plans

This Summer Owen will spend four weeks in Utah at the 2015 Summer Institute on Algebraic Geometry, and I'll be traveling around Europe for some of that time, visiting friends in London and Paris, and having friends visit me as well. It will be an exciting time.

The park near our flat

Plans for the Future

Some of you have asked what we've decided about staying in the Netherlands, and here is our answer for now. We're staying one more year, so we plan on leaving in August 2016, which is three years total. That means this year I'll be applying to PhD programs, and Owen will be looking for jobs, and we'll do what we can to land ourselves in a place that's reasonable for both of us, and hopefully not so far away from family.

Here we are, married for two years already!

That's the news from Leiden.

Some thoughts about Race and a list of picture books

Over the last few months I have been in near constant distress about the racial issues in this world. I was, I suppose, naively shocked by items in the US news with a police officer shooting the unarmed Michael Brown, and read story after story about protests and heavily armed police and struggled to look for hope as ugly events kept flowing in. Living in The Netherlands in November and December doesn't help much because of the "Zwarte Pieten" or "black Peters" the little helpers to the Dutch version of Santa Claus. I know this is a complex issue, with a lot of history and the tradition has changed a great deal for the better. But living in a progressive, tolerant, and beautiful country where it's normal to see children wearing blackface or hear them singing songs with the chorus, "dumme, dumme, dumme Zwarte Pieten!" (that's "stupid, stupid, stupid black Peter!") scares me for the future of this world. I had just convinced myself that the Dutch were more racist than the Americans when I heard more news that the grand jury had ruled that Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Brown would not even face trial. And somehow these things kept surprising me. Surprising me the way my classmates in Virginia grad school surprised me when I said, "but interracial marriage isn't a big deal anymore" and everyone in my class looked at me like I had lived in some kind of ignorant bubble. And perhaps, mercifully, I had? I had a fair number of friends from mixed families in my homeschool groups, and in music lessons. My white uncle married a black woman and if it was a big deal in my family, I had, in fact missed it. I felt like the kids reacting to this Cherrios commercial: 

I love that it surprises these kids, but I don't love that it surprises me. I don't want be ignorant about these issues of prejudice, because they are clearly still issues. I also want to be honest about my own unconscious prejudices, including my reluctance to seek out books/movies/media focused on or written by people who don't have the same color skin that I do. This has never been something I've consciously thought. I have never walked around thinking, "I don't want to read any books by Toni Morrison, she's black!" but at the same time, I haven't read any books by Toni Morrison, and I read a lot. So what you could call my new year's resolution is reading a whole lot. I want to read many works of classic literature that I've missed so far, especially books by authors of color or dealing with race. I also want to read some non-fiction, such as "The New Jim Crow," which has been on my reading list for a while. So far I've read MLK's Why We Can't Wait, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I started Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon this morning. 

But I also wanted to make a list of books for children, because I am passionate about the impact of stories and pictures on children. Children's books have become less and less diverse in the last few decades as budget cuts to schools and libraries put buying power into the hands of the largely white middle class consumer. The people determining what goes on a best seller list are therefore not librarians and teachers looking for diversity, but parents and grandparents who (totally understandably) don't automatically think about race when choosing books. So here are some picture books and some names you might consider adding to your list when you go to the library, or even when you buy books for kids you know and love. 

Kadir Nelson, author and illustrator
Nelson's clear writing and majestic paintings have won a pile of awards, and his work respected well outside the field of children's literature. He has written a staggeringly excellent book on the history of African Americans for ages 9 or so and up, a biography of Nelson Mandela and one of Harriet Tubman, and has illustrated the words to several Spirituals. Sometimes a bit difficult to search for (as books are listed under author, not illustrator) so here are a few of his works that you might miss just by searching.  

Please, Puppy, Please by Spike Lee
Abe's Honest Words: The Life of Abraham Lincoln by Doreen Rappaport
Ellington Was Not A Street by Ntozake Shange
Henry's Freedom Box: A Story from the Underground Railroad by Ellen Levine
I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King Jr. 

Jacqueline Woodson, author
Woodson writes for many different age groups, but the link above is for her picture books. It's a really nicely set up website where you can get a good idea about the books by just scrolling through. One of her most widely acclaimed books, The Other Side, is about a black girl and a white girl who become friends in an intensely segregated town. She says she wrote it because, "I wanted to write about how powerful kids can be. [...] They don’t believe in the ideas adults have about things so they do what they can to change the world. We all have this power."

Nikki Grimes, author
I'm not as familiar with her work as with some of these authors but I just read her early reader Make Way for Dyamonde Daniel and it was great. She's known for her biography of Malcolm X, and A Pocketful of Poems, and When Gorilla Goes Walking.

Walter Dean Myers and his son, Christopher Myers are also good to know. WD Myers mostly wrote for older children (his YA book, Fallen Angels shaped my understanding of Vietnam), but he teamed up with his son for the wonderful poem of a book, Looking Like Me. Christopher Myer's Jabberwocky is also fantastic. 

Langston Hughes, My People photography by Charles R. Smith Jr.
This sparse, glowing poem is set to stunning sepia photographs: 

The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.
The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.
Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people. 

Books by Ezra Jack Keats
Keats was not black himself, but he often populated his books with black children as they were the children who lived near him in NYC. The Snowy Day was the first book with a child of color to win the prestigious Caldecott Award.

Books by Patricia Pollaco
Pollaco is from Eastern Europe (Ukraine, I believe) but she, like Ezra Jack Keats, writes and illustrates books with black and white children. My favorite is Chicken Sunday which is a great story for Easter or any time of year. It includes Pusanky eggs, a beautiful hat in the window, and a gospel choir who sing like low thunder and sweet rain. 







These are just a tiny few! February is Black History Month, so there will be more displays and such in libraries and hopefully bookstores. I've just been focusing on books with black characters and/or authors and illustrators because it seemed appropriate to the prejudice I'm seeing in the news and MLK day on Monday. But here are a couple more lists which include more races than just the black and the white.

Cooperative Children's Book Center's list 
The Gaurdian's list
Cynthia Leitich Smith's list
The Coretta Scott King Awards These are two awards given out by the American Library association to black Authors and Illustrators of books for children and young adults.

Do you have favorite books by black authors or illustrators? Books with black protagonists? I'd love to hear about them. And thanks for reading. 

A Year in Leiden: Effort and Beauty

In Jeanette Winterson's incredible novel, The Powerbook, one of her characters writes, 

“There's no such thing as effortless beauty - you should know that. There's no effort which is not beautiful - lifting a heavy stone or loving you. Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I'm not quite sure why I am doing it.”

As I’ve thought about how to sum up our experiences here in Leiden this year, this quote came to mind again and again. There has been a lot of effort over things that don’t seem important or deeply meaningful, but there’s also been so much beauty that the effort itself (perhaps only in the haze of hindsight) can seem beautiful.

A lot of stuff this past year was really hard. Family sorrows, world sorrows, academic struggles, unemployment, loneliness. Some of it has been usual moving/adjusting difficulties, (the effort of filling out job application after job application, setting up the various things with town hall, unpacking a house, getting to know your way around your new city) but some of it hasn’t been. Watching new friends make the move had made us realise our transition was unusually difficult. Some of our new friends waited for a shipment for weeks, we waited for months. Bank accounts--which took us four trips to the bank, an additional trip to town hall, a seven-email conversation, a missed form, a delay because of vacation time and over 5 weeks total--took other people just one appointment to the local branch. We had to move within three months of coming. We were without internet for three months. It’s normal for these things to be difficult, but it’s not normal for them to be this difficult. I’ve gone to expat meetups that turn into pity-parties. “I’ve been miserable here for thirty years” is not the encouragement you’re looking for when you confess you’re really struggling to not feel sad.

The Hyperbole and a Half comic about depression started feeling really appropriate. But I’m not miles deep in the sadness either. I cry about as easily as the toddlers I babysit, but I laugh as easily too. And no, I am not pregnant, I am just Clara-the-easily-moved. I think I’ve always been this way, but I usually have feet a bit more solidly in my comfort zone.

Leiden in the late afternoon, in December

So now that I’ve shared a little of the effort, let me share a little of its beauty.

Board game nights: when the Italians bring Bang and then are totally shocked when we already know how to play.

Learning to Speak Dutch: Watching familiar kids movies like “The Emperor’s New Grove” dubbed in Dutch, and having it be something we can actually understand!

In the Escher Museum

Breakfasts: We sit down to pancakes pretty much every morning.

Babysitting: I’ve been able to help two children grow and learn. When we came little J wasn’t even born yet, but now I’ve seen him crawl and take some of his first steps.

Nights at home: We’ve read books out loud together (Villette, Ella Enchanted, To Kill a Mockingbird, What's so Amazing about Grace , to name a few), and watched a lot of Sci-fi (Dr. Who, Stargate, and Firefly, most of which I had never seen, but loved).

Making my mom's Greek Easter bread

Traveling: One of the greatest joys here is just being able to say, “Hey Owen, want to go to Belgium this weekend?” and have the answer be “sure!”

Museums: We have been to so many that even new museums in new places are starting to feel like friends we're only just now getting to meet.

Violin Lessons: I’ve started teaching two children once a week, and it’s been a blast.

King's Day!

Most of a first year of marriage: So much learning how to communicate, learning to be a team, learning to take care of each other, laughing, dancing, learning to love each other and this world better every day.

The Gym: We joined a super cheap gym and love remembering how good it feels to challenge one’s body.

Taking Owen’s calculus class: I’m in it again this fall and at more than half way through the course my average is an A-. Last year I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.

The Keukenhof: If you missed that post it’s worth it to go back for the pictures.

Owen’s work at the University: It’s great. He really likes his colleagues, his duties, the atmosphere and feels like he’s accomplishing more in less time than he ever did in graduate school.

Biking: Has begun to feel so normal, I already feel how much I will miss the biking when we return to the states.

Making Friends: Nothing makes you feel more at home than this. 

Cultural celebrations: This week I saw a parade with the royalty in their golden carriages, various military groups in gorgeous formal attire and dozens of children dressed in traditional dutch clothing, complete with little hats, bonnets and wooden shoes.

Houseplants: our "boompje" (little tree) is now taller than me!

Learning together: Besides learning Dutch, and learning from all the museums we go to, over dinner or breakfast sometimes we take part in online courses, the best of which was Barbara Oakley’s Learning How to Learn. We’re looking forward to a lifetime of learning together.

Our plan had been to stay in Leiden two years, and if we stick with that plan we have less than 12 months before we’ll need to move on. Owen recently was given the word that the University will happily extend his contract for up to five years total, so we could stay here much longer than we had planned. We’re not sure what we think about that, and we have a few months to think it over, but it’s made us do a lot of thinking about our time here. Do we want to stay? Is it the right choice for both of us? It's a real adventure learning to trust God, and trust each tother, but we know one thing for sure. If it's for just this next year or if it's for longer, we love it here, and it’s getting better all the time.

I didn't include it in the list, but I will say it here. Visits have been some of the best parts. Some of you are already planning trips, and we can't wait to see you. But if you’ve been thinking of coming to Europe, we’d love to show you around. We’ll share a little of the effort and the beauty of life here in The Netherlands.  

More Books from Five Illustrators you Already Love

Lots of my friends are having babies right now, and I get a lot of questions about good children's books, so here's some more suggestions. Previous posts I've written on kids books are one for this blog about going to a baby shower, and another for The Shakespeare Standard on the best books about Shakespeare for kids, so feel free to check those out as well. In this post I'm going to list a bunch of really famous children's books, and then suggest other great (but less famous) books by the same author or illustrator.

Ezra Jack Keats

The Snowy Day won the Caldecott Award in 1962, and has mesmerized children since that day. A Jewish artist born in 1916, his books quietly promote healthy interactions between generations, races, boys and girls, and even people with disabilities. I love The Snowy Day, but I also love many of his other books. 

Peter's Chair is one of my favorite books for children who are going to have a new sibling. Peter finds his dad painting his find his crib and his highchair pink! Distraught, he takes his (still blue!) chair and run away, only to find he is too big to sit in it. Coming home, he suggests perhaps they should re-paint the chair together. Apartment 3 tells the story of two boys poking around their run-down apartment building as they look for the sound of the harmonica. Some picture books shy away from gritty realities of life, but this one doesn't, cigarette smoke, shouting voices, a scary superintendent even a man who's blind show that beauty can come from unexpected places. A Letter to Amy, tells of Peter's wanting his friend Amy to come to his birthday, but his own shyness about asking her. There's a thunderstorm and some misunderstanding but it ends with happiness.

Barbara Cooney

Less well known than many of the books here, Barbara Cooney's most popular book is Miss Rumphius. If you have missed this one (as I did somehow until grad school), it is the story of a little girl and her life guided by her grandfather's three principles. Travel to far away places, live by the sea, and do something to make the world more beautiful. Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran is a story about kids with fabulous imaginations making a world out of a hillside of mud, rocks and boxes. Eleanor tells the story of the life of Eleanor Roosevelt as an awkward, shy, and unpopular young girl. Perhaps my favorite of Cooney's illustrated books is a one a dear, dear friend gave me for my birthday, called When The Sky is Like Lace by Elinor Lander Horwitz. It's the story of what happens on bimulous nights, full of silliness and wonder, just pure magic to read aloud, with lots of details for little kids to find in the pages. And if you want a Christmas story to read on a long chilly evening, Holly and Ivy tells the story of a little orphaned girl, and a little unloved doll, and a couple without any children who all find each other and are happy when Christmas comes. It's a longer book, with full pages of Rummer Godden's beautiful text, and takes about an hour to read out loud from cover to cover.

Maurice Sendak

Where the Wild Things Are is perhaps one of the most loved children's books. It's a little weird, and a little scary, but it is written and designed with incredible skill. I like his writing too, but most of these books I'm suggesting are ones he illustrated for other authors. A Hole is to Dig by Ruth Krauss is a book of imaginative, playful definitions of everyday things such as mashed potatoes are "to give everybody enough" and the ground is "to make a garden." It's wonderful, and Sendak's pen and ink illustrations are hilarious. Nutshell Library is a set of four tiny books. I know the books are also nice (Chicken Soup with Rice, One was Johnny, etc.) but I remember especially loving how perfectly little the books were. The Little Bear books by Else Holmelund Minarik are less picture books and more "I can read" style, but they are utterly charming. Sendak's animals are more life-like and less surreal than in some of his other books, but with no less personality. If you prefer the weird side of Sendak's illustrations, let me recommend the Christmas classic, The Nutcracker by E. T. A. Hoffman. The pictures are strange, even grotesque, but profoundly fitting for the strange little fairytale.

 

Chris Van Allsburg

Chris Van Allsburg's favorite letter from a child is this, "Dear Mr. Van Allsburg, I love the books you write. I am so glad your books are so weird because I am very weird. I think you are weird but great. I wish a volcano and a flood could be in my room when I am bored." 

Best known for The Polar Express, Chris Van Allsburg's drawings and paintings are intricately detailed, but always just a little off. Perhaps a cathedral with every arch and shadow perfect and precise, but the nun and her chair float 100 feet above the floor. My favorite are The Wreck of the Zephyr two stories in one, and a ship that might fly? The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, a set of enigmatic pictures and glimpses into stories we can only guess at, and which has been the seed of many, many writing projects, I'm sure. The Stranger combines an odd visitor with the changes of the seasons, and leaves questions tantalizingly open at the end.

 

Tomie dePaola

Tomie is known to many for Strega Nona, the tale of the old lady with the magic pot of pasta, but he has illustrated over 200 books in his career, many of them about Italy, folktales, stories of Saints and Bible stories, but also books for holidays and nursery rhymes. I'll share four of my favorites. The Art Lesson is a story from Tomie's early days in school, and the woes of only being allowed to draw with school crayons. It is funny, sweet, and an excellent read-aloud even for quite young children. The Clown of God is the only picture book I brought with me to The Netherlands, a book which tells a great deal about the connection between faith and work. It's a good enough story that small children (maybe 5 and up?) will get caught up in it, but deep enough that adults will keep coming back to it. Bill and Pete go down the Nile is one of my favorites from growing up, and to this day I can still remember Andrew and I chiming in with my mom as she read, "'ooooooo' said all the little crocodiles." Bill is a crocodile, and Pete is his "toothbrush" and together they save a giant diamond from the bad guy trying to steal it from the museum. The Days of the Blackbird is a Northern Italian folktale about a little girl, her sick father, and how a dove became a blackbird through kindness.

 

And again in a concise form without all the pictures and descriptions for easy use:

Ezra Jack Keats 

Known for: The Snowy Day

Other excellent books: Apt. 3, Peter's Chair, A Letter to Amy

Barbara Cooney

Known for: Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney

Other excellent books: Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran, Eleanor by Barbara Cooney, When the Sky is Like Lace by Elinor Lander Horwitz, and Holly and Ivy by Rummer Godden. 

Maurice Sendak

Known for: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

Other excellent books: A Hole is to Dig by Ruth Krauss, Nutshell Library by Maurice Sendak, Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik, and The Nutcracker by E. T. A. Hoffman

Chris Van Allsburg

Known for: The Polar Express

Other excellent books: The Wreck of the Zephyr, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, The Stranger

Tomie DePaola

Known for: Strega Nona

Other excellent books: Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile, The Art Lesson, The Clown of God, and The Days of the Blackbird

Hope you enjoy!