Pigeon Post

One of the most effective ways of creating an environment in which a child is likely to learn to love to read is to have many, many choices of books from which they can pick. Let them swim in a sea of books. The more books there are, the more likely that there is at least one which will grab their fancy. It only takes a few sparks to kindle the fire and the more kindling you have lying around, the more likely the blaze is to take hold.

Why buy books in the first place? They are expensive, they take up space, they are subject to being torn up, etc., etc.

To a true book lover, this is almost a heretical question. Beyond all the pragmatic answers though (you need a core of books to which you can reliably turn at any time, books that will be re-read many times are natural candidates for purchase, and so on), there is, at the core of it, the desire of a child to have and to hold that which is dear to them. After perhaps a favorite stuffed toy, a favorite blanket, I suspect the next most common childhood beloved possession is a treasured book.

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one. - Augustine Birrell

A room without books is like a body without a soul. - Cicero

Budget

I like the Dutch philosopher (1469 - 1536) Erasmus' perspective - "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes." However, we are not all in a position to pursue Erasmus's strategy.

There is a cascade of affordability that shapes what fits your budget. For most people, the local library is the primary foundation on which to build a personal collection. You check out many volumes of books and have them lying around for sampling. Those that get read repeatedly and checked out again and again, become candidates for purchase.

Next most affordable is to find the books you are seeking at used bookstores. Across the country there are a small handful of used book stores that focus primarily on children's books, but usually you will find in any major city a couple or three really good used book stores which also have a good selection of children's books. Don't overlook library sales as a source of children's books; if you know what you are looking for (particular titles, authors or genres), you can often find a bagful for startlingly low prices. You just have to keep a sharp eye on the quality (torn pages, etc.).

One of the real pleasures of scouting used book stores is the surprises that are guaranteed to surface. Robert Graves a children's author? Keep your eyes open for The Green Book. How about Ian Fleming of James Bond fame? He was the author of Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang! There are all sorts of surprises out there.

If you are going to buy new books, you still have the decision of what form the books should take.

Form

Typically among children's books, particularly classics, there are two sets of issues - Physical Form and Edition.

Under the rubric of physical form you have an ascending order of durability; paperback, turtleback bindings, board-books, hardback, and library binding. Turtle-back bindings are basically reinforced paperbacks. The cost of books rises from cheapest at paperback (the least durable) to most expensive at library binding (the most durable).

Board-books are children's books rendered on small format hard cardboard pages that are usually reasonably resistant to infant abuse. This is an interesting form. There are a good number of books that were originally released in standard paperback or hardback versions that I think are especially good for the very youngest of children in board book format. Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny, Good Dog, Carl, etc. The traditional format books are nice because they are bigger and take up more of a child's visual horizon. There is something though, about board books, to which every infant I have ever read to, seems to respond to - perhaps it is that it is a size for them to reach out to clasp. Or perhaps it is that they fit into the mouth of a teething child. We have a good number of well loved and thoroughly gnawed board books lying around.

Where in the continuum of durability it makes sense to invest, depends on some further heritage issues.

Heritage

How big a family do you have or are you anticipating? A single child? Then you probably can get away with mostly paperbacks. If they end up having a number of favorites that get dragged all over creation, you can upgrade those on an individual basis to hardbacks.

If, on the other hand you have or anticipate having multiple children, it probably makes most sense, if you can afford it, to go ahead and buy hardbacks for the classics and the favorites of your own childhood. The price differential between a paperback and a hardback is such that you are better off buying a single more expensive hardback edition that will survive being handed from one to another child than to have to replace a paperback that ends up being loved to death.

Because children's book publishing is quixotic in the extreme, there is little way of predicting whether a book your children have loved will still be in print twenty years from now. Online internet searches make it feasible to find just about any kind of book but the condition and price might be a shocker.

Editions

Once you have an idea as to what form of binding is going to make sense, then you have a few more decisions to make, or at least to be aware of. Some of the things to watch out for are:

• Bi-lingual editions - Many classic books are now being rendered into bilingual versions. This is great if your child is learning a second language and you intentionally buy it for the bilingual text. It is frustrating if you are not aware that you are buying a bilingual edition.

• Pop-up editions - These are usually pretty obvious. Some kids love them. I am not particularly enthusiastic about pop-ups and they often have a pretty short half-life. You might want to try out a couple with your kids, but my general recommendation would be to use your money on real books.

• Publishers frequently release old classics on anniversary occasions (e.g. fiftieth anniversary of first publication). That is great if that is all they do. However, they frequently end up doing specially packaged editions with a stuffed toy or some other items packaged up with the book. It's up to you - I have always told our kids I buy toys in a toy store and books in a book store.

• Abridged and bowdlerized editions - This is where it begins to get especially tricky and you need to keep a particularly sharp eye open. Abridged editions typically are shortened in some way to make it "easier" for a contemporary child to read. This change might encompass the simple excision of certain passages, characters or even whole chapters. Sometimes it extends to changing a few words that are now considered objectionable or archaic. Sometimes, the story is basically retold in a shorter "crisper" form with more contemporary language.

In general I am reasonably opposed to abridgements and simplified retellings. I am especially inclined to steer clear of the versions that pander to contemporary fads, by changing the language so that it is less classist, sexist, or racist or whatever the perceived source of injury might be. This is just a bit precious - our children are capable of reading these stories in their original form without becoming prejudiced homophobic, misogynistic, racists. Far better, from my perspective, is to read the original text and discuss what it is that has changed and why such phrases or attitudes may no longer be acceptable than to simply try and airbrush it out of history.

So look closely for signs that a book is an abridgement or has been subject to new editing.

There are a couple of variations on abridgement which actually serve a worthwhile purpose and you might want to consider. The first is when a story is retold in briefer more contemporary language to allow a much younger reader to enjoy the story earlier than their reading skills might allow. For example, The Adventures of Gulliver is a fairly sophisticated text with some archaic stylings and language. A firm reading of it is probably not feasible before 8th or 10th grade. But it is a great story and there are a number of abridgements designed to be read by 4th or 5th graders. To me an abridgement that enables an earlier reading and helps prepare a child to read the more sophisticated version later can be useful but a dumbed down text targeted at an older reader is of questionable value. The challenge is that there are a lot more attempted abridgements for younger readers than there are successful abridgements for younger readers.

The second variation is akin to this and that is the rendering of some classic in a graphic format. I am inclined towards a catholic attitude towards reading - most everything is fair game. When I was coming up, I recall reading Junior Classics, a series of comics that were graphical renditions of children's classics. I read all that I could lay my hands on and enjoyed them thoroughly. Many I went on later to read in their original form. For some books, my only knowledge of that title is that which I recall from that early comic book version. I am comfortable with the thought that a little flawed knowledge is better than no knowledge at all.

• Finally, beware of editions that are re-releases of books published before 1923. These are books that are now out of copyright and therefore subject to some rough editorial man-handling. Most publishers are pretty respectful and keep things as they were but it is not uncommon to do some bowdlerizing of language or to bestow a jazzier, more contemporary title.

Accentuate the Positive

This is just a personal bias on my part but it is certainly an issue we have encountered raising our children in the current book publishing environment. There is a plethora of books that to my way of thinking, are just plain faddishly self-indulgent, shallowly hectoring, special pleading, transparent attempts by the author to take some moral high road at the expense of history and current readers. Read through any list of prize winners, books reviewed in publishing industry magazines, etc. and you are quickly struck by the sheer volume of books that are focused on racism, social dysfunction, abuse in various forms, historical inequities, perceived injustices, etc.

Please do not mistake my criticism. These are all fair issues and there are certainly circumstances where as a parent you might want or need to focus on alcoholism, drug addiction, AIDS, etc. No, my issue is simply the preponderance of these tomes.

I am not of the school that believes a child is forever tainted by what they read. I think they are more robust than that. On the other hand, an unremitting diet of negativity, defeatism, victim glorification, and caustic skepticism cannot but help jade a young mind.

Consequently, one of the goals of Through the Magic Door is to identify those books that are inherently positive or constructive while being great reads: classic books which are compelling and sometimes humorous stories in and of themselves, but which when read by different readers, or read for a second or third time, reward each reader and each reading with a new idea or theme to consider. If there is a serious issue to be addressed, these books set it within the context of a well told story with many layers rather than by hitting the reader over the head with a moralistic point.

Again, this is not to say that some of these books have no place in a well-stocked personal library; just in moderation.

Message Books

Related to the idea of accentuating the positive, there is an additional issue of the past twenty or thirty years of which to be mindful. There is a very large cadre of "Message Books". These are basically books where platitudinous statements are strung together as a substitute for actually writing an engaging story. They are almost always aimed at some simplified singular idea: potty training, starting school, moving house, bullying, death, etc.

There are a few series which address these themes with some modicum of storytelling capacity and are useful to use with kids. The Berenstain Bears and the Franklin series spring to mind. There are many, many more that are simply a waste of good paper and of your child's time.

Again, there can be legitimate issues that you want to address with your children, but our position is that it is far better to do so by finding a book whose story is so engaging that your child is gripped by the tale and that within the context of that story it happens to also address the particular issue.

Logistics

Ouch! Every book lover you might know has encountered this one. Where do you put all those books. Once the bug has bitten and if you can afford to buy books plentifully you soon encounter the limits of space, even in the large houses that have become so common over the past thirty years.

The obvious answers (aside from move to a larger house) are to increase the density of books in any given room (more bookshelves) and expand the number of rooms that are candidates for holding books (bedrooms certainly, the den, the recreation room, and nooks and crannies of most other rooms).

I have reached that stage in life where the house has effectively been filled almost as full as it can be with books. I have purchased some additional time by renting a storage unit, but that is a temporary salve. I know I am going to have to become a more imaginative space manager. I sometimes feel like Elizabeth Brown in Sarah Stewart's The Library.

Sarah Stewart, The Library

Books were piled on top of chairs
And spread across the floor.
Her shelves began to fall apart,
As she read more and more.

Big books made very solid stacks
On which teacups could rest.
Small books became the building blocks
For busy little guests.

When volumes climbed the parlor walls
And blocked the big front door,
She had to face the awful fact
She could not have one more.

Aesthetics

Especially for young children, but applicable to all - Never underestimate the value of beautiful and detailed illustrations. There is an unfortunate over-abundance of children's books illustrated in some style derivative of South Park - a commercially cheap mutant fusing of Introduction to Geometry with Drawing 101.

Innovation and a wide variety of styles has its place but particularly for young children, before they are able to conceptualize about text and words, they are able to "read" pictures and the closer those pictures align with their world and the more detail there is for them to explore, the more engaged they tend to be with the story itself. Even into the independent reader/chapter book years, the aesthetic value of beautiful illustrations is an important contributor to the enjoyment of a book by both child and adult.

Beyond the run of the mill, well produced books, there are also a number of publishers who specialize in producing top-notch, high quality books with a very high aesthetic index. I am thinking of such publishers as the Folio Society and David R. Godine. Some of their catalogue is quality renditions of old favorites such as Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, etc. Sometimes not only is the quality of the publication of value but also the selection itself, resurrecting old favorites that have not been in print for years or decades.

I am an enthusiastic buyer of books from these publishers, however, most children are not well-equipped to treat these beautiful books with the respect that they warrant. These are books for you, not necessarily for your child.

Reading Ability

Hitch Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover. from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Don't Panic!

The wonderful variability and individuality of children shows up in many ways, not least in their reading capability. Where you can help the most is by inculcating the desire to read - by reading to them, talking with them, singing with them, by being seen to read, etc. When they have the desire, they will figure out how to read. It is easy to get caught up in the endless pedagogical debates about whole word versus phonics; to so closely monitor reading ability that you end up conveying the unintended message that reading is solely a skill to be accomplished, a task; to be so concerned about what they are reading compared to their peers and injecting the message that it is a race or competition.

We will cover reading ability in more detail in a later Pigeon Post essay but remember - Don't Panic!

Letting Go

One of the pleasures of being a parent is introducing your child to stories that you enjoyed as a child or even stories that you had wished to read as a child but for some reason never got to.

But this trip down memory lane is sometimes fraught with disappointment. As I have been emphasizing in this essay, children are their own people. There is a certain symmetry though. What you enjoyed they may not, and certainly what they enjoy you may not.

Of all my childhood books that I have introduced to our three kids, probably 90% have been a hit with at least one. That sounds pretty good except that I thought all of them would like all of the books. Ah well.

Selecting Books

In summary:

• Have lots of books, magazines, newspapers, comics (all the old-fashioned stuff) lying around.
• Let your child choose what he or she wants to read with as much latitude as possible.
• Make sure there is a range of reading materials ahead and behind their nominal age.
• Don't worry about how well they are reading, focus on making sure they love to read. • Accentuate the positive.
• Pick books that have beautiful, detailed illustrations and are fun to look at.

Suggestions for starting out are contained in a couple of booklists:

Nursery Starter Library

American Expatriates

In every place and every time throughout history, the long term success of society has depended upon the family (variously defined); that intense crucible where new citizens are born, formed, raised and forged. As much attention as has been paid over the years, at least since Caesar Augustus, to the importance of the family and of family values, there actually is relatively little information about how the socialization process occurs or how it can be best achieved. It is the last frontier of the gifted amateur in which we are all qualified.

What are the many steps in the course of eighteen years that carry you from a start with a proto-Neanderthal bundle of inarticulate emotion to a sentient, reasonable, polite individual focused on improving his lot and that of his friends, neighbors and countrymen, and able to express respect for all the unknown strangers that come into his life? No-one has that well mapped out but there is a lot of speculation and free advice along the way. Given what you start with and the challenges from a not-always-sympathetic and, indeed, sometimes hostile external environment, I think the effectiveness of parents raising their children is one of the hugely un-acknowledged miracles of our times.

It seems almost irreverent to think of the family as a socialization process; it is way too personal and fun for that, and yet, for better or worse, that is the outcome. We know when it doesn't work, and often have a pretty good idea as to why it doesn't work. It is a little harder to know when the process has worked or to say what makes it work better.

I once read somewhere that everyone in the US has the power to never be in poverty. All that you have to do is 1) graduate high school, 2) marry, and 3) get and keep a job, any job. There are virtually no high school graduates that are married and employed that are in poverty. Sounds like a straightforward formula. How hard can that be?

Well, pretty hard it would appear.

Clay Shirky made an observation a number of years ago which I think encapsulates the dilemma reasonably well. He said that "Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality." Accepting this clarifies then the mission of the family in raising a child - helping them to understand and make choices.

The beauty of it is that this process is mostly unconscious and often terrifically fun. The benefits are not one way either, from parent to child. With the freshness of their eyes and the blank slate of their minds ("before the dark of reason grows" Betjeman) it is usually quite frequent that as you are explaining something to them, they are asking the questions that you never got around to asking yourself as a child. Children force you also to look at the world with new eyes.

First you teach them to communicate. Then you begin to fill them with knowledge and facts. Then you begin to work with them to understand how to interpret those facts. Then to predict based on that interpretation. Then, finally, to begin to understand the fallibility of facts, reason and, most especially, of prediction. Because the world is not a mechanical place where A always leads to B, we fill in the gaps with our faith, our morals, and our sense of civic responsibility, our ethics. And this is where it gets wonderfully and intriguingly complicated.

It is fun playing around with facts and getting kids to understand them. We once asked our three kids (at that time probably three, five and seven) to explain why it was that, if one in five people on earth is Chinese, none of the five of us was Chinese. It is a real pleasure to see them working through the exact meaning of words and the light beginning to go on.

As they slip more and more out of our sheltering and direct influence, (beginning school, playing with neighbourhood kids, off to camp, etc.), they are of course exposed to an ever greater diversity of values and opinions. I reckon that you have six to ten years to establish the foundation of values and beliefs that will shape their interpretation of the external world and how they choose to interact with it. What are their obligations to family, friends, countrymen, fellow man? What should, or more importantly can, they expect from their fellow man? What are their rights, their obligations?

The check lists are easy - the Ten Commandments, the Boy Scout oath, the Golden Rule, the rules of sports, etc. That is just a matter of exposure and memorization. The challenge is in the interpretation and application. It is the ability to make appropriate choices in every-day life that represents real growing up.

In the midst of all this learning from parent, from experience and from stories, it has struck me over the years just how fruitful our language is with what, fundamentally, are little bits of ethical code masquerading as idioms and adages. Some of these adages are just useful rules of thumb; some are important ethical decisions. I don't know whether you experience it in your household, but we certainly do in ours: a number of adages that get repeated ad nauseum.

• First things first (homework before games, dinner before desert, etc.)
• Focus
• Look before you leap (watch out, plan ahead)
• The early bird gets the worm (hurry up)
• Cleanliness is next to godliness (clean your room)
• Andre volk, andre art (a Swedish phrase from my childhood, "other people, other ways" to explain why someone else has made a decision that seems both self-defeating as well as contrary to the rules we live by)
• Share and share alike
• Slow and steady wins the race
• Do unto others . . .
• Etc.

I once gave Sally a delightful little book by Carol Bolt, Mom's Book of Answers (which is out of print but you can find something similar with The Book of Answers. There are probably three or four hundred pages, each with a single phrase which you will instantly recognize - it is as if every mom on earth is programmed to say these words. Some are adages, many are just familiar phrases. Sally keeps the book in the kitchen and often, when a child comes in with a request or question, she pulls it down and randomly opens it and to read the answer:

Q: Mom, can I have some chips? Random Mom's Book of Answers: Is there anything you've forgotten?

Q: I can't find my shoes.
Random Mom's Book of Answers: Don't complain; in the old days, we walked five miles in the snow just to get the mail, and that was before breakfast.

Q: Has anyone seen my homework?
Random Mom's Book of Answers: It may come back to haunt you.

It's kind of surprising just how often these phrases/adages work interchangeably. They are always the answer regardless of the question. They take on an almost cryptic haiku-like quality.

I think there might be an interesting study in there somewhere, documenting the frequency of adages used as well as comparing the nature of adages between cultures. In a pre-literate society adages are an efficient way to pass on critical information and wisdom from generation to generation and I wonder if adage-rich families/cultures aren't characterised by better adjusted and more successful children?

As if moving up the building blocks, from basic language to adages, you then have folk stories, myths and legends all of which are usually vessels for communicating information and rules of behaviour, but more often are built around the application and outcomes of such knowledge and wisdom. I mentioned in this essay about James Baldwin, the incredible richness of our heritage of folktales, not only from all over Europe but all over the world. Robert Bruce and the Spider, King Alfred and the Cakes, King Canute and the Tide, Aesop's Fables, the 1001 Arabian Nights, Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby - it is a rich well from which we can draw.

The books we have compiled here are a mixture of tales that you can use to plant ideas in the mind of your child or to serve as the catalyst to discuss a topic to help them explore how to behave, as well as stories that serve as models of how to behave and how to consider making decisions in a social context. Most of these stories allow the child to make the connection for herself about the values being demonstrated and the ways of interacting with one another and the benefit that accrues from those values.

There is also an incredibly dense population of books that deal with the individual in conflict with society and how those conflicts can be resolved. We have included just a smattering of those. The first step is to understand value and obligations with regard to society. Once those basic rules are understood, it then becomes a little easier to navigate the more difficult exceptions and the issues of societal right and wrong which we will address in a future Pigeon Post and book list.

Picture Books

Thomas the Tank Engine by Rev. W. Awdry Highly Recommended

Goops and How to Be Them by Gelett Burgess Suggested

Maybelle the Cable Car by Virginia Lee Burton Recommended

The Yellow Star by Carmen Agra Deedy and illustrated by Henri Sorensen Highly Recommended

The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln and illustrated by Michael McCurdy Recommended

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and illustrated by Christopher Bing Recommended

What Do You Do, Dear? by Sesyle Joslin and illustrated by Maurice Sendak Highly Recommended

What Do You Say, Dear by Sesyle Joslin and illustrated by Maurice Sendak Highly Recommended

Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss Recommended

Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss Recommended

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss Highly Recommended

Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss Recommended

Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss Recommended

Independent Readers

Fifty Famous People by James Baldwin (Not available from Through the Maigc Door. Click the link to go to Yesterday's Classics)

Fifty Famous Stories Retold by James Baldwin (Not available from Through the Maigc Door. Click the link to go to Yesterday's Classics)

Thirty More Famous Stories Retold by James Baldwin (Not available from Through the Maigc Door. Click the link to go to Yesterday's Classics)

The Children's Book of Heroes by William J. Bennett and illustrated by Michael Hague Recommended

The Children's Book of Virtues by William J. Bennett and illustrated by Michael Hague Recommended

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and illustrated by P.J. Lynch Highly Recommended

The Christmas Candle by Richard Paul Evans and illustrated by Jacob Collins Recommended

Cheaper By The Dozen by Frank B. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey Highly Recommended

Hoot by Carl Hiaasen Recommended

Beowulf the Warrior by Ian Serraillier and illustrated by Severin & Ian Serraillier Recommended

Black Ships Before Troy by Rosemary Sutcliff and illustrated by Alan Lee Recommended

Stop The Train! by Geraldine McCaughrean Suggested

Railway Children by Edith Nesbit and illustrated by C. E. Brock Highly Recommended

Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Recommended

The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene Du Bois Highly Recommended

Holes by Louis Sachar Recommended

The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder and illustrated by Garth Williams Highly Recommended

Young Adult

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens Highly Recommended

Lord of the Flies by William Golding and illustrated by Ben Gibson Recommended

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Isaac Kramnick & James Madison Recommended

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo Recommended

Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley Recommended

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Highly Recommended

1984 by George Orwell Recommended

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand Recommended

Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose Recommended

To have time travel, you have to have some concept of time. When do kids begin to comprehend time, its flow and its mystical nature? Based on my own sampling of three, kids come to a concept of time at very different points in their development and once there, have a highly variable engagement with time as a measurement system. One of ours knows the time to the minute, always has known and always will know exactly what time it is, knows who is supposed to be where, how long it is likely to take to get there and just how long it will take to do whatever it is that needs to be done. I have another who has to stand and think a minute to determine what day of the week it is much less where he is supposed to be, what he is supposed to be doing, or how long it might take.

Because of this variability, there is no easy way to predict when a child will begin to engage with a story that involves time travel, but once they do it is a fascinating room in the house of children's literature to explore.

There are a number of good reasons to encourage children to read time travel stories. Stories that take you back into time can be revelatory: "the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there." When read from this perspective, this type of time travel story, where the protagonist is whisked off to a different century, is not much less than historical fiction rendered vicariously. The reader doesn't read the history directly but reads it indirectly through the experiences of the time-traveling protagonist. But it is still basically history or historical fiction.

Related to this revelatory aspect (Is that how they did it then?), time travel stories help build the imagination of the reader. It is not just the facts of existence in the past but how those facts shaped what was done. Those facts help children expand their imagination about what it would be like to live in entirely different circumstances. And by building imagination, you begin to build the capacity for empathy. Louis MacNeice's poem, The Gloomy Academic, captures this sense of adjusting to a past as it was rather than as we might wish it to have been.

The Gloomy Academic by Louis MacNeice

The Glory that was Greece: put it in a syllabus, grade it
Page by page
To train the mind or even to point a moral
For the present age:
Models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity,
The golden mean between opposing ills...
But I can do nothing so useful or so simple;
These dead are dead
And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas
I think instead
Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists,
The careless athletes and the fancy boys,
The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics
And the Agora and the noise
Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women pouring
Libations over graves
And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta and lastly
I think of the slaves.
And how one can imagine oneself among them
I do not know;
It was all so unimaginably different
And all so long ago.

Time travel stories give children the power to not just learn more and imagine more but also open the gateway of contingency thinking. What would happen if X had not happened? Would there be Y today? The capacity to understand the nature of contingency (if this happens then that is likely to happen) is a critical milestone towards adult thinking and responsibility.

Related to this understanding of consequences and contingency is an increasingly sophisticated understanding of some of the philosophical complexities interwoven in the concept of time travel best characterized by the classical conundrum and inherent contradiction of a time traveler going to the past and killing an ancestor, the consequence being that the time-traveler would not be born in which case the ancestor would never be killed, and around and around. It's like giving the kids a Möbius strip for the first time and their bewilderment as they suddenly realize it only has one side.

It is only a short step from the mental exercises of exploring the logic of action in a time travel scenario to becoming interested in the physics of it. Over the years I have noticed how often many scientists have indicated a childhood interest in sci-fi and fantasy books. Their thinking got kick-started somewhere.

The mechanics of time travel in children's stories usually fall into four or five categories. The classic and one of the first, was of course, H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (published in 1895) in which the unnamed Time Traveler builds a time machine that carries him forward to different points in time. He does not travel geographically, just in time. When he returns, he returns to a point very near in time to his departure. Many time travel stories have this feature - regardless of the crowded events that might occur in their time traveling, they are not noticed to have been gone or have not been gone long.

It is of course not always a time machine that carries the protagonist backwards or forwards. Sometimes it is an incantation, sometimes some sort of a portal such as the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

The Chronicles of Narnia offer an example of another category, i.e. moving beyond time. Lucy, Peter, Edmund and Susan clearly travel to a different place. They must also be time traveling because, though there is a long elapsed period while they are gone, they return to the time of their departure. And yet they haven't traveled to a recognizable place in time. It is almost as if they have traveled beyond the constraints of time. Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is another example of this type of time traveling - traveling beyond time.

Another category of time travel is where the time travel occurs in the present; a different time comes to you in the present. Fog Magic by Julia Sauer is an example of this type of time traveling. The protagonist, Greta Addington, a young girl in Nova Scotia, Canada, finds she can visit an old fishing village, Blue Cove but only through the magic of a particular fog. She doesn't go to a different point in time, it is rather there for her to discover in her own time. In situ time travel as it were. Another example of this type of time travel would be Tom's Midnight Garden.

A variation in this category is some of those turn-of-the-last-century type fantasy stories where adventurers discover a missing land in which time has stood still. They travel geographically to a place where time has been arrested. Not time travel per se but pretty close. The Time Land Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs and The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would both fall into this category.

Similar to this type of time travel is a plot in which the author leaves it unclear as to whether time travel is occurring at all. The classic example of this might be the wonderful stories by L.M. Boston, The Children of Green Knowe. The protagonist, Tolly, goes to live with his great-grandmother in their family home. While there, he discovers three ancestral children from the 17th century with whom he plays and shares adventures. They are not ghosts, nor are they here-and-now children but something altogether other: the past sharing the present. Daphne du Maurier does something similar with her House on the Strand.

These are all wonderfully engaging stories and styles of time travel story telling. Some styles may appear to be more attuned to one child's tastes than another but once they have been bitten by the time bug, most children will happily read across all the styles.

Below is a potpourri of time travel tales. We hope you enjoy. Safe travels!

Independent Readers

Time Cat by Lloyd Alexander Suggested

Something Upstairs by Avi Suggested

The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks Highly Recommended

The House With a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs and illustrated by Edward Gorey Recommended

A String in the Harp by Nancy Bond Recommended

The Children of Green Knowe by L. M. Boston and illustrated by Peter Boston Highly Recommended

Stonewords by Pam Conrad Suggested

The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper Highly Recommended

Edward Eager's Tales of Magic : Half Magic, Knight's Castle, the Time Garden, Magic by the Lake by Edward Eager Recommended

Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer and illustrated by Chris Connor Suggested

The 13th Floor by Sid Fleischman and illustrated by Peter Sis Suggested

A Girl Called Boy by Belinda Hurmence Suggested

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle Highly Recommended

The Root Cellar by Janet Louise Swoboda Lunn Suggested

The Story of the Amulet by Edith Nesbit and illustrated by H. R. Millar Recommended

Bed-Knob and Broomstick by Mary Norton and illustrated by Erik Blegvad Recommended

Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce and illustrated by Susan Einzig Recommended

Fog Magic by Julia L. Sauer Recommended

Time Warp Trio by Jon Scieszka Suggested

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells Recommended

The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen Receommended

Young Adults

The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs and illustrated by J. Allen St. John Recommended

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle Recommended

The House on the Strand by Daphne Du Maurier Highly Recommended

A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain Suggested