My Children's Book List

[MargaretAnne]

Many years ago in the late 90s, a co-worker came back from lunch carrying some books that she had bought. She was very pleased and was very anxious to show them to us. They were children's books by Robert McCloskey, a Maine author. There were several but the ones that I remember were "Make Way for Ducklings", "Blueberries for Sal", and "One Morning in Maine." I was enchanted as I skimmed thru the pages and saw the illustrations. From then on, I began spending time at the bookstore in the children's book section. I brought a notebook with me and wrote down the title, author and publisher of each book that interested me. I spent most of my time at Bookland in Brunswick, but I also found some at Barnes & Noble, and a few libraries. I also found some on Amazon when I wanted to see if there were other books by a particular author. As my list was expanding, I starting entering them on an Excel worksheet. I had columns for the title, author and publisher. After many months, I began requesting books from my list thru Interlibrary Loan at the Maine State Library. Every Monday, I dropped off a request for books and they called me when I had books waiting for me. I picked them up at lunchtime or after work and I returned them, often on Monday, when I dropped off a new list for books. In the beginning, I requested 10 books per week but sometime later, I cut it down to 5 books. I have a total of 5,860 books on my list. I have read over 5,000 of them. There were also columns on the Excel sheet for the date received (when I picked them up), name of the lending library, city, state, zip, one for notes and the ISBN. I rarely added the ISBN unless it was a special edition. It would be too tedious and time consuming to add the ISBN for so many books. The library information was just a way of keeping track of the ones I had read. In the beginning, only a handful of libraries in Maine were participating in the Interlibrary Loan Program. A large portion of the books were requested from libraries all across the country, especially if they were relatively new titles and the public libraries in Maine had not yet had a chance to add them to their collection. Many of the books were mailed to the Maine State Library from well over 400 out-of-state libraries over the span of many years. Sometime later, almost all the public libraries in Maine were participating in the Interlibrary Loan Program, so it was no longer necessary to procure the books from other states. Not only that but the formerly new titles weren't new anymore, so the passage of time made it possible for them to be added to their collection. I stopped requesting them a few years ago when I needed to focus on things that were more pressing.

One of my favorite books is "Owl at Home" (1975) by Arnold Lobel. I'm not good at writing book reviews, but below is a link where it can be read online. It's an "I Can Read Book" - Level 2 with chapters. I've also seen videos of people reading the book. One I found showed the pages being turned with the illustrations only as it was being read but the text wasn't shown. Another one showed the actual book with both the text and illustrations. The reader went all out and goes to great lengths to be entertaining. He spoke with an accent when Owl was speaking. Everyone has their own style or preference in the way they present the story. I love the illustrations.

archive.org/details/OwlAtHome-English-ArnoldLobel

Here's the video of the man speaking in kind of a brogue when Owl is talking.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=rUZkNNyKm7Y