[edited by] Roger Sutton and Martha V. Parravano - A family of readers : the book lovers guide to childrens and young adult literature

Some years ago, when the Boston Public Library was considering closing a few branches, I wrote to the Boston Globe. To make fresh a point about the value of reading, I mentioned Bill Wattersons popular comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes. Remember, I suggested, how many times Calvin is pictured standing in gloomy half-light by the bedside of his parents, who are either lying there groggy, disbelieving, or are bolting upright, horrified. Whenever Calvin is alarming his drowsy parents, glance at the bedside table. Under the lamp. Youll always find a book upside-down on spread pages, half-read. Calvins parents are always in the middle of a book. Is it any wonder that Calvin has the cranial firepower of a Merlin, a Charles Dickens, a Steven Spielberg? He comes from a reading family.

The venerable Horn Book Magazine is eighty-six years old. When I first came across it as an undergraduate, the journal was only fifty-two years old (though it spoke with Solomonic confidence born of the convictions of its erudite editor, Paul Heins). As Ive grown older, it has grown young partly because its current editor in chief and executive editor, Roger Sutton and Martha V. Parravano, know that to evaluate contemporary books they are obliged to pay closer attention to contemporary life than earlier editors might have done. The world changes faster than it used to (or is that just me?).

Its grown young as Ive aged because children beginning to read are almost always young. A secret benefit of working on the sidelines of childrens literature is that access to the newest of childrens books is better than Botox at rejuvenation. Watching the dubious reader experience the nitroglycerine jolt of the right book at the right time is one thrill that never grows old.

The Horn Book Magazine is to childrens books what the Blue Book is to automobile assessments. (Yes, it can be wrong, too: inflated here, distracted there. But only often enough to keep its devoted readers on their toes, kicking the tires of recommended books for themselves.) I bet Calvins parents flip through The Horn Book at their local library, or maybe even have their own subscription. As a parent, I read every issue cover to cover the day it arrives. Maybe Im something of an anomaly but hey, so is Calvin. And I like that company.

Once upon a time, the more authoritarian of Horn Book editors including my dear departed friends Paul and Ethel Heins would have frowned at my choosing a comic-strip character as a thematic device to introduce a discussion about books and reading. Theyd have preferred a fairy-tale favorite: Cinderella, Bluebeard, Rapunzel. Or someone from the classic British fantasies Alice, Peter Pan, Pooh. Theyd have expected (or anyway hoped) that every family would recognize the names of those new-world kids Tom Sawyer, Jo March, Anne of Green Gables, or the Ingalls family of all those little houses in the wilderness.

And since they never neglected to consider what the latest wave of immigrants might be best able to appreciate, they might have suggested I draw on one of those picture-book masterpieces so often known by one name, the way children think of themselves: Madeline. Babar. Eloise. If I were to strike out, to dare modernity, Id be expected to turn to established twentieth- century heroes like Harriet the Spy, the Great Gilly Hopkins, or M.C. Higgins, the Great.

For me to instead employ a pint-size anarchist from the funny pages what has reading come to? How has the nations literary life devolved if, in hoping to speak to everyone in the room, I need to rely on a pop-culture figure?

Those earlier enthusiasts for childrens books were old-fashioned, yes, but not stodgy. They thought hard and well. After a while, theyd have understood. The worthy missionaries who stocked the libraries we frequented in our childhoods, who talked up new books into classics, these pioneers were not only keen on narrative and cunning on message. They were visually literate, too. Those Horn Book editors of the past would recognize that the book on the bedside table of Calvins parents might more likely be Charlottes Web or Monster or When You Reach Me than the latest bestseller on the New York Times adult list. That open book, caught in mid-story, might well be something that The Horn Book Magazine recommends with a starred review. After all, those parents were two-thirds of a family of readers. (Or one-half, if you count Hobbes, and maybe you have to.) Those parents were smart. They knew what they were doing.

Picking up this book, so do you.

Once upon a time, a title like A Family of Readers would have called up cozy images of reading by the fireplace Ma reading aloud, Pa whittling, the children listening respectfully. But today, debates about what qualifies as reading are as noisy as the concurrent fights over what can be called a family. In this book we have no uncertainty: a family is a group of at least two people who care about one another; by reading, we mean books. Right about now you may be sensing that this is a book that features informed opinions from passionate readers, not bland lists of dos, donts, and surefire recommendations. You are right. This is not a book for parents who badly want their children to read but are too busy to read for their own pleasure. Its for parents who wish their children would be a wee bit more understanding when Mom or Dad is lost in a book. If the thought of looking up from your dinner and your book and seeing heads bowed in pursuance of same is your idea of a good time, youre in the right place.

But your passion for reading isnt necessarily accompanied by a knowledge of childrens books, and thats where we come in. In A Family of Readers, we seek to provide parents and other interested adults with an essential understanding of books for children and teenagers. Grown-up readers can be a bit like the twins John and Barbara in P. L. Traverss Mary Poppins. As babies, the twins happily converse with the sunlight and the wind and the starling who visits through the nursery window until the dark day arrives when they respond to the birds greeting with gurgles and Be-lah-belah-belah-belah! Not only had they forgotten the language of the sunlight and the stars, but they had forgotten they ever knew it. Adults can be like this with childrens books, looking for utility or edification, and completely forgetting what drew them into reading in the first place. Given the chance, kids will read the same way adults do: for themselves. Dont think of books for young people as tools; try instead to treat them as invitations into the reading life.

That life can be a rich place, comprised of the highbrow and the lowdown, the casual and the ambitious, private reading and public sharing. As a parent in that landscape, youll need to be sometimes traveling companion, sometimes guide, sometimes off in your own part of the forest. A relationship between readers is complicated and cannot be reduced to such strategies as mandatory reading aloud, a commendable family activity whose pleasure has been codified into virtue, transforming the nightly bedtime story into a harbinger of everybodys favorite thing: homework. For more than eighty years,