Medical Bulletin: Making great progress. Walked 2 km today without using the stick. I don’t see the need to issue further bulletins. Thanks for all your good wishes.

I’ve been reading quite a lot of books this last couple of weeks, and doing a certain amount of thinking about books, and I decided this week I’d share some of those thoughts with you. I know that some of you are rather turned off by my musings on literature, but please don’t stop reading just yet. I hope this might be a bit more accessible than usual.

Let me first tell you some of the titles I’ve been reading, re-reading and thinking about: Inside, Outside, Upside Down; Five Minutes’ Peace; Meg and Mog; Grandma Goes Shopping; Where the Wild Things Are. Yes, this has been a fortnight of children’s picture books, and I must say it has been a real pleasure revisiting old favourites and discovering new treasures, and a double pleasure reading them to a totally absorbed and very appreciative listener and viewer, albeit one who knows very well what he likes and what he doesn’t. As the days have passed, I have found myself musing, not for the first time, about writing story books for young children. After all, how difficult can it be? All it takes is 200 words and a talented illustrator.

Well, the last month has given us all a painful reminder of the fact that not everybody can succeed in this endeavour. Even if you are a Hollywood actress, even if you are married to a prince, and even if you are a close friend of Oprah, you can still produce a children’s book that is a total embarrassment. If this has somehow flown under your radar, then I invite you to read The New Statesman’s searing review of The Bench, by Merghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex.

Almost all of the books Tao has here (many of them saved from Esther and Micha’el’s childhoods) range from good to brilliant, but one or two have me puzzled. I am always surprised how much Tao enjoys one particular book about a builder constructing a bedroom over the garage for a family with a new baby. The book could virtually serve as a do-it-yourself manual: it goes into details of laying floor timbers, mixing sand, cement and lime to make mortar, nailing rafters, laying roofing felt, and so on and so forth. We even see the builder giving the customer a quote for the job.

There is little humour to lift the story, and both the storyline and the prose are…prosaic. Yet Tao finds it fascinating. Of course, this may be because he already realises that it is very much in his own interest to acquire all of these construction skills as early as possible.

Thinking about the books that he and I both agree are well worth reading, I have been drawing a few conclusions, which I present here.

The most successful books are those that engage both the adult (usually parent) reader and viewer and the child listener and viewer. There are two ways to achieve this. The easier way is to interweave humour and interest for the child with humour and interest for the adult. We are used to seeing this in the realm of film with the work of Pixar Animation Studios, whose full-length films almost always combine two sets of content so that they appeal to parents and children. In a children’s picture book, with its inherent limitation on number of words, it is much more difficult to sustain both plot strands.

The more challenging, but more economical, way is to present a single set of content that simultaneously appeals, at two different levels, to parents and children. Jill Murphy’s Five Minutes’ Peace achieves this, by focusing on the relationship between a mother elephant who desperately wants to have a quiet, soaky bath by herself, and her three children who constantly demand her attention.

The dialogue in this book is pitch-perfect: Murphy captures with complete accuracy the speech of mother and children. This must help the child listener identify with the elephant ‘children’, and certainly any mother of three children, or even one child, yearns, like Mrs Large, for five minutes’ peace. The book is accompanied by illustrations that highlight the humour of the situation, and despite the surface conflict of interests, both text and illustration make it clear how warm and close the bond between this mother and her children is.

Of course, picture books do not need to deal with everyday situations. The only thing unusual about Five Minutes’ Peace is that the family are not people but elephants. The Meg and Mog series of books, on the other hand, are about a witch who is always casting magic spells, and her adventures with her cat and owl. I wish I could ask Tao what he enjoys about these books, since he has no conception of what a witch is. I should perhaps ask Esther, whose absolute favourite Meg was, but I doubt whether she can remember exactly what appealed to her at age two.

The illustrations here are very stark, lacking the softness and the domestic detail of Five Minutes’ Peace. They do not expand the horizons of the story, but rather illustrate with great clarity the core plot. The regularity with which Meg’s spells go amusingly wrong and the strong personalities of all three characters make the books enjoyable to read. There is a briskness and energy in text and illustrations, and the text dances all over the illustrations, making an excitingly integrated whole. The word count is about as low as it can be while still narrating a rich story without becoming incoherent. Where Five Minutes’ Peace includes 460 words in 26 pages, Meg and Mog, in 28 pages, contains only 230 words.

A different kind of surrealism can be found in Grandma Goes Shopping, a book that takes an everyday character in an everyday situation, and weaves a bizarre story from this. Finding that the cupboard is bare, and Grandpa is ready for dinner, Grandma goes shopping. Her purchases begin with an amiable alligator and include a bicycle made for two and a variegated vicuna. However, they also include a round cheese and a fish for frying, which means that, in the last picture, we can see Grandma and Grandpa sitting down to a healthy meal.

The text is cumulative – the entire list is recited after each new purchase – which gives the listener ample opportunity to become used to the strange items and obscure words. In parallel with this growing list, the illustrations are packed with the kind of detail that an engaged viewer will love. A mouse that is not mentioned once in the text nevertheless appears in every illustration in a completely different place. Tao also finds great interest in some backgrounds that surprised me. For example, he always spends time identifying the various vehicles on an overpass in one picture – a background that I don’t think I registered until he drew my attention to it.

Looking back, it seems to me that all of my selections so far have been British – some of them very British, so it only seems fair to finish with two books from across the pond.

The first is a Berenstain Bear book: Inside, Outside, Upside Down. In the unlikely event that you are looking for a picture book to teach positional and directional spatial adverbs and prepositions, then this is the book for you. If, on the other hand, you just want a fun book to look at with a toddler, then this is still the book for you. Its 27 pages contain only 66 words, which means that any reader is going to have to improvise. Fortunately, the lively illustrations give reader/viewer and listener/viewer plenty to talk about. Since Tao is fascinated by the concept of position, he loves this book. He is particularly fond of ‘under’, specifically in the context of: ‘How far do I have to push my cars under the sofa so that we will need to use grandpa’s walking stick to get them out?’

And finally, the book that I haven’t yet persuaded Tao to let me read him. He is, in fairness, probably not yet ready for it, but I can’t wait until he is, because Where the Wild Things Are demonstrates just how great an art children’s picture books can be. The prose sings; the pictures dance. The narrative speaks to children and their parents simultaneously. As Max goes deeper and deeper into the imagined world, the illustrations take over the page, leaving no room for text; as he is pulled back to the real world, the text drives out the illustrations again. Celebrating both the power of children’s imagination and the strength of family love, Where the Wild Things Are is a magical journey and a profound lesson for children and their parents.

Well, that’s 1490 words, so I’m stopping here (and keeping the other 56 books on my list for another time). I’d love you to leave your recommendations in the comments. We’re always on the lookout.

No videos this week, I’m afraid, but I managed to catch a couple of reading sessions.