Short and bookish

As one of the dork persuasion, I am contractually obligated to love books. My mum read The Lord of the Rings to my sister and I when we were very young. I can only assume that she had an entire universe of lozenges to hand. Perhaps this is why I currently sport an Orc-like hairstyle.  

One moon to rule them all. 

I am chronically short of lozenges, so my daughters are treated to some less hefty evening reads. Here are some our favourites, as per a lovely suggestion from Kate Takes 5 and MummySquared :

1. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. About the night that Max donned his wolf suit and sailed off into the stubborn wilderness of childhood. A manifesto on how to face down parents and monsters alike with awesome belligerence.  
2. What Was I Scared Of? by Dr Seuss. A tale of spooky green pants, er trousers, with nobody inside them. Featuring pecks of snide, doubt-trout, and being nice to scary things.
3. The Snail and the Whale by Julia Donaldson. An apology for snails with an itchy feet, or as per the infinite wisdom of Tanta: the best way to explain wanderlust to the under-fives. 
4. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. If you can read this bittersweet tale of a tree who loved a boy without weeping, then you need to get new tear ducts installed.
5. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. The classic American goodnight book. Our copy, gifted by the lovely Auntie S, only retains structural integrity by a duct-tape thread. I consider I Took the Moon For a Walk by Carolyn Curtis to be the imaginative soul-mate of Goodnight Moon - complete with weeping grass, moon-shoes, and ghosts in the belfry.  

There is a pale bearded man who haunts these parts. He might be Santa or Odin, but he is lanky, chain-smokes, and doesn't appear to own a raven. He pilots a vast mobile library around on tiny pot-holey roads; he knows everything about any book under the sun, and hands out Bookstart packs like they are pure, magical gold. I reckon his RV is actually some sort of spaceship from another dimension.   

My favourite grown-up book, Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, features one library, two boys, and a flock of carnival bad guys. Naturally, the boys run to the library when they need to escape from evil. 

Libraries are wonderful places - especially in painfully-quiet neighborhoods like mine. I'm no expert - heck, I'm hardly even awake to be honest - but closing down libraries does seem a bit like binning cats to save on cat food to me.