Christmas Bookshop

Children take great pleasure in listening to stories, and there are some terrific books on CD . You'll find that these books not only provide you with an occasional break from reading (and rereading the same stories again and again); they also enrich your child's multi-sensory experiences with books.

Hearing a book read on CD helps a child see how the words on the page can come alive in a fluid, expressive way. It helps her focus on the sounds of words read without interruption and provides a model of fluent reading. Audio books also give her an important introduction to listening — a skill that she must master in order to learn to read.

Many books on CD have interesting sound effects, music, and multiple narrators that are especially motivating and fun for young children. Narrators on CD tend to embellish their storytelling with silly voices and dramatic enhancements. They emphasize reading as a source of pleasure rather than a skill, and make children eager to learn how to read. Beyond their sheer enjoyment of audio books, children also develop a sense of narrative structure and understanding of language. Stories on CD help them to grasp the rich and various ways in which language distills and conveys meaning. In addition, exposing your child to a range of narrators and their different styles of reading will deepen his grasp of the reading process.

Teachers often set up a listening center so that two to four children can listen to the same book at the same time. This can provide a wonderful opportunity for children to hear their favorite books read aloud again and again. The more they listen, the greater the likelihood that they will learn new vocabulary words. And, when listening with a special friend, the opportunities for playing creatively and acting out parts of the story are endless.

There is some debate on what constitutes children's literature. Most broadly, the term applies to books that are actually selected and read by children. Conversely, the term is often restricted to books various authorities determine are "appropriate" for children, such as teachers, professional reviewers, literary scholars, parents, publishers, librarians, bookstore personnel, and the various book-award committees. Anderson defines children's literature as all books written for children, "excluding works such as comic books, joke books, cartoon books, and nonfiction works that are not intended to be read from front to back, such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference material".In addition to genres--such as traditional literature, fiction, fantasy, biography, informational, and poetry--books can also be categorized by their various formats, such as picture books, easy-to-read books, illustrated books, chapter books, hardcover books, paperback books, grocery store books, and series books. There is considerable controversy on whether grocery store (particularly merchandise) books are considered literature. Included in this debate are comic books and graphic novels.


One example of this is Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, throughout which the word "nigger" is used liberally. Many people feel that the word's racist and discriminatory connotations make it unacceptable to use anywhere, and particularly in a book aimed at children. Others, however, claim that to call the book racist because of this usage is to miss its point; Huckleberry Finn shows an admirable black character who becomes the voice of reason for a cast-off urchin and a middle-class white boy. Peter Hollindale, the educator and literary critic, applauded the book as "one of the greatest anti-racist texts of all time" and T. S. Eliot called it a "masterpiece".

Parents wishing to protect their children from the unhappier aspects of life often find the traditional fairy tales, nursery rhymes and other voyages of discovery problematic, because often the first thing a story does is remove the adult influence, leaving the central character to learn to cope on his or her own: prominent examples of this include Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Bambi and A Series of Unfortunate Events. Many regard this as necessary to the story; after all, in most cases the whole point of the story is the characters' transition into adulthood.

While most children's literature is specifically written for children, many classic books that were originally intended for adults are now commonly thought of as works for children, including Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Conversely, some works of fiction originally written or marketed for children are also read and enjoyed by adults, such as Phillip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night, both of which received the Whitbread Award, which is typically awarded to adult novels. Also included are the works of J. K. Rowling and Shel Silverstein. Additionally, the Nobel Prize for literature has also been given to authors who made great contributions to children's literature, such as Selma Lagerlöf and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Often no consensus is reached whether a given work is best categorized as adult or children's literature, and many books are marketed for both adults and children/young adults.

There are a number of problems inherent in defining a class of books as "children’s literature": For example, much of what is commonly regarded as "classic" children's literature speaks on multiple levels, and as such is able to be enjoyed by both adults and children. For example, many people will reread Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or The Wind in the Willows as adults and appreciate aspects of each that they failed to notice when they read the books as children. Many critics regard such multiplicity as having drawbacks, however; an adult may see the darker themes of a book and deem it unsuitable for children, despite the fact that such themes will likely be lost on younger readers.


Another type of children's literature is work written by children, such as The Young Visiters by Daisy Ashford (aged 9) or the juvenilia of Jane Austen or Lewis Carroll, written to amuse brothers and sisters.

An attempt to identify the characteristics shared by works called "children's literature" leads to some good general guidelines that are generally accepted by experts in the field. No one rule is perfect, however, and for every identifying feature there are many exceptions, as well as many adult books that share the characteristic. (For further discussion, see Hunt 1991: 42-64, Lesnik-Oberstein 1996, Huck 2001: 4-5.)

Publishers have attempted to further break down children's literature into subdivisions appropriate for different ages. In the United States, current practice within the field of children's books publishing is to break children's literature into pre-readers, early readers, chapter books, and young adults. This is roughly equivalent to the age groups 0-5, 5-7, 7-11 (sometimes broken down further into 7-9 and pre-teens), and books for teenagers. However, the criteria for these divisions are just as vague and problematic as the criteria for defining children's books as a whole. One obvious distinction is that books for younger children tend to contain illustrations, but picture books which feature art as an integral part of the overall work also cross all genres and age levels (as can be seen with the Caldecott Honor Book Tibet: Through the Red Box, by Peter Sis, which has an adult implied reader). As a general rule the implied reader of a children's or young adult book is 1-3 years younger than the protagonist. (Counter example: Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, not necessarily written for children, but co-opted by a child and young-adult audience.)

Anderson suggests that literary elements should be found throughout all of children's literature. These important elements include characters, point of view, setting, plot, theme, style, and tone.

Anderson states that there are "several common themes in traditional literature" they follow along the lines of "Triumph of good over evil, trickery, hero's quest, reversal of fortune, and small outwitting the big," "Because one of the purposesof folklore was to transmit cultural values and beliefs, the theme is uaually quite apparent."