Joe's Book Club

Joe is finally not treating books as objects! And he has favorites! That he will tear through his bookshelf looking for, while rejecting all the others. Sometimes he thinks that he might like Twas the Night Before Christmas, but he doesn't.


Open the Barn Door was the first book that he would actually sit through, and that he requested to read. It asks the question, "Who says ___?" and you lift a flap to see what animal makes the noise. It's ruined him for all other books featuring barns - he reaches for the doors and is frustrated that they don't open. According to these authors, goats say "meh."

Book #2 on the list of favorites is 1,2,3, to the Zoo by Eric Carle. It also features animals. Joe likes the elephant, alligators, monkeys and birds, so we spend most of the time looking at those pages. It's been temporarily rotated out, due to narrator fatigue.

Similarly, we read The Very Busy Spider muliple times over every night as well. It's also Eric Carle, and it also features a menagerie. Joe flips the pages fast enough to read the left page, which features an animal making it's signature noise, and asking the spider to do something (e.g. "Quack Quack," says the duck, "want to go for a swim?") but we skip over the right page in haste to see more animals, which is fine by me because the words on the right side are the same on every page ("The spider didn't answer, she was very busy." Between you and me, I'm confused about what the moral of this story is. I think it's that if you work all day, you miss out on a bunch of fun, but you get to eat and then go to sleep, filled with satisfaction of a Job Well Done. I want to know what the spider does on weekends, because all work, no play, etc.)

After we get through these, he can be persuaded to read Happy Birthday, Little Pookie or Hippos Go Berserk! because they both feature balloons on the cover. The pages of the books, are however devoid of the ballonapalooza that he would like, and he discards them after one time through. Balloon teases, they are. 

Finally, the book that we can get the most mileage of is Good Night, Gorilla. This book features keys, AND a flashlight, AND a zookeeper named Joe. The keys are the real treasure of the first half of the book, and it's kind of downhill, keywise, from there. I'm hoping to make a connection to the banana that the mouse drags around, because it's on every page, but so far it's not as exciting as keys. (Joe has claimed our spare housekey as his, and can't leave the house without grabbing his keys off the hook when I grab mine. It is a BIG IMPORTANT DEAL.)