Why “Reading Brightens Childhood” is a good book selection guide for young parents

Wel­come to the 2014 TOP10 Awards and New Book Launch Event


Read­ing Illu­mi­nates Child­hood:0~8The book “Par­ents Must Read” is com­piled by the edi­tors of “Par­ents Must Read” mag­a­zine in coop­er­a­tion with the Red Mud Read­ing Club. Its core part is2005–2014YearTOP10This book fea­tures intro­duc­tions and index­es to the short­list­ed and select­ed works for the annu­al chil­dren’s book rank­ings. It also includes tran­scripts of inter­views with numer­ous renowned domes­tic and inter­na­tion­al authors over the past decade on par­ent-child read­ing philoso­phies, as well as prac­ti­cal exam­ples of book selec­tion and par­ent-child read­ing. As the edi­tor-in-chief, I’m proud to say that this book is an excel­lent guide to book selec­tion for young par­ents. Why do I say that? Let me briefly explain.

A col­lec­tion of good books

As some­one who spends their days immersed in books, I’ve always stub­born­ly believed that if a book is tru­ly nec­es­sary, it’s only because you des­per­ate­ly want it and can’t find it no mat­ter how hard you try! A book not born out of such a need is like­ly a waste. “Read­ing Bright­ens Child­hood” was born large­ly out of a press­ing need shared by me and my fel­low enthu­si­asts. Unlike a decade ago, there are now an over­whelm­ing num­ber of excel­lent chil­dren’s books on the mar­ket, mak­ing book rec­om­men­da­tions for young par­ents increas­ing­ly chal­leng­ing. Young par­ents are always eager to get their chil­dren good books as soon as pos­si­ble, fear­ing their rapid­ly grow­ing chil­dren will miss out. There­fore, we need to pre­pare a foun­da­tion­al library of books with the nec­es­sary length, breadth, and depth for them to choose from, though it’s obvi­ous that such a library is unlike­ly to be per­fect or with­out omis­sions.TOP10The short­list­ed and list­ed works of the annu­al excel­lent chil­dren’s book list are the result of care­ful selec­tion and selec­tion over the past ten years.600There are more than1500There are many excel­lent chil­dren’s books to choose from, most of which have been reprint­ed many times since their pub­li­ca­tion and have stood the test of time.

Choos­ing a good book also requires guid­ance

How­ev­er, with so many books (no mat­ter how good they are) piled up in front of the book selec­tor, it is still a “dizzy” word! Where to start? New par­ents often start by choos­ing “books that are on the top of the list” and “best-sell­ing books”, but they often find that whether they are on the list or sell the best is actu­al­ly not very rel­e­vant to their own baby; slight­ly expe­ri­enced par­ents may start to search for book lists, look for repost­ed lists of famous books in var­i­ous groups, or ask around “what are the books for chil­dren?“27“What books can my child read at 1 month old?” “My child is a lit­tle timid, what books can I read?” “My child is obsessed with cars, what books can I read?”… In short, I began to con­scious­ly search for books based on my baby’s spe­cif­ic sit­u­a­tion. But even these ques­tions (such as what books to read at what age, and what books to read for the child’s spe­cif­ic needs) can be quite dif­fi­cult for expe­ri­enced book­worms like us. Defin­ing the appro­pri­ate read­ing age for a book is only a nec­es­sary tran­si­tion­al mea­sure, and “pre­scrib­ing the right med­i­cine for the right prob­lem” is by no means the true val­ue of a good book. But such needs are so urgent that in “Read­ing Bright­ens Child­hood,” we have spe­cial­ly designed mul­ti­ple guid­ance chan­nels to make it easy for begin­ners to get start­ed and for expe­ri­enced read­ers to rec­om­mend books to others—and to appear very knowl­edge­able!

Mul­ti-faceted guid­ance

Read­ing age guideIt is the most help­less, but it seems to be nec­es­sary, so I call it “tran­si­tion­al”. We will try to pro­vide gen­er­al pos­si­ble read­ing age rec­om­men­da­tions based on expe­ri­ence and cer­tain the­o­ret­i­cal per­spec­tives, as well as refer­ring to the actu­al read­ing accep­tance sit­u­a­tion. We will mark them after the rec­om­men­da­tion rea­sons for each book and guide them in the form of “min­i­mum read­ing age”, such as “2–6“Years” is placed in “2In oth­er words, if your baby is3Around the age of 20, you can refer to “3The books of “years and above” can also be down­ward com­pat­i­ble with “2Years old and above”,1Years old and above”,0“Years and over” because it is like­ly to con­tain suit­able books; and “4Books for chil­dren aged “over” or old­er may be more dif­fi­cult or chal­leng­ing over­all. Of course, this is not absolute, but only based on gen­er­al pos­si­bil­i­ties. Par­ents can make judg­ments based on the spe­cif­ic sit­u­a­tion of their baby.

Key­word GuideIt’s quite inter­est­ing, and while it might not be entire­ly accu­rate, it should be quite inspir­ing. The key­words for this sec­tion were ini­tial­ly draft­ed by Ajia and Car­rot Inspec­tor from Red Mud, and then grad­u­al­ly final­ized through repeat­ed dis­cus­sions and prac­ti­cal imple­men­ta­tion by the moth­ers at the Red Mud Chil­dren’s Clas­sic Book Study Group. Please note: While these key­words are divid­ed into pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary lev­els, they are not cat­e­gor­i­cal. Instead, they rep­re­sent themes that the aver­age read­er might ran­dom­ly asso­ciate with a par­tic­u­lar book. These are often relat­ed to chil­dren’s lives and inter­ests, rang­ing from objec­tive ref­er­ences to sub­jec­tive asso­ci­a­tions, from pure inter­est points to themes or gen­res that we might asso­ciate with when select­ing books. The entire process of asso­ci­a­tion was left to these moth­ers who love both books and chil­dren. I sim­ply sum­ma­rized and made nec­es­sary (occa­sion­al) adjust­ments, hop­ing to present a rel­a­tive­ly raw and diver­gent state of asso­ci­a­tion, which is actu­al­ly clos­est to the asso­ci­a­tions we make when select­ing books (rather than over­ly spe­cial­ized or the­o­ret­i­cal ones).

Sev­er­al oth­er gen­er­al index­es are also very impor­tant: read­ers canBook Title IndexDirect­ly find the book whose title you know rough­ly; you can alsoAuthor Illus­tra­tor IndexFind oth­er works by a cre­ator; you can alsoTrans­la­tor’s IndexCome to find books, because the trans­la­tor’s choice often con­tains some sim­i­lar inter­ests.

Chick­en Soup for the Soul and Oth­er Peo­ple’s Thoughts

The last part of the book, in addi­tion to some intro­duc­tions to the book selec­tion activ­i­ty, con­sists main­ly of inter­views with many famous chil­dren’s book writ­ers at home and abroad, includ­ing:Nao Mat­sui, Tat­suya Miyan­ishi, Leonard Mar­cus, Chen Jiang­hong, Chen Zhiyuan, Fang Suzhen, Zheng Mingjin, Zhang Xin­gru, Huang Naiyu, Hao Guang­cai, Zhou Yifen, Mei Zihan, Peng Yi, Zhou Xiang, Xiong Liang, Wang Yifang, Xiang Hua, Yang Zhong, Tian Yu,These light­heart­ed inter­views main­ly revolve around chil­dren’s books and par­ent-child read­ing. It’s worth read­ing them when you have time; they should be quite inspir­ing.

Oth­er arti­cles are select­ed from the arti­cle library of “Par­ents Must Read” that has last­ed for more than ten years. They show every­one the design ideas of some the­mat­ic books and the spe­cif­ic sta­tus of par­ent-child read­ing activ­i­ties in some fam­i­lies. I believe they should be of cer­tain ref­er­ence val­ue to young par­ents.

As stat­ed in the pref­ace and instruc­tions, “Read­ing Bright­ens Child­hood” does­n’t aim to replace read­ers in book selec­tion; rather, it pro­vides a help­ful ref­er­ence. We hope that read­ers will become expert book selec­tors by mas­ter­ing this tool. There­fore, I sin­cere­ly hope that after pub­lish­ing this guide, I’ll be able to find even more updat­ed and enhanced guides in the near future!
 

Ajia …
Writ­ten on2014Year12moon18Bei­jing

Appen­dix: Table of Con­tents and Sub­ject Details of “Read­ing Bright­ens Child­hood: Must-Read Books for Par­ents of Chil­dren 0–8”