Books: Encore!

When my girl loves a book, she wants to read it over and over and over and over again. My friend Alex (who really gets kids) says most kids are like this, that it's because they crave predictability. And that adults, mostly, crave novelty. This explains why I sometimes almost always skip every other page of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish and also why I hid that one Dora book under the bed two weeks after my grandmother gave it to Ingrid for Christmas.

But every once in a while we hit on a book that I genuinely don't mind reading as many times as Ingrid wants. We've had a couple of these lately: Books that sound and look beautiful, and that leave open some mystery.

My Name Is Georgia is the most recent one, and it is terrific. Told in the voice of the artist growing up, learning, doing what she loves to do even when the wind almost blows her over. We've read it at least twice a night since my sister in law gave it to us a couple of weeks ago. And it looks like the author/illustrator, Jeanette Winter, has some other great titles, including one about Emily Dickinson. Hooray!

I Am Pangoo the Penguin is like Velveteen Rabbit meets I'm a Big Sister Now. Ingrid and I are both loving the determined stuffed penguin—Absolutely! And the story (the favored stuffed animal displaced by new birthday gifts but, it turns out, still loved fiercely) is pretty resonant around here.

We've borrowed My Dog Rosie from the library at least a dozen times since we discovered it when Ingrid was just about one. It's a simple story, and the illustrations were some of the first that she really was able to "read", but there's still something in it even now that longer, more complicated stories are on the shelf.

And last, a true classic: In the Night Kitchen So absurd. So rhythmic. So much fun.

Which books do you ask for over and over and over again?