I know! We have to get the sequels soon. I can't get enough of those characters and their foibles.

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane sounds like a wonderful addition to our library. Thank you. I have added to my list.

Don't forget "My Father's Dragon" by Ruth S. Gannett.

We are currently finishing up The Wind in the Willows. It is really sweet, and we particularly enjoy the illustrations of our particular book. It completely holds our three-year-old's attention. I am also excited to get The Reluctant Dragon by the same author. She loves dragons, especially when they are nice.

She is going to have to wait until St. Nick's Day (Dec. 6) for her next big book. She will get the next two books in the Toys Go Out series in her stocking, as well as some new easy readers.

Also, she is getting the My father's Dragon series, Abel's Island, by Wiliam Steig, Catwings, The 13 Clocks, by James Thurber, and The Minpins, by Roald Dahl, for Christmas. Yes, she did sit on Santa Claus and ask for more books. I hope these are hits. Thanks for the ideas!

We still try to hit one picture book a night, and let DD try to read a whole book to us, like Hop on Pop.

We also read the first chapter of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane in the bookstore a couple of weeks ago. I loved it, but I don't think she is quite ready for it. Although, we still talk about that vain little rabbit all the time. He sounds like a great character.

I've got a cool copy of My Father's Dragon. When I went to go buy mine from Amazon somebody was selling a library bound copy of the book that the publishers messed up an put the cover on upside down. So I thought that was cool and it was the same price as the other ones so that's what I got.

I also recommend A Cricket in Times Square by George Selden, the Amelia Bedelia books and the Boxcar children.

As a child I reread these books a lot (I listed them in random order), but since it's been awhile I may not remember if there's scary or mature content:

A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Little Women and Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott
The Black Stallion (and some of the series) by Walter Farley
Heidi by Johanna Spyri
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Funny, it had truly never occurred to me to read my DD4 a chapter book. LOL. Going to try Cam Jansen or MTH.

Funny how quickly they change! I wrote the original post back in August, and now she totally gets magic, and a whole range of things books can do with playing with what's real and what's not real. It's opened up a much wider range of things we can read.

We're still mostly sticking to the picture book section of the library (she thinks it's outrageous that a book wouldn't have a picture on each page). I recently read a distinction that's quite useful -- apparently there's a distinction between "picture books" and "story books," even though they're mixed together at the library. Story books are the ones that have an actual plot, with more text and more complex sentence structure and so on.

That's the leap that Hanni made about six months ago, which made me think we needed to start finding chapter books. But in fact I'm realizing that there's still a huge number of story books that we can tap into that I just wasn't even paying attention to six months ago.

Lauren Child has an awesome version of Pippi Longstockings. She plays with the text layout and added lots of pictures similar in style to her Charlie and Lola picture books.

All the EB White books!

The George and Martha series (James Marshall) makes a nice bridge between picture and chapter books.

DeeDee