Six Books for the Dog Days of Summer
Next I'm going to fly over the ice cream factory, just to make sure we do.
Deep dives on great picture books are here.
We recommend picture books here.
New shirts for sale on the Looking at Picture Books Shop here.
This week it finally got hot here in Oakland, California — the “dog days of summer,” a phrase I first started wondering about when I heard it as a young kid on a commercial for Comedy Central’s August programming slate but only just now looked up. I thought it just meant that it was really hot, but it’s apparently keyed to the constellation Sirius, and technically ended a couple of weeks ago — but tell that to the two dogs absolutely panting a few feet from my desk right now. So maybe we’re a little late, although our readers in the Southern Hemisphere will find that we’re helpfully early, and anyway I’m wearing shorts and still roasting. I’m telling you, it’s crispy. So here are some great books for hot weather.
—MAC
I’m wearing shorts too.
—JON
The Summer Noisy Book, by Margaret Wise Brown, pictures by Leonard Weisgard
The Summer Noisy Book is part of Brown and Weisgard’s cacaphonous, mind-bending Noisy Book series. The Noisy Books all follow the same pattern, roughly, kind of, but not really at all, because this is Margaret Wise Brown and she is going to do as she pleases. But basically here’s how they work — there’s a dog, Muffin, who hears all sorts of noises, conveyed by Brown with energetic and often surprising onomatopoeia. (These books give the adult reading aloud a real vocal workout.) The text asks children to guess what’s making each sound. Brown asks other, knottier questions too: What are those baby birds eating for dinner? Can Muffin hear a wild geranium bloom? Unlike many guessing books, The Summer Noisy Book is full of surprises.
The best parts of the Noisy Books are sections where Brown proposes —and immediately discards — poetic theories to explain some mysterious sound. In these spreads, the words and the pictures achieve a shocking and beautiful liberation unrivaled in picture books.
—MAC