Slate's "25 Best Picture Books of the Past 25 Years"

Jon and Mac consider: a bunch of new picture books, just this once.

Deep dives on great picture books are here.

We recommend picture books here.

The Looking at Picture Books Shop is here.

Below, we look at few titles from Slate’s “25 Best Picture Books of the Past 25 Years.” You can see their list here.

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MAC BARNETT: Hi Jon.

JON KLASSEN: Hi Mac.

MAC: Slate has asked us—indeed hired us—to talk about their big picture-book package, “The 25 Best Picture Books of the Past 25 Years.”

(Did you like how I called it a “package”? Did it make me sound like a Real Journalist?)

JON: (Not to me, but go off.)

MAC: As regular readers know, at Looking at Picture Books, we mostly talk about older works, a decision we made carefully, and for a lot of reasons.

And now we’re throwing that policy out the window.

JON: Just for a minute.

We will go back to it.

MAC: We will retrieve the policy from the lawn and gingerly pass it back through the window.

JON: Hopefully without learning any horrible new lessons out on the lawn.

MAC: First, maybe we should make some things clear.

Jon, did you and I create this list?

Is this the Looking at Picture Books list of the best 25 books?

JON: We did not!

And it is not.

It is Slate’s.

MAC: How did Slate make this list?

JON: They talked to other people! Lots of them, if Slate is to be believed, which we think they are.

MAC: Here is what Slate says: “To make this guide to the best picture books published over the past quarter-century, we surveyed more than a hundred authors, illustrators, librarians, booksellers, academics, and publishing pros.”

That’s a lot of pros.

Jon, were you one of the pros?

JON: I was not! They did not call me.

MAC: They emailed you.

I was cc’d on that email.

JON: I don’t read those!

MAC: So you did not fill out your survey.

Is what we’re learning.

I did fill out my survey, for the record.

(Did that make me sound like a Real Journalist? When I said “the record”?)

JON: (Yes.)

But wait! So you did help with this list?

MAC: I was but one pro among hundreds.

If you believe Slate.

Which, again, we see no reason not to.

Jon, do we, generally, “believe” in these lists?

Or even like them?

JON: Well look.

“Like” isn’t the word we’d use.

Our relationship to book lists is complicated. We have definitely set up this newsletter to avoid making definitive lists, or anyway “best of” lists. (We make a lot of lists, but I hope that it’s clear that they are collections of books that we like. We don’t think of them as “best of” lists.)

Our long-form close readings are not presented as “the best books.”

We believe that the picture book is a thriving literary tradition that has produced many excellent works, and we are going to look at picture books for as long as our time—and the ever-evolving structures of the internet—allows.

MAC: Yes or no, Jon.

JON: No, not really.

We don’t really like lists.

MAC: But were we happy that a couple of our books were on this list?

JON: It’s nice!

MAC: Yeah, that was tight.

When I saw we had books on the list.

JON: Yes 🙁

Hey Mac.

MAC: Yeah?

JON: As a pro who answered the survey that Slate sent out

did you put our books on this list.

MAC: Well first of all I am offended that you are so cavalier about the sanctity of my secret ballot.

Second of all, I did vote for one of your books.

But the one I voted for didn’t make the list.

JON: This is turning into a real O. Henry story.

MAC: So I was just at my local bookshop where a librarian, who was shopping there, overheard me talking about writing this post and expressing some skepticism of lists. She piped in and said, “I love lists! They’re useful. Sometimes people need a little help figuring out where to start reading. But ultimately you have to disavow the list.”

JON: What a handy thing for her to have said!

MAC: It happened! Today I am a Real Journalist!

JON: Can we, in honor of her, and her for sure existing, disavow this list? Here and now?

MAC: Not yet. First we gotta talk about it!

JON: OK. We, at best, have a complicated relationship with best-of lists. And actively avoid making them. And also actively avoid talking about recent books. And certainly see how talking about lists that feature our own books is fraught, especially when it turns out that half of us tried to influence the list by voting.

Why would we agree to comment—indeed be hired to comment—on this list?

MAC: Here at Looking at Picture Books, we’re devoted to the form of the picture book—to talking about how these things work. And we thought it could be interesting to look at a handful of the books on Slate’s list and see what they can tell us about the present state of the art form, or even its future.

JON: Good enough for me!

MAC: Let’s start with Du Iz Tak? by Carson Ellis.

JON: Sure! Mac.

MAC: Yes, Jon?

JON: Can we confirm that both of us were present, either physically or digitally, for basically the entire birthing process of this book that Carson (who is our friend) made.

MAC: I believe that is what we Real Journalists call “full disclosure.”

JON: Still though. We have lots of friends who make books.

MAC: And some enemies too.

JON: We’re not full-disclosuring those.

Anyway, Du Iz Tak? is worth the ethical (and social) limb we are crawling out on.

MAC: I will never forget when Carson sent me her pencil sketches for this book, in an email you were cc’d on and apparently actually read.

JON: I did read that one.

MAC: It was one of the most exciting picture books I’d ever seen. The sketches changed my understanding of what was possible in these things. It was as if she’d knocked down a wall in a house I’d been living in all my life, and there was a second kitchen back there.

Du Iz Tak? is the story of a flower sprouting, blooming, and dying, as observed by a set of nattily dressed insects.

And it’s told entirely in untranslated bug language.

JON: Even if the only idea in this book, in which there are many, many other huge ideas, was untranslated bug language, this book would be on a list, that we will never make, of best books.

I don’t know if this is why Carson did it, but I remember when I started writing my own books, I had to leave a lot of pieces out before I got anywhere. When I tried writing something that sounded like a “normal” picture book, it felt so scary that I immediately stopped. But as soon as I left out, like, a narrator and a few other things, I loosened up and could write.

Carson was like, I don’t even need any language at all. I just need sounds. Watch me do this with sounds.

MAC: But they’re not just sounds! Carson has invented a language, and she teaches us the language using the unique mechanisms of the picture book.

In a good picture book, the words tell part of the story, and the pictures tell a different part of the story, and there is fluidity and is even sometimes tension in the way they interact. This complicated relationship between text and image is the chemical reaction that catalyzed the form.

British illustrators like Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway made pictures for nursery rhymes that extended and subverted the text. This dynamic was codified and expanded in the United States by authors like Wanda Gág and the great picture book makers of the mid-20^th century.

The picture book is a young art form!

It’s not even 100 years old.

We’re still figuring out what this thing can do, how to make the words and pictures dance together. And in Du Iz Tak?, Carson figured out something new.

JON: The conceptual restraint and elegance of the visual setup as both a static and dynamic thing is such a kick in the pants.

The book is a “held shot” or a stage, but the scene changes. Players and time and seasons come and go, things grow and die. Problems arise and are solved. Something is growing, a few things actually, and this all pays off.

MAC: There’s something fascinating too about the way this book upends the hierarchy between adults and children. The grown-up reading this book out loud is placed in an uncomfortable position kids know well: struggling to comprehend (and pronounce!) an unfamiliar language, using letters that are recognizable but don’t quite make sense. To understand the book, adults must do something kids do so well: look closely at the pictures. By the end, miraculously, everybody is able to understand bug language.

Can we talk a little bit about Dim Sum Palace, by X. Fang?

JON: Absolutely.

MAC: I love this book. It’s about a girl named Liddy who is excited to eat at a restaurant called Dim Sum Palace. The night before, she has a dream (or maybe not—the text insists that Liddy was “too excited to fall asleep”) in which she visits a royal palace, where, in the kitchen, two giant chefs cook her into a dumpling and serve her to the Empress. Just before she’s eaten, Liddy shouts, “I’m not a dumpling! I’m a little girl!” Then Liddy and the Empress share a huge meal.

JON: I really love “permission slips” in stories for kids, where you get moments or ideas that might feel risky or dangerous if you didn’t surround them with context that allows them to happen, and Dim Sum Palace is so full of these. A kid gets to wander off to a castle by herself, get prepared as food and nearly eaten, and then stuff herself with dumplings. Because of the setup, it’s this hugely joyful time, start to finish.

MAC: Yeah, it’s a fun and expertly constructed book about food, one of picture books’ great sensuous subjects. And it’s also a reimagining of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, a rich and complicated story about a boy’s encounter with a trio of giant cooks and his narrow escape from an oven.

In the Night Kitchen was itself in conversation with comics, especially the work of Winsor McCay. (There’s a bit of Mickey Mouse in there too.)

Sendak’s book is invigorated by art forms outside the picture book—it’s one of the first picture book to incorporate comic book–style paneling, for instance, which is now a commonplace tool of picture-book storytelling.

Dim Sum Palace felt like a watershed moment for the picture book—whereas Sendak scavenged other literary modes for useful stuff, Fang found fuel within the picture-book tradition. Dim Sum Palace is a major work that stands on its own but becomes bigger when read alongside In the Night Kitchen (and it enlarges our understanding of Sendak’s story too).

JON: Yeah, even on its own, without what she’s doing in conversation with Night Kitchen, it really is so strong. The basic idea of the book is being super excited for something that is going to happen tomorrow, which would’ve been great on its own. But Liddy’s so excited that she kind of scares herself. It’s loose and spontaneous, and it takes strength to let that happen in your book and still control it.

MAC: All right, let’s look at Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut, written by Derrick Barnes and illustrated by Gordon C. James.

This is a book about going to the barbershop, “that moment,” in the words of Barnes, “when black and brown boys all over America visit ‘the shop’ and hop out of the chair.” And it is, as the title tells us, an ode.

JON: I had a kind of forehead slap reaction to this one, where it was like “Oh yeah! picture books can do odes!!”

And a good ode, like this one, still has an arc. It builds and rises and falls and has this great release as an ending.

But it’s not a story. It doesn’t need to be.

MAC: There is a narrative here. Something happens. A boy gets a great haircut.

Barnes and James treat the boy’s “turn in the chair” with heroic weight.

Which feels right!

JON: It’s affirming what kids feel.

MAC: Adults are often doing the opposite. We try to provide wisdom and context and experience but end up minimizing the magnitude of kids feelings.

JON: But this book is saying, “You’re right. You know. This is a huge deal.”

MAC: And this affirmation feels especially intimate because the book is written in the second person:

when my man is done with you, 
they’ll want to post you up in a museum! 
That’s my word.

JON: Yeah, one of the great gifts of the book is the wink that seems to be there throughout, but then is confirmed near the end, where it promises, in the same tone, that when you are done, the entire shop is gonna stand up and cheer, etc.—and then it checks itself and says, like, well, maybe not that, but they’ll WANT to.

MAC: It’s even funnier!

“They’ll look like they want to.”

It’s so qualified.

But the picture is of the whole shop giving the kid a standing ovation. So the illustration delivers that ecstatic rush.

Again, here’s that complex dynamic between text and image working to create a moment that is utterly triumphant but also imbued with this little hedge, this joke, that deepens our understanding of the narrator.

JON: And you can carry around everything he’s saying to you! It works! The whole way home people are going to look, at you, the reader, like they want to cheer—for you!—after that. For weeks, maybe!

MAC: It’s worth saying that the ode is one of the oldest poetic traditions, and here we see it morphing as it inhabits this young and novel form, the picture book.

It feels like every five years or so you see an article (in places like Slate, even!) declaring some crisis in the world of poetry.

“Who reads poetry anymore!” these articles fret.

Well, one answer is … kids!

All kinds of ambitious poetry are widely read and deeply loved by children. And the picture book doesn’t just sustain poetic traditions—it changes them, too. In ancient Greece, Pindaric odes were governed by strict formal rules—a tripartite structure, intricate meter. Over time, as odes moved from poems that were mostly performed to poems that were mostly written down, these rules changed and loosened. Ancient Romans and English Romantics adapted the ode to suit their own times and tastes. Modern poets have largely abandoned the ode’s formal requirements. Today, an ode is defined by an attitude more than rhyme schemes or meter.

But when you write an ode as a picture book, new conventions are introduced: The poem will be divided by page turns; its length is dictated in part by the picture book’s particular printing constraints; and of course, now the ode is conveyed with pictures and words.

In Crown, one of the oldest forms of lyric poetry, the ode, commingles with one of the newest literary forms, the picture book. There are fresh opportunities and also some ancient echoes—picture books are typically read aloud. This book is performed by an adult who reads, emotes, and turns the pages, just as Pindar’s odes were recited, sung, and danced.

JON: It also seems you can do odes ... to the ode, in an otherwise snappy text conversation! Cool thing to find out.

One thing our overlords at Slate asked us was if there were any books that were on the list that we didn’t think should be.

And my first thought was, I am not touching that one.

That was also my second thought.

JON: It was all of my thoughts, just smushed up.

MAC: But on further consideration…

JON: Ugh.

MAC: It’s worth asking:

JON: Is it?

MAC: Is The Book With No Pictures a picture book?

I think it is not!

And you know what?

I don’t think it considers itself a picture book!

And do you know why I think that?

It is called The Book With No Pictures.

The Book With No Pictures is written by B.J. Novak and not illustrated by anyone, because it doesn’t have any pictures.

Now, picture books do not need to have words—there are great wordless picture books—but I do think picture books need to have pictures. Otherwise we have to come up with a new name for them.

And a new name for our newsletter, which would be even more of a hassle.

JON: But that’s the frustratingly great thing about that book, though. He did something we would love to do.

MAC: Me especially.

I’m tired of these illustrators.

JON: Yeah, well, too bad.

But, if this argument holds water (and it does, if you feel like having it, I guess), he did make something that might not have a name yet.

It is sold alongside picture books.

It is the size of picture books.

It NEEDS picture books to work.

We as picture-book makers understand it, and are deeply jealous bordering on upset about it.

MAC: It uses a lot of the formal conventions of a picture book—meaningful page turns that advance the story one spread at a time. It is designed to be read aloud, by an adult, in about five minutes—a social occasion that exists thanks to the picture book.

But it’s a piece of prose, a portable comedy routine that an adult performs for a kid.

Look, it’s a great book.

It’s one of the most popular and most innovative pieces of children’s literature in recent memory.

It might be the first example of some new thing, some new way of telling stories to kids, one that is descended from the picture book, but is something else.

But for now, the book is sui generis, an example of the kind of experimentation that’s essential to children’s literature. (Childhood is experimental, so it’s only right that kids’ books are too.)

And that’s the problem, I guess. The Book With No Pictures is not a picture book. But also, it doesn’t really feel right to give The Book With No Pictures the No. 1 (and only) slot on Slate’s “Top 1 ‘Books With No Pictures’ of the Past 25 Years.”

JON: Nobody would read that list.

MAC: Slate certainly wouldn’t hire us to write about it.

JON: They’ll for sure hire us again for something though.

They’ll LOOK like they want to, anyway.

MAC: You know what, Jon?

JON: What Mac.

MAC: It was fun talking to you about this list. Maybe even useful, like that one Real Librarian said.

And now, we can disavow it.

JON: Way ahead of you.