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/ . - B O O K S / . / B O O K S Why We Write About Books Caterpillar or The Velveteen Rabbit or Blueberries for Sal or Harry Potter or Pat the Bunny because we figured you don't need us to tell you that these are enduring works of art. You will also note a disproportionate number of titles by William Steig and Roald Dahl, and that is because we are disproportionately in love with the way they see and explain the world. Lastly, you'll find that we are heavy in the graphic novel department, but for a good reason: graphic novels did not exist when I was a kid, and I'm not sure I can ever forgive the world for that. There is, then, a certain element of vicarious living going on here and of making up for lost time. Any book list reflects the biases and tastes of the people who compile it, and I'm afraid ours is no diZerent. I hope that means you won't enjoy it, or trust it, any less. So: why do we write about books on Dinner: A Love Story, a website about family dinner? It's a valid question. All I can say is, we didn't set out to do any of this. I distinctly walk through all 121 of these books, one by beautiful one, and let the nostalgia pour forth. But I will refrain. Reluctantly. I will say, though, that any list of favorite books is inherently subjective, and this one is no exception. Our criteria here: we simply picked books that we loved most, and that we think have a better- than-decent shot of turning your kids into geeked-out book-lovers and readers, too. Because of this, you might note some glaring omissions and odd, obsessive-seeming tendencies. These are, for the most part, intentional. We did not include Goodnight Moon or The Very Hungry Esta Maude's Secret, a book that belonged to my aunt Jane before it belonged to me; in the sticky, Cheerio-strewn, crime-scene-ish backseat of our leased sport utility vehicle (I still have guilt-pangs about the ways in which we violated that car), as we deployed The Sneetches to stave oZ waves of Abby's unhappiness on our first real road trip, as a foursome, to see the grandparents in Virginia; in Phoebe's second grade class, reading The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip aloud to 21 kids, and getting to those last transcendent pages and watching the weight of that story's message sink so completely into those hungry little brains. Seriously, I could Brooklyn apartment with a nine-month-old Phoebe, as we read and reread Moo Moo Brown Cow until one day, her first word—duck!—just kind of magically leaped out of her toothless mouth; in our town's public library, as Phoebe brought over a copy of Meanwhile by Jules FeiZer, the book that would set oZ a torrid comic book/ graphic novel obsession that continues to this day, and that, with any luck, will endure for the rest of her life; in my old bedroom in my parents' house, with all the books from my childhood on the shelves, as the four of us laid on our backs on the bed and Jenny and I took turns reading Miss T H I S I N T R O D U C T I O N was hard for me to write. Not only because writing is always hard and there's a certain amount of staring-at-the-blank page and self-hating that has to happen before you can begin to put something coherent down, but because the books you are going to read about here are more than just books to us. These books are, as Margaret Wise Brown would say, important. They are, in many ways, the story of our life as a family, not all that diZerent in their memory-conjuring powers than a photo album or a diary or, God, one of those old home videos from when the kids were just babies and you had convinced yourself that, as exhausted as you were, you would somehow be able to preserve them this way forever. The books Jenny and I read to our kids carry that kind of weight for me. I can tell you where I was when we read each one of them: in a king-size bed in our hotel suite (free upgrade!) in Philadelphia, when Abby and I did a father-daughter weekend away, and we tucked into some Lemony Snicket after hitting the hotel pool and devouring the warm cookies they left on our nightstands; on the living room floor of our 1

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