The 65 Most Essential Picture Books

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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

The Atlantic‘s 65 Essential Children’s Books

I was a little confused by The Atlantic’s well-curated (and quite beautiful) list of essential children’s books. Not in the selections or criteria, but in the framing. The title is “65 Essential Children’s Books,” but the rationale is more limited in scope: picture books. From the list header:

“A picture book is a deceptively complex object: Ideally, it should be mind-expanding, psychologically astute, vividly illustrated, and—the most elusive criterion—fun. It must entertain the child without boring the grown-up to tears. And it should teach children to match sounds to meaning, pictures to objects, cause to effect, without feeling like homework.”

Which is terrific, but just call this a list of picture books. Early chapter books into middle-grade are still children’s books. I suppose leading and titling with picture books is worse for SEO or sharing or something? Just seems strange and unnecessarily imprecise.

A “Grand Tour” of Literary Burglary

I do not want to spoil this story of a mult-city biblio-heist that took place throughout Europe in 2023. I do not want to comment on its devious simplicity (replacing the stolen library books with high quality imitations) or the thieves’ deep knowledge of these repositories (that older books in some libraries do not have anti-theft magnetic strips in them because they can damage the books). Look, I have said enough already. Bookmark, save to PDF, email to yourself, whatever. Fun and dastardly reading.

First Book Plucked off The Black List

Crooked Lane has acquired Isabel Booth’s crime thriller Then He Was Gone for publication next year. This is the first book to be acquired from The Black List’s fiction program, which was an expansion from the organization’s screenplay identification and development activity. The Black List is a terrific resource for writers (now of page and screen) trying to get a foothold into two famously opaque industries.

On this week’s episode of Zero To Well-Read, Rebecca Schinksy and I get into Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s most famous novel, Never Let Me Go. It’s been 20 years since it was published, and let me just say that it still hits.

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