A Treasury for Today's Kids.(Book Review)

The National Review Treasury of Classic Children's Literature, selected by William F. Buckley Jr. (National Review, 528 pp., $29.95)

The first thing I ever read to my oldest child, now a spirited boy of five, was an article in Commentary magazine by Francis Fukuyama. Brendan was a baby then (a neocon -- literally!), his mother was away somewhere, and the kid needed a nap. No amount of rocking him in my arms, feeding him a bottle, or simply setting him in his crib would work. So I decided to read him something in what I hoped would be the soothing sounds of my voice.

The experiment was a success -- for about eight or nine minutes, at which point the boy erupted in protest. I'm a proud pa, and like to think that Brendan is above average in many respects. A part of me wanted to believe that he was listening to my rendition of Fukuyama and meant to quibble. ("The fourth paragraph contains a logical fallacy, Daddy.") Alas, the noise had a different source. There was a diaper to be changed.

The ritual of reading bedtime stories began in earnest some months later, with Margaret Wise Brown board books and the like. We've since marched through Mother Goose, Curious George, Dr. Seuss -- even Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: Speed Trap. Brendan now has a storytime companion in his sister Josie, a giggly three-year-old. Soon Patrick will join them; he's already received his first doses of Goodnight Moon.

Yet it was with some trepidation that I picked up The National Review Treasury of Classic Children's Literature. My parental forays into books without pictures on every page have met with what I will charitably call mixed success. Brendan once carried around a paperback copy of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan everywhere he went for a week -- he loved the cover illustration but lost interest in the narrative after just a few pages. We've resorted to a picture-heavy retelling of the old novel, plus the Disney movie on videotape.

So I am pleased to report something of a breakthrough. We're not talking complete comprehension -- the 44 stories and poems in this volume, mostly collected from St. Nicholas Magazine, a monthly children's periodical that published between 1873 and 1940, are aimed mainly at kids a few years older. The target audience, I would guess, is children aged seven to fourteen, give or take. There are pictures, but they serve as decorations rather than focal points. Kids may close their eyes and just listen to these stories (or do the reading themselves).

My own kept their eyes open and their mouths shut as we zipped through installments of "The Happychaps," a serial verse by Carolyn Wells about a faerie people who fall asleep during the American Revolution and wake up more than a century later to build a town called Jollipopolis. When we finished one of these stories, my audience of two would plead for more, in the same tone I hear when they want more pudding after dinner.