Ode-athon: Maurice Sendak

My blogger pal Tony Laplume is hosting his first bloghop this week!  The Ode-athon is an opportunity to celebrate our favorite authors.  Care to learn more?  Go visit Tony either here or here.

via Wikipedia

Anyone who has spent significant time reading books to children knows both the joys and the pitfalls of children's literature.  One major peril for a parent is that while adults appreciate variety, small children thrive on the familiar so a favorite story will be requested for multiple command performances.  We're talking triple digits.  As a result, we come to dread even the treasured books of our own childhood.  For me, Dr. Seuss, Curious George, Babar and Frances all suffered mightily from exhausting repetition when our daughter was little.

There was one book, however, of which I never tired.  Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are is, in my humble opinion, the golden masterpiece of the medium.  While I liked the book as a boy, I grew to love it as a father.  The pictures are the easy sell for a kid.  But for me as the read-aloud parent, the text was miraculous.  Words like "he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year" trip off the tongue so effortlessly that each reading was a soothing pleasure. 

via Wikipedia

Sendak's magical hand touched numerous other treasured works. Among them:

• The Nutshell Library, the stories and illustrations of which would later become part of the Sendak produced television special, Really Rosie.
• In the Night Kitchen, a book frequently banned for perfectly innocent child nudity.  The Caldecott committee didn't blush.  A New York City skyline created from the items in a kitchen pantry?  Genius!
• The Little Bear series, written by Else Holmelund Minarik and illustrated by Sendak.  Our Girl first fell in love with the television series but the books are far better.  Little Bear's Visit is my personal favorite.

I found out about Sendak's death in May 2012 during my drive home from work.   NPR's Fresh Air, which had hosted the man four times, replayed highlights from his interviews with Terry Gross.  Sendak lived to the age of 83 and had been ill for many years so his death was far from surprising.  I still couldn't help feeling I had lost an old friend.  And yet, I knew that millions of people all over the world would celebrate his life that evening just as I planned to do, by reading his books aloud to their loved ones.  What better send off could a man possibly have?

Go check out the other entries in the Ode-athon: