See The Book. The Book is Good. (A little bit about Easy Readers)

I suppose I should move on from picture books at this point and talk about Easy Readers.  It’s harder for me to recommend a bevy of Easy Readers because I honestly don’t remember reading that many. My first concrete memories of reading to myself were from chapter books, which led me to suspect that I had almost “skipped” the Reader phase.

Easy Readers fall into that “in-between” niche of a child’s life, between having an adult read to you and fluently reading to yourself. A lot of children aren’t sure this is a smart move. So Easy Reader publishers tend to capitalize on trends: popular picture books, graphic novels, and movies are adapted into Reader form. A lot of the most popular Easy Readers are entitled along the lines of “Meet Batman,” “I am a Jedi,” series based on the picture books of Pinkalicious and Fancy Nancy. Therefore you can probably go through the picture books I’ve recommended and find a corresponding Reader. 

As a result, while I recommend a lot of those continuations from picture book to Reader, there aren’t that many independent Reader series that I remember enjoying off the top of my head. In fact, there are only three titles that come to mind:

Tried-and-True Babysitting Books

The cliché of babysitting is of teen-aged girls who park their charges in front of a TV and then commence raiding the fridge and calling their boyfriends. I always saw babysitting as an opportunity to read picture books, not just because I personally enjoy them, but also because it might share my joy of reading to a younger generation. When I babysit, there are a set of books I habitually take along, which have been tried-and-true to entertain and engage kids in the stories. I would suggest these books not only to babysitters, but to anyone who might have kids come and visit their homes (such as grandparents or other relatives).

Whenever I babysit, my go-to books are the following:

The Illustrious Art of Children’s Picture Books

I’m an adult, I read picture books, and I am not ashamed.* Picture book authors and illustrators not only have to be skilled storytellers (and keep the attention of some very attention-deficit individuals…and sometimes also their children, too), they have to condense that storytelling quality into very few pages. All the character development, relationships, plot points, conflict—in short, all the good storytelling qualities you find in an adult-length novel—have to be established in maybe a few dozen pages at the most. For that, if nothing else, picture books are to be commended.