What are your Favorite Picture Books?

So, I have A LOT of picture books out from the library right now (there's a sampling of them above) but last week in my Children's Literature class we were asked to think about what makes a picture book great.  On Tuesday we discussed picture books and Thursday comics/graphic novels, and our professor asked us to think about what makes a perfect picture book, and also what are our favorite picture books and graphic novels, excluding Where the Wild Things Are and Hugo Cabret, which we discussed in class.  So, these are the books I ended up bringing in, and I even found my favorite picture book from when I was little on our bookshelf!

Picture Books:

My all time favorite book when I was little, that I remember looking at and reading all of the time was Nancy White Carstrom's and Bruce Degen's Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?

Some of my favorite spreads and pages from the book:

And this last spread here below, was my absolute favorite, I think in part because the light is so wonderful and magical and safe, but also because I was obsessed with The Little Princess film when I was little, and well still am, and I loved the idea that when she was asleep or when she close the door her toys came to life, and I remember thinking that about this page, that perhaps as I turned the page and Jesse's eyes finally closed, all of these toys would burst to life!

Here are my other personal favorite picture books which I brought into class:

Now for graphic novels and especially comics, that's a place that I have yet to really experiment a lot with.  However from what I have read, I do have some favorites, and some not so favorites, and I'll share the ones I brought into class that I really liked:

I absolutely loved this book by Eugene Yelchin!  And I put it here with graphic novels because it's toeing the same line as Hugo Cabret.  Of course it's shorter than Hugo, and thus has fewer images, but in this text the images play as important a role as the words, and as in Hugo Cabret where there are pages in which the story is only being conveyed in image, the same is true to Breaking Stalin's Nose.  And the illustrations that Yelchin has created are just so perfect for the novel, there's something so quintessentially Soviet about them, I felt as if I was bringing to life the moments of history I had learned about in my "Portraits of Soviet Russia" college course three years ago!  Also, I'm not sure if anyone else has read a book called Timur and his Gang/Team, probably not, but it's an old Soviet children's book, and I keep coming back to the idea that it would be incredible to see that text with Yelchin's illustrations!

 Here are a few more images from Breaking Stalin's Nose:

The other graphic novels that I've really loved (I really also want to read Spiegelman's Maus, I've heard about it for so long and haven't read it yet!):

So, what are you favorite picture books and graphic novels/comics?? What was your favorite picture book when you were little?

PICTURE BOOK REVIEW: Extra Yarn

Usually when I'm about to read a picture book, I flip through quickly and scan the images.  When I sat down to read Extra Yarn today, I once again flipped through and then I had some extra time, since my little brother was finishing listening to a ebook story, in which I found myself thinking about and realizing consciously that I tend to do this flip preview and especially today I realized that this not only gives me a sense of the story but I then enter the story in a special way.  

So although most people will probably not read/experience/see Extra Yarn in the way I'll describe below, this is how my eyes/brain/perspective viewed this charming, amazingly illustrated, quirky and modernly old timeish book:

So, here's the first spread (from Jon Klassen's website):

So first of all, flipping through, these are the things that stuck out to me: juxtaposition of stark images and wonderful color, a small girl in plain clothes and a dog, a boy in a Russian winter fur hat, village setting, flamboyantly dressed man, ocean, yarn, more yarn, wood, snow.

So before jumping into my somewhat outlandish reading, I want to say that this is one of the best picture books I've seen in a long time!  Text and image worked so well together, and I like how they placed the image on the page, and the whiteness is awesome because it just adds to the atmosphere.  While I was reading this together with my brother, I was totally inside this book, I was in the village and I totally bought that this magical and crazy unending yarn was there.  And Annabelle is just awesome, isn't it just evident? 

So with the mental images that I garnered through my flipping process in mind, this is the added layer that surfaced for me in the story.  It reminded me of what a post-Soviet village might perhaps look like.  A stark community where everything is painted in blacks and grays and browns, where the only light and hope is found in the miracle of snow, where surprisingly anything is still possible in the hopeful mind of this little girl who has been through so much; because despite the struggle, the poverty, the seeming lack of hope, sparks of the imagination have lingered in the private echos of her inner self, where anything is still possible, where life is alive and where finding a not so ordinary box with something surprise inside is still believable.  

I know, crazy right?  But this is what Extra Yarn sparked in the inner workings of my mind... 

Some more spreads (1st & 3rd from Jon Klassen's website):

More reviews and thoughts:

• Thoughts from Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast
• Jules' (from Seven Impossible things...) talk with Mac Barnett over at Kirkus Reviews
• Review from Read Now Sleep Later Blog
• Review from the Horn Book for the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, which Extra Yarn won (!)

Also check out Mac Barnett's site here and Jon Klassen's here.

And I'll leave you with this wonderful Mac Barnett quote from his talk with Jules for Kirkus on the awesomeness of quirkiness:

"The same plots get trotted out. Great ideas are shaved and sanded down until they look a lot like a lot of other things on the bookshelf. I like strange stories, shaggy stories, stories with knobby bits and gristle and surprises. And so I’m glad that people think my stories are quirky. All my favorite books have quirks. Although I think it is almost always more interesting to examine why something is quirky than to simply say that it is."