After half a decade of buying cheap books at the friends of the library store, we now have enough volumes to fill up six slots of the Ikea Kallax shelves. So the girl and I sorted out our own private library this weekend.
The first division we made was fiction and non-fiction, which were then sorted the rest out by author’s last name. Apart from confusing the illustrators and authors, and a child’s tendency to get distracted it went really smoothly. Some highlights from the exercise included:
- She immediately decided talking animals were unreal and they all went into the fiction pile.
- Human slice of life books generally ended up in the non-fiction pile.
- ABC books ended up in the non-fiction pile, except for one which had talking animals. I guess she takes linguistics pretty seriously.
- Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen also ended up in the non-fiction pile. Even though most of the contents are quite fantastical, my daughter pointed out the book is a dream sequence, thus for real. Somehow, Where the Wild Things Are did not get the same treatment and went into fiction.
- A book on Noah’s Ark ended up in the non-fiction pile. I thought about discussing the myth of Gilgamesh but thought better of it.
- An illustrated copy of the Night Before Christmas also ended up in non-fiction. I pointed out the drawing of flying reindeer, but she responded that they must have flown in the past. We have never pushed the Santa myth (all our Christmas presents come from humans) but I decided this was not the time to do a hard debunk of old Saint Nick.
In all, it was a fun exercise. It was quite interesting to go through all the books we’ve collected over the past few years, and even better to plumb the depths of a five year old mind.