Musing Mondays: Childhood Favorites

It's been quite a while since I participated in the Musing Mondays meme. Mainly because, quite frankly, Mondays are very frazzled around here and I usually have a hard enough time just waking up and wrapping my hands around a coffee cup. Any musing I do is along the lines of "whatever happened to the weekend?" and "why don't I just go back to bed?"

But today's question caught my eye and I thought I'd join in. This week, our host MizB (at Should Be Reading) asks: "Do you have a favorite children’s book? Either one that you loved as a child, or one that you discovered later, and still enjoy? Tell us about it!"

This is one of those questions I love because I did/do very definitely have childhood favorites. Vast numbers. Well, several anyway. But I'll only bore you with a couple.

Now, my absolute favorite children's book of all time is Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. I've read it many times since that first discovery back when I was six or seven, and I still love it just as much as I did then - maybe even more. But I've written about my Alice addiction many times on this blog, so today I'm going to tell about one of my other childhood lit loves.

Even before I discovered Alice and her wondrous adventures, I was a book lover. And the first book I remember really loving was The Real Mother Goose, published by Rand McNally and illustrated by the great Blanche Fisher Wright. I still have my childhood edition:


I was given my copy long before I learned to read, but I memorized the nursery rhymes as my parents and grandparents read them to me. And I spent long hours just gazing at those gorgeous illustrations.

Could this have been my earliest experience of male chauvinism?

And, as you can see (below), I even spent some time adorning the book with a few instances of my own artwork.

I believe I was trying to give the birdies a house here.

And while that jagged line may look like a shark about to gobble up an unsuspecting couple,
I think it's really supposed to be a staircase. Call Dr. Freud.

The Real Mother Goose is still in print today. It's had many different editions and several different covers over the years; it's even available for e-readers and there are several online versions (like this one). But it still has those magnificent Blanche Wright illustrations. And I still love reading my copy, more than fifty years later.