Another from me since the baby's actually happily batting at shiny! things in her bouncy seat.

What distresses me more about children's books was really beautifully exemplified at the book fair at the elementary school last night. Looked like a licensing warehouse had exploded in the gym. Amid the few copies of actual original titles were SpongeBob books, Wild Thornberrys books, SpyKids books, books based on Matt Steele (which as far as I know is a toy), et cetera, et cetera.

I get encouraging children to read. But there are so many inventive, funny, meaningful, thought-provoking books out there, the character tie-ins just make me nauseous. It's not just the commercialism, either; they're horrible books. Slapdash, no style. Sad.

Don't shop for kids' books at Barnes and Noble. Their kids' book sections leans heavy on the tie-ins with toys, very light on the actual books.

now I have another task -- I have to go to the children's section of the bookstore. Because we do have some tie-in book s( like pokemon) and lots of series books the library has lots of better books to. I never looked at the kids section at the book store ...now I have to .

Our Barnes and Noble is actually pretty good when it comes to the kids' department (they seem to have a decent buyer, and they feature lots of kids' reading groups, and author appearances), but the best store I know for kids' books (or any books, really) is the huge independent store near my parents, about an hour from here. My favorite place in the world. They have everything. I worked there once for about six weeks and they simply recycled my paycheck.

This was the Scholastic Book Fair held at school every year, last night. What killed me, too, was the number of non-book items offered. Toys, even, not just beading kits and mini science sets. Blech.

Ok, maybe I am old, but at our school bookfairs, I don't remember anything BUT books. Ever.

Not sure how old you are, but when I was kid, same thing. There were books, period. Good books. But I think at that point tie-ins weren't the huge chunk of the market they are now. I don't remember ever seeing a book for children that wasn't an original work of fiction when I was a kid.

Little House wasn't on the air until I had read the first few books, and even then, I was appalled when they changed the stories, added characters, et cetera. And that's a book-to-TV progress anyway, not the other way around.

I'm 29.

And I never saw Little House until after I had read the books. Bugged me too. Bugs me even more that more books have been released.

I saw the Wonderworks production of Anne of Green Gables first and then read the books, but those were fabulous. Well, the only 2 movies I acknowledge are.

Even now I cringe to think of Mary and her husband, and the blind school, and the fire, and the weird boy Ma and Pa adopted...shudder. The books were so wonderful as written, why change them? I suppose the show wouldn't have been on the air for ten bazillion so many years if they hadn't taken so much blatant artistic license.

And the books are in about seventeen different forms now, I noticed. Picture books, shorter chapter books, blah blah. Again, why? Grrr.

It seems so unnecessary to dumb down Little House on the Prairie. It's already an easy to read book meant for young readers, fer cryin' out loud.

Edited cause I really can spell prairie when I'm not concentrating on the italic tags...

What the television show did that was so unforgivable to me was to make it all sweetness and light. The Little House books are, to me, some of the best memoirs we have of the frontier, even if Rose Wilder Lane did clean them up. It's Laura's excitement at the Christmas she got a tin cup and a piece of candy and at the first time she had an orange that show so vividly how little they had. The television show made everyone nicer, cleaner and more prosperous, and it was just wrong, wrong, wrong.