Great Holiday Reading Choices from the NCBLA Board!

NCBLA Board Members Susan Cooper and Carol Greenwald Share Favorite Holiday Book Memories!

NCBLA president Mary Brigid Barrett here. Recently I posed a question to all the members of our esteemed NCBLA Board—What is one of your favorite holiday reads? For your holiday pleasure, my blogging assistant Colleen and I will be posting their responses!

From Susan Cooper, author of The Dark Is Rising, Green Boy, The Selkie Girl, Matthew’s Dragon, and many more delightful books for young people:

For me it’s John Masefield’s THE BOX OF DELIGHTS, and at first I didn’t even read it as a book, it was a BBC radio serial. The high point of our day when I was a kid – and there weren’t too many high points, this being England during the bombings of World War Two – was a program called The Children’s Hour at 5pm. They dramatized THE BOX OF DELIGHTS, which is a wonderful Christmas fantasy, and it bewitched me. I even remembered the incidental music, and 30 years later put it into my book THE DARK IS RISING as the magical music heard at key moments by its hero Will. (You can hear it too, if you can find it – it’s the Second Intermezzo from Wolf-Ferrari’s opera THE JEWELS OF THE MADONNA. And do read THE BOX OF DELIGHTS! )

Carol Greenwald, the Director of Development for Children’s Programming at WGBH/PBS in Boston and the executive producer of PBS programs Arthur, Postcards from Buster, Curious George, and the new PBS children’s program Martha Speaks--all based on children's books-- shares this suggestions for a great holiday read:

I’m kind of partial to “Little Tree”, the ee cummings poem. There are several nicely illustrated versions of it. I can’t find the one we used to read to our kids but there’s at least one on Amazon right now.

To find out more about Susan Cooper and her books, go to:

http://www.thelostland.com/

To find out more about PBS’s great educational children’s programs that promote reading and books! – got to:

http://pbskids.org/

And check out a blog listing below for holiday reading recommendations from NCBLA Vice- President Katherine Paterson!