I'm not quite sure how I managed to get 65 books in to this blog without mentioning one of my son's absolute favorite storytime characters, so without further ado, let me feature a tale about our favorite little troublemaker (other than our son, of course,) Curious George. The first Curious George book was published 70 years ago in 1941, and the mischevious little monkey has been a household favorite of many ever since. I only had one Curious George book growing up, Curious George Goes to the Hospital, and I loved it. My mom didn't, but she humored me and read it to me every so often anyway. We first read Curious George Flies a Kite to my son when he was about two and a half after receiving the book as a hand-me-down, and were amazed at how quickly it captured and kept his attention. If you've ever read it, you know it's long -- 80 pages -- but he sat still through every single page taking the whole story in. In fact, the reason I chose to feature this book as opposed to one of the others is that my son loved it so much and read it so many times, he literally could recite about 90% of it from memory at age three. It was amazing. I find it kind of strange that in many of the earliest George titles, the flow of the story lines isn't always that logical. In Flies a Kite, for example, the first two-thirds of the story is about George playing with Bill's bunnies, then going fishing. He doesn't even see a kite until page 51. Regardless, my son absolutely loves the stories about this silly little monkey. I think he loves George so much because he is just like him; as is any toddler or preschooler, most likely. He tries to be good and do the right thing, but his curiosity often gets the better of him and he finds himself in some kind of trouble or another. Fortunately, the man with the yellow hat loves him no matter what and is there to help him learn from his mistakes. The more recent Curious George stories are much shorter and feature topics such as ice cream stores, pizza, and baseball, making them more accessible to more children than the originals, I suppose. But as much as I like being able to read them in 5 minutes instead of 20, something inside me still loves the different style of the old classics, too. We have many different Curious George titles in our house now, and love watching the PBS show about him, as well. (There are very few kids shows we think are worth watching, but this is one of them!) My son also assumes the identity of George at least once a day, even though he is pretty much a silly monkey all of the time. When our whole family is together, my husband is the man with the yellow hat, I am Professor Wiseman, and our daughter is Hundley, the daschund from the show. So fun. I have no doubt that my son will read Curious George to his own children someday with a big, reminiscing smile on his face. And who knows? He might even remember all the words.
