Happy Birthday, Maurice Sendak!

CPL will be celebrating its 150th birthday on June 10, which is also 95th birthday of one of my favorite authors and illustrators, Maurice Sendak. When anyone asks me my favorite book from childhood, I always say Where the Wild Things Are. I vividly remember my dad reading this book to me and my siblings over and over again one winter after he had surgery. It was particularly memorable because he wasn’t the reader in the family – that was my mom.

Now that my youngest child is learning to read, we are revisiting some of Sendak’s easy reader books, such as A Hole Is to Dig and the Little Bear series. These books are written by other authors and feature Sendak’s somewhat childlike drawings that enhance the comical stories.

Sendak was particularly good at drawing expressive and not too scary monsters. This is especially true in his first, and only, pop-up book, Mommy?, where the monsters are more afraid of the child than the child is of the monsters.

And speaking of birthdays, one of Sendak’s last books, Bumble-Ardy, is about a pig celebrating his 9th birthday with some very funny consequences.

How are you celebrating Maurice Sendak’s 95th birthday?