Don't Let Calvin Drive the Car.

Originally Published November 26, 1985 from gocomics.com

This week I am at the Texas Library Association conference in San Antonio. I came up, (yes, that is right, I come up to San Antonio) this afternoon and walked in late to the first panel I wanted to go to which was animals misbehaving. It was with five children's authors four men and one woman. The audience was all women except me and one other guy.

Male children's librarians rock.

Just saying.

Anyways it was a great discussion, entitled "Animals Misbehaving" which to me are some of the best kinds of children's books. Calvin and Hobbes falls into this category at times, though not in today's strip. However this strip does remind me of one of the most popular animals misbehaving books Don't Let Pigeon Drive the Bus:

Here is the Amazon link

The story is: a bus driver leaves his bus to have lunch and tells you the reader to mind it and whatever you do, don't let pigeon drive the bus. The rest of the book is pigeon's side of the conversation, who tries to plead, cajole, threaten, and trick you in to letting him drive the bus. It is hilarious and highly interactive. The author is Mo Willems and I like all his stuff. It is great for reading out loud in story-time.

The authors in the panel talked about how using animals instead of kids lets them get away with all sorts of things such as nudity, characters with no gender, race, age, or class, murder, not to mention all the things kids actually do but parents like to delude themselves into thinking they don't... (or at least, their kids don't.)

I also was introduced to the TLA exhibit hall where there are many free and cheap books and librarian goodies. I ended up buying four books from the Peguin publishers for ten bucks as well as receiving an advanced readers copy of a book in a series that I enjoy by Lev Grossman, which starts with The Magicians, then The Magician King, and now The Magician's Land which doesn't come out officially until August but has just jumped onto the front of my reading list as soon as I finish Words of Radiance. The Magicians Trilogy, as now it is apparently known, is a gritty secular "realistic" take off on Harry Potter and the Narnia books. It is also as you can imagine, pretty dark. But good. Give it a shot especially if you were going "wait a minute" when things were a bit too tidy and and neat in  the Harry Potter and Narnia books.

Anyways I should head towards bed. Need to get up bright and early to make my way downtown to the conference tomorrow. There is another pigeon book entitled Don't Let Pigeon Stay Up Late. But don't worry, you won't have to convince mzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....