What Picture Books Have Taught Me About Limitless Wonder

Can we read? No. 26: A guest post from Laura Sackton

Today I’ve got a guest post for you from a dear fellow Substacker and friend,

Laura Sackton

of Books & Bakes, a weekly newsletter celebrating queer lit and home baking, where every week, Laura gets loudly excited about queer books, tasty cakes, the woods, her pup, indie presses, and many other wonders.

Laura’s newsletter might not seem to possess a logical intersection with Can we read?, except for a project Laura began at the end of 2023, which you can read more about below. I’ll just say: it has been such a joy to watch Laura fall (deeply in love) into the world of picture books.

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Sometime last fall, after I’d been reading Sarah’s newsletter regularly for a year and a half, I decided to start reading picture books. Let me set the scene for you: I do not have kids and I don’t plan to. I am an aunt, although none of my nephews are currently interested in picture books. I love reading aloud with other, younger kids in my life, but this is not a regular occurrence. When I decided I was going to become a picture book reader, I had not read a picture book to myself, for myself, since I was a kid myself.

My decision to start reading picture books felt sudden, although, in retrospect, I can see that it wasn’t. I subscribed to Sarah’s newsletter not because I had any intention of ever reading picture books (I didn’t), but because we’d bonded over writing book newsletters, and I wanted to support her. For over a year, I happily read reviews of children’s books I never expected to read. She writes about reading with her kids, but her own love of picture books energizes her writing. Quietly, without my even noticing at first, that love began to energize me.

The other thing that happened in 2023 was that…well, it sucked. It was a hard year for me personally, with lots of change and uncertainty and approaching-the-end-of-my-thirties-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life turmoil. It was a hard, bad year for the world. In late October, when I conceived of this picture book project, I was raging and grieving over the genocide unfolding in Palestine, the atrocities I was watching my government fund. I felt small and hopeless and unmoored. I was looking for ways to grab joy.

I am a spreadsheet nerd as well as a book nerd, and I love a project, especially a big, unwieldy one that I can make 7-10 lists about. So I decided that, in 2024, I would read a picture book every day. For me. For joy. I wanted to make daily joy a practice, as much as I could. Without joy, I can’t fight for justice. I can’t show up for the people in my life, including myself.

I could write a hundred essays (truly—I’m a maximalist and I’m not kidding) about how reading picture books every day has changed my life. But the most remarkable thing that’s happened is this: I have been surprised, over and over and over again, by my own capacity for joy and wonder.

There was a part of me that was not expecting to love picture books as wholeheartedly as I do. I was expecting to be delighted. I was expecting to learn and be entertained. I was not expecting to read a picture book and feel — well, changed. That, I thought, was the realm of adult novels, adult poetry, adult nonfiction. I embarked on this project purely for joy, and still, I was expecting to love this new thing conditionally, with caveats. I imagined myself adding “for a picture book” to the end of every superlative phrase (e.g. “this was brilliant, for a picture book”). As if that sort of categorization and explanation was expected, necessary.

Rain Makes Applesauce by Julian Scheer

The first book that loudly, beautifully, laughingly disabused me of this absurd idea was Rain Makes Applesauce by Julian Scheer & Marvin Bileck (a Sarah rec!), which I read last fall. (I was so excited about my picture book project that I started it early.) This book made it onto my year-end favorite poetry roundup, and I still think about it basically every day.

Here’s the beginning of the review I wrote on Instagram: “I can’t explain how wildly I love this book. I opened it thinking I would like it because it has a wonderfully strange cover and I love the title. By the time I got to the end, I knew I had underestimated my capacity to love children’s books. I love this book with the kind of abandon I thought was reserved only for my most sacred novels. How humbling, how joyful, to be wrong.”

Even more humbling, even more joyful—to be wrong over and over again, and in so many different ways! What a joy to discover that my sense of wonder is bottomless! What a joy to be surprised, again and again, by the emotions picture books awaken in me. Joy, yes. Wonder, absolutely. But also, and just as importantly: deep sorrow, pure silliness, rage, despair, hope, curiosity, grief, mystery.

Picture books do not make me feel the way adult novels do. I do not love Rain Makes Applesauce the way I love Cereus Blooms at Night (one of my favorite novels from last year), but I do not love it any less. I just love it differently. And for me, that’s everything, that’s the whole point, that’s what we’re here for: to love all the bits and pieces of this earth as wildly, as differently, as we can.

Rain Makes Applesauce was the book that broke open the floodgates. I have fallen in love with many other picture books since then. Here are the nine most surprising ones I’ve read so far, the ones that have shown me something new about the world or myself, that have changed how I think about art, that have expanded me in seemingly infinite directions.

• When Aidan Became a Brother by Kyle Lukoff

• Guji Guji by Chih-Yuan Chen

• A is for B: An Alphabet Book in Translation by Ellen Heck

• Mr. Watson’s Chickens by Jarrett Dapier

• The Little Band by James Sage

• 40,000 Beads by Koja Adeyoha and Angel Adeyoha

• The Big Bath House by Kyo Maclear

• When We Were Alone by David A. Robertson

• There Was a Party for Langston by Jason Reynolds

The Little Band by James Sage

I can’t wait to see what surprises the rest of this year (and the rest of my life—I am never going to stop reading picture books) brings. If you’re curious, too, you can follow along on Instagram (@365daysofpicturebooks).

Laura