I trekked to my favorite non-Denver non-PGN library with a list of children's books. Indiscriminately--totally being one of those parents at whom, as a page, I rolled my eyes, because they selected books for their children based on exactly the same list--I plucked Newbery books into a stack in my left hand.
And then I went off and read them. I don't know what I thought I wanted to find at Nordstrom, but I read Everything on a Waffle over a sandwich from Paradise Bakery. That was charming and fun and safe, like Because of Winn-Dixie.
(What did I miss about Desperaux? It was okay, but it fit into a pattern, in which the work that follows the best work is rewarded, out of guilt for previously neglecting the best, that I had previously noticed more with Oscars. And, as regards Philip Roth and Richard Russo, the Pulitzer.)
Home again I read On My Honor, which was A Taste of Wild Blackberries Meets the ABC After School Special; yesterday I read The Wish Giver--I'd say Stephen King lifted Needful Things straight from it if it weren't such an old premise--and The Matchlock Gun, which had a strong anti-Indian slant (even for 1942? when Laura Ingalls Wilder was publishing Newbery Honor Indian-hating books?) and brought up interesting bits of history only to let them fall scattered and neglected.
Today I'm reading One-Eyed Cat, and I'm surprised it took four books to prove that all books are one book. In Everything on a Waffle is a recipe for perfectly boiled potatoes. In One-Eyed Cat, someone describes the succulence of the perfectly boiled potato.
I also borrowed one of the three Medalists I feel guilty about, Up a Road Slowly--about which I feel the guiltiest since it was mentioned in Look Out My Window and I even read a book about a doll (Impunity Jane*) for its sake and and painted my teenaged bedroom yellow with white trim. The others are M.C. Higgins the Great and A Gathering of Days. Those are the only three since 1959--unless it be about a dog (Sounder and Shiloh**)--that I have missed, and 1959 to 1986, Witch of Blackbird Pond to Sarah, Plain and Tall, is the Golden Age of U.S. children's books.
* Impunity Jane was fine. So was Hitty, Her First Hundred Years. I am not impugning (disappointingly, those words' sources are dissimilar) dolls.
** I did survive Ginger Pye and King of the Wind and Julie of the Wolves. I could try Sounder and Shiloh. And maybe Rascal. I am not going to read Where the Red Fern Grows, though. That I refuse.