Children's Classics

Claire, my third-grader niece, is in love with books. "Classics!" she says, when you ask her what she likes. "The Cricket in Times Square!" she declares, a recent favorite. Books that have survived, that have been loved, that are time tested and therefore true. She reads them to herself; she invites others to read to her; she recounts the tales in loving detail (then breaks into an all-out rendition of "The Twelve Days of Christmas").

Talking with Claire takes me back. To Heidi and Pippi Longstockings. To Harriet the Spy, The Secret Garden, Doctor Doolittle, and Black Beauty. It floods me with the desire to fill her library with more books to love—with classic classics or with books, newly written, that feel timeless. So far I've bought her the following for Christmas: River of Words, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Penderwicks, and From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. (Along with necklace, for she's as pretty as can be.)

I wonder what you might suggest.

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Quiet?

I have been puzzling over the word "quiet" of late, as in, "the book is quiet," or, more truthfully, "but the book is quiet." That but. That but is what I've been puzzling over. For when I consider some extraordinary YA books—ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, for example, THE SECRET GARDEN—I think of books so impeccably quiet that one can hear a river running, one can hear one's own breath in a shady knoll. A sort of magical, human, alive quiet that never feels but-ish to me, just distilled, searching, pulsed.

Can quiet matter, still, on a page?

Can quiet be heard?

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