Best Psychology books for students

The Color Kittens: Best Children's Book Ever

My favorite book as a small child, hands down, was The Color Kittens. Nothing else came close.

Not that I didnt have great fondness for the entire Little Golden Books oeuvre, however. I admit that I enjoyed, for example, The Fuzzy Duckling as well as Nurse Nancy. Even when compared to the unparalleled brilliance of The Color Kittens, Nurse Nancy and The Fuzzy Duckling should not be dismissed.

Yet I'll admit the reason I was fond of Nurse Nancy was not because of the timeless story or the vivid, compassionate portrayal of the main character. Instead I liked Nurse Nancy because it came with a plastic Band-Aid taped to the back of the book.

I loved that Band-Aid. That Band-Aid became a fetish object for me. I also believe that the constant restocking of this book was the greatest health-care cost that my family indulged in while I was growing up. And The Fuzzy Duckling I liked because, not to put to fine a point on it, the duckling was fuzzy. Golden Books had managed to put something velvety on the page, and I would wear down the fuzzy part of the fuzzy duckling, almost as quickly as I would tear off the Band-Aid from the back cover of Nurse Nancy.

You can see, therefore, that both Nurse Nancy and The Fuzzy Duckling seduced me through their gimmicks. It was not their essential narrative that got me, it was their bonus features. It was the bonus features that made me come back to what English teachers would call the text.

(Note to textbook manufacturers: If you included the equivalent of a Band-Aid - lets say a lottery ticket, an iTunes card, or a gift certificate to The Gap - in the spine of every book, no student would ever sell back the textbook. The same would go for a dollar bill. At some point in the semester, the student would simply rip the spine off to get to the treat on the inside. This is because, at a certain point in the semester, every student becomes a really cheap date).

The Color Kittens, however, had no gimmick. The Color Kittens was a book that both soothed and enlightened me. Let's put it this way, I've forgotten the last name of the first boy who ever kissed me, but I remember that the color kittens were named Hush and Brush; I remember that they were searching for a way to make the color green, and that while they could make all of the other colors of the rainbow, green somehow eluded them.

I should admit that while I remembered Hush and Brush and their quest for the color green without consulting any original sources, the rest of the column will be written with the Little Golden Books open in order to make certain that I get everything correct.

If I were writing an academic paper on The Color Kittens - and I have no doubt that any number of my university colleagues have already produced finely wrought and intricate works concerning this classic written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen