I’ve loved this and Shel Silverstein’s other books since I was a kid—he has a great sense of just the right proportion of nonsense and a knack for wordplay to make his poetry and beautifully silly drawings go together just right. It’s the kind of stuff that teaches you to think and imagine in creative ways without realizing that’s what you’re doing. And it’s just a lot of fun.
And so you can imagine my excitement when I learned this anniversary edition of the book had a CD with it with some of the poems read by the author. (Let’s just say, if you have trouble with imagination, that I was pretty darn excited.)
It turned out my excitement was well founded. The only complaint I have is that there’s no listing provided with the CD other than that on the CD itself, and even that doesn’t list the poems by page number (and the selected poems on the CD are all over in the book). The lack of these cues left me scrambling to flip to see what I was hearing as I was hearing it. It would have helped if there were audible cues within the CD telling the page numbers, but those didn’t exist either.
All in all, though, this is the edition of A Light in the Attic to get, either for yourself or any kids you know.