I knew that there would be decades in the Dewey Decimal System like this one. Where the books are nearly all dry reference materials forbidding linear reading. I hope that when I reach dictionaries, it will not be restricted to dictionaries in its span of the shelf.
01x is bibliographies and most of the books here are precisely that: Lists of books. There were a couple You Must Read This books on the shelf that were on possibility, but being the father of a pair of 4-month olds, a book about books to read to children seemed a better option.
Being in the bibliography section, nearly every chapter ends with a list of books with brief descriptions. Books that reappear in different chapter lists retain their descriptions rather than allowing their relevance to that chapter’s theme to be highlighted. Overall, the lists seemed as much distraction as value in the book since the books were often Australia-specific (the author is Australian) and the more appropriate thing was to think about the goals of the book in selecting works at the local bookshop.
The non-list sections of the book, however were wonderful. I realized that some of the books I’d been reading to the kids (or planning to) were not developmentally appropriate (and I’m not just talking about the Shakespeare here). They still have value in allowing the kids to hear spoken words and to begin to connect the physical objects of books to the idea that they contain words and stories but choosing more appropriate books will allow the reading to be more enriching.
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