Just a couple of kid book suggestions. Yes, we still visit the library and check out 30 books at a time, which last us a little less than a week. In the chaos that is our house, books do indeed get misplaced and discovered under couches weeks after they were due, but the twenty bucks or so a year in fines we end up paying is small change for the (literally) hundreds of books we check out during the course of a year.
You know, after 25 years of this, I have just about had my fill of ABC and counting books, but every once in a while one comes along that gets my attention.

This one combines two genres:  the ABC motif with something quite popular around here – the Where’sWaldoISpy genre. Plus it’s got Art.
It doesn’t seem like much – you just look for one object beginning with each letter on each page, but my two little boys loved it and actually wanted to go through it several times. And the objects weren’t impossible to find, either. Although not all are as blindingly simple as the first one. Perhaps it is the richness of the art – the pictures being certainly more interesting than most!
I see the author, Lucy Micklewathe, has others in the series, one finding numbers and another on transportation. Hmm, just right for some in our train-firetruck-ambulance-mad household.
(Update since this post was originally written: We checked out the others and liked them too, although just a smidgen less than the alphabet edition. A rather sad, in retrospect, note on my part: I believe each book contains at least one religious painting – either a nativity or an Annunciation. And when I flipped the page and saw them, I was honestly startled. I would have thought some crusading editor would have caught that faux pas, so thanks for the pleasant surprise!)
Along the same lines are a couple of books called Can You Find It? – and its exciting sequel, in which you are asked to find details in works of art. Provides more variation in illustration than the I Spy, etc books, and pretty challenging, particularly for middle-aged parent eyes, even with the reading glasses. Joseph particularly liked the contemporary painting of San Francisco that’s on the cover of this one, as well as the several Asian paintings in both books that depict, well, battles.
Oh, and I have to mention this book, which I knew nothing about, but which, when I picked it up and opened it to a random page, made me laugh out loud, right there in the library. I wish I could find an image of the page itself to snag and post, but that’s not allowed. So just know the book is about a regular day at the sloth’s school, disrupted by a new student, but all is well at the end. The page I turned to was p. 11 and the text is, “And then it was time for recess.”
As you can tell, when it comes to book that I am called upon to read aloud, humor is key. As is the absence of Very Special Moments In Which We Understand That Everyone Is Different.
Because, as I mentioned, it’s been twenty-five years now. Make me laugh, make it rhyme or even both.  Oh, and since it’s been twenty-five years, make the font bigger. Please?