Winter Gift Books for the Small Cyclists in Your Life

As we've mentioned often reading about or just meeting pictures of riders in children's books can be a fun way to share bikes with your smallest soon to be riders. We've talked about many of our favorites this year but want to mention them again since the season for sharing books as gifts for special friends and loved ones has begun. Here is a big mix of our reviews from the year.

Always at the top is the terrific Bear's Bicycle.

A Pile of Children's Bike Books to Beat the Heat

We were going to do a great tour of our favorite splash parks today but after a roasting trip to the farrmer's market everyone was way too wilted. Stay tuned for quiet routes to splashy parks...

Instead we have a shock of kids bike books to read while you beat this summer blast furnace inside at home with the lemonade or trawling the library for good bike reads.  If you've never read any of our kid bike book suggestions before you can find them just on the right under the Delightful Bike Books post list.  Read picture books to your small riders! (Especially The Bear's Bicycle).

Here are three new ones:

Anatole by Eve Titus with pictures by Paul Galdone is a stealth bike book. It was the Caldecott Medal winner for 1956 and stands the test of time with beautiful line drawings washed with blues, red and black.  Anatole is a Parisian mouse searching for a way to take care of his growing family.  It just so happens that he and his mouse friends use their bikes to get everywhere. Their classic bicycles are sprinkled throughout  the book with cool bright front lights and bells on the handlebars. It's especially good for kids that like cheese....

Along A Long Road is a brand new book by New Yorker cartoonist Frank Viva. Our guys love the dynamic drawings that tell the story of a long fast ride through towns, tunnels over bridges. They don't pay so much attention to the words. Making up their own stories for where the rider is going and about the curious pregnant lady and her son who appear and disappear seems to be more fun. Just in case you are a stickler, the rider is not wearing a helmet...  but we love looking at the pictures in this book anyway.

New Red Bike a new book by James E. Ransome is all about the story and pictures. Tom's new bike is beautiful and the swooping ride he takes to visit his friend Sam is a favorite especially with our youngest.
The older guys have a running debate about Tom and Sam's friendship which takes a turn when Sam steals Toms bike and disappears.  Should Tom hang out with Sam anymore or should he just ride that terrific red bike off into the sunset? You'll have to choose your own side.

The Terrible Swede- a trip to Andersonville with two books

Looks like spring may really be here. Reason enough to want to jump in the air. We have two more reasons. Last month we happened upon two new books we love: Tillie the Terrible Swede by Sue Staufacher, and Wheels of Change by Sue Macy.

Susan B. Anthony famously said "Let me tell you what I think of bicycling... I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel."

Here is the cover of Wheels of Change

Reading, Riding, no Rithmetic - two great reads for younger riders

The bead on our studded front tire on the box bike broke and stuck out through the rubber, popping our tube and putting us on the train these last two icy days awaiting its replacement. Two of our favorite winter reads came out.

The Bear’s Bicycle by  Emilie Warren McLeod and illustrated by David McPhail is a new absolute favorite. It is a wonderful book about biking from 1975 that is actually very current. It covers everything from making turns and checking tires to not getting doored, as a young boy (a clever rider) and his brought-to-life teddy bear (rather reckless) go off on their daily ride. Perfect for the learning rider, it says it all with sly humor and clever pictures. My kids crack up at the Bear’s cycling antics every time.  Though it’s pre-helmet era, the boy’s puffy cap looks suspiciously like a chic Yakkay hat helmet.

You can probably find it at the library or order it from your trusty neighborhood book store — like Sandmeyer’s or Women and Children First.  (link here)

Usually there is plenty to watch on our wintery city rides, be it a new building going up or the perennial hit — some gigantic machinery next to a huge hole getting dug in the road. More than buildings grows in Chicago, and a nice trip game we play is to spy winter trees we pass on a ride and identify them from their shapes. Carole Gerber’s Winter Trees was our original inspiration for this game. A book perfect for the younger rider, Leslie Evans’s sweet linoleum block, watercolor and collage illustrations bring the shapes of winter trees to life. They especially piqued my middle guy’s curiosity about which trees we passed on our daily rides. It’s a nice counterpoint to the bulldozers and street cleaning machines! I like that Winter Trees gently describes the difference between deciduous and evergreen trees and gives tactile clues for telling seven different trees apart — a good number for the budding arborist to remember.

Sometimes we ride by trees in a place a few times and try to guess as we go by what the trees are from their shapes, then go back, when we have time, to check the bark and branches, to see if we were right. If you get really good at the tree game, tree guides can be fun to have around. We have a Peterson’s Guide to North American Forests but there are plenty of other good ones to be found at the library or book store.