We have quite a few less desirable books. The grandparents and well-meaning other relatives can’t quite grasp what non-twaddle is, so we make do with those as gifts, but I purge them out asap. I do put my foot down on any books that have Barbies or any TV characters. Those we get rid of immediately.
Once we ended up with a ton of Deigo and Dora books. Where did those come from? Now I’m very specific about what we would like as a family. It’s hard though because one Grandma is a teacher and she just switched from K-2 to junior high, so she unloaded lots of twaddle on us. In her defense there were some really nice books too.
For picture books, some of our favorites might be twaddle… we like Mr Seahorse from Eric Carle. A lot! And Margaret Wise Brown’s Big Red Barn. We have read these two so much that I have them memorized. We do keep Little Bear and some of our Christian books, but even those are so dumbed down that I cull them as well fairly often. Oh, we do like The Snowman, too.
One thing I like to do now that my girls are a little older (8 and 5) is to stop at a certain word that is very central to the story and ask for synonyms. It’s kind of fun to do in the car and sometimes we decide we like a new word better and read the book that way from then on.
I’m currently “organizing” our books, by which I mean getting rid of lots of them! 🙂