Reading Copy Book Blog

It’s that time of year when eggs are everywhere - chocolate eggs, dyed eggs, plastic eggs,  jelly bean eggs …

We can’t leave books out of the picture so here’s an eclectic Top 10 List of egg books:

1. Faberge’s Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces That Outlived an Empire by Tony Faber

In 1885, Carl Fabergé created a seemingly plain white egg for Czar Alexander III to give to his beloved wife, Marie Fedorovna. It was the surprises hidden inside that made it special: a diamond miniature of the Imperial crown and a ruby pendant. This gift began a tradition that would last for more than three decades: lavishly extravagant eggs commemorating public events that, in retrospect, seem little more than staging posts on the march to revolution. Above all, the eggs illustrate the attitudes that would ultimately lead to the downfall of the Romanovs: their apparent indifference to the poverty that choked their country, their preference for style over substance, and, during the reign of Nicholas II, their all-consuming concern withthe health of the czarevitch Alexis, the sickly heir to the throne-a preoccupation that would propel them toward Rasputin and the doom of the dynasty.

2. Egg & Nest by Rosamond Purcell

The beauty of the robin’s egg is not lost on the child who discovers the nest, nor on the collector of nature’s marvels. Such instances of wonder find fitting expression in the photographs of Rosamond Purcell, whose work captures the intricacy of nests and the aesthetic perfection of bird eggs. Mining the ornithological treasures of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, Purcell produces pictures as lovely and various as the artifacts she photographs. The dusky blue egg of an emu becomes a planet. A woodpecker’s nest bears an uncanny resemblance to a wooden shoe. A resourceful rock dove weaves together scrap metal and spent fireworks. A dreamscape of dancing monkeys emerges from the calligraphic markings of a murre egg.

Alongside Purcell’s photographs, Linnea Hall and René Corado offer an engaging history of egg collecting, the provenance of the specimens in the photographs, and the biology, conservation, and ecology of the birds that produced them. They highlight the scientific value that eggs and nest hold for understanding and conserving birds in the wild, as well as the aesthetic charge they carry for us.

3.  Good Egg by Barney Saltzberg

Meet Egg. Cuter than a button, enormously personable, and talented, too. Say “sit,” and Egg sits. Good Egg! Say “roll over,” and egg rolls over. What a good Egg! Of course, Egg does all of this with a toddler’s help, who lifts the flaps and pulls the tabs and operates the wiggle behind the wiggle-waggle. But that’s the most fun part: interacting with the Egg.

Then comes the pay-off. “Speak,” is the command, and children will crack up in delight and surprise with what happens next.

4.  Scrambled Eggs Super! by Dr. Seuss

Illus. in color. “Riotous humor in picture and verse as an enterprising Seuss creature hunts uncommon eggs for a super deluxe dish.”–Child Study Assn

5.  Intricate Eggs: 45 Egg-Cellent Designs to Color! by Chuck Abraham

Forget about messy dyes and hard-boiling eggs–with the simplicity of Intricate Eggs, kids and adults can decorate their own luxurious masterpieces. A perfect activity book format for on-the-road or at home, all it takes is Crayons, colored pencils, or markers and you’re set to illuminate forty-five of the most magnificent egg patterns, each as unique as you. With room to color inside–and outside–of the lines, this is coloring fun for everyone…minus the breakage!

6.  Confessions of a Serial Egg Donor by Julia Derek

Growing by nearly 20 percent annually, the business of egg donors is exploding in the United States. Confessions of a Serial Egg Donor tells the true and disturbing story of how an independent college girl got so caught up by the tens of thousands of dollars she was making on her eggs her body shut down. With brutal honesty, always applying her own brand of humor, she will describe exactly what it was like to be a twelve-time egg donor, including how the broker of her eggs betrayed her viciously in the end.

7.  Mommy Laid An Egg!: OR Where Do Babies Come From? By Babette Cole

In this hilarious twist on one of the most difficult discussions in a child’s development, award-winning author Cole illustrates the one question all children are bound to ask–where do babies come from? Offbeat illustrations are accompanied by a text that is short, simple, and anything but predictable.

8.  The Good Egg: More than 200 Fresh Approaches from Breakfast to Dessert by Marie Simmons

Beginning with basics, such as how to make perfect scrambled eggs, and continuing on to sandwiches, soups, pastas, quiches, soufflés, and delectable meringues and cakes, The Good Egg artfully describes the many uses of one of cooking’s most essential and healthful ingredients.

9.  Fresh Eggs by Rob Levandoski

Calvin Cassowary is ready to do whatever it takes to keep Cassowary Farm in the family for one more generation. Hatching a scheme to specialize in chickens, soon he’s got a million hens laying eggs for Gallinipper Foods, but he still finds himself deeper and deeper into debt. To make matters worse, his chicken-loving daughter Rhea is spending far too much time with the chickens and is starting to act very strange.

Filled with as many tears as chuckles, Rob Levandoski’s Fresh Eggs is a provocative father-daughter tale guaranteed to make you ponder the realities of modern farming and think twice the next time someone asks, “white or dark meat?

10.  A Day in the Death of Joe Egg by Peter Nichols

This play is about the nightmare all parents must have dreamed of at some time, that of living with a child born so hopelessly crippled as to be, as the father says, “a human parsnip”.