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I mean, that's the problem. It's not in my mind. But it turns out, between my wife and myself, we remember a totally insufficient quantity of books to keep our kid entertained. And so the search for something new, or at least new to us, begins. And this search has been utterly ruined by SEO and good old fashioned media cartel behavior.
More or less every article you find on google about "Best X of Y", be it powertools, computer parts or children's books, looks like it was written by a chatbot sourcing the list from Amazon bestsellers and the attendant "user" reviews. In the case of powertools, this ends up with every top 10 list being full of the cheapest of chinesium desktop jointers. In the case of children's books, it's woke bullshit as far as the eye can see.
Well, don't use google you might say? Find a children's book review community. Why bother? My wife already suffered through the woke takeover of knitting, and I was around myself during the gamergate days and the fall of every community I previously enjoyed to ultra-woke moderation policies. Why after personally suffering those devastating losses of community, would I believe the first, second, third, forth and fifth community review site for children's books I come across to not also already be ultra-woke?
If I were religious, maybe I could rely on those institutions to pre-screen books for me. But we're not. And we both remember having weird religious neighbors and their thinly veiled religious polemics aimed at children. I guess it's better than the alternative, but we still feel adrift in a sea of info-hazards with zero way to navigate it.
I assume you've exhausted the list of Caldecott Medal books (older than 19xx)? That would seem like a place to start.
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