Moog Moog the Space Barber and The Weaving of a Dream are both nestled on my book shelf today along with The Divine Comedy and The Widow Killer.

I am just under 26 years old.

I graduated cum laude from one of those venerable liberal arts schools that pride themselves on good academics, lofty ideals and a bit too much gravitas for a school with a football team that shares the name of a gay lifestyle newspaper once published in Chicago.  (The purple and gold uniforms and dismal win record don't help either.)

I was a Ford Fellow, won research and journalism prizes.

My work since college not only pays the bills but  has also been picked up at least once by the Associated Press. An interview with former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor - a childhood idol - rounded out a career that pays bills and taxes.

I am never without a book.

And, time and again, I still return to the picture books of my youth - In the Night Kitchen, The Enchanter's Daughter, Brave Irene, and an illustrated collection of Pushkin’s fairy tales to name a few.

I am saddened that now it seems the picture book will become another tool in the race to quash all the love of reading and learning in our society.

If you haven't read it yet, I suggest you take a look at this article published by The New York Times this morning. 

I want to make something very, very clear: You cannot make children read.

You Cannot Make Children Read. (Interpret this as a vehement but calm refrain.)

Oh, logistically, you can take away the Caldecott winning The Lion and the Mouse, so beautifully brought to life by Jerry Pinkney.

You can force toddlers fumble through Tolstoy or even a tome as wonderful as Stuart Little as one of the sources from today's article does. 

Physically, you can take away the picture and force a child who is too young to take up chapter books because you think that little Johnny and Sally at age four are already behind little Anke and Teppo in Finland or Chen and Xiaoping in China.

But, at the end of all the adult dictating and controlling what reading material a child has in their hands, you can't "make" a child read with love.

You can't "make" a child continue on the incredible path of discovery that books and reading open if they don't want to read what you put in their hands.

Taking away picture books denies children not only the ability to choose what reading material they enjoy but it also takes away a fundamental tool in developing our imaginations.

I think we're starting to lack for imagination sorely as a society.

Illustrators such as the venerable Randolph Caldecott, Leo and Diane Dillon, Brian Selznick, and Trina Schart Hyman give children a whole new world to decipher and build upon when they pick up colored pencil, ink or pastel.

We expand the right brain function of our minds - the functions governing creativity, emotion, and imagination - when we juxtapose illustration with text.

Although I am not a psychologist, neurologist or art therapist, my years of study of art history taught me the importance of the exchange between my heavy hitting left brain - the side governing language, analysis and supposedly math problems, although not in my case - with my picture processing right brain.

How many times do we as adults, walk into an art museum and want to know the "story" behind a piece of art?

We only have to look at the covers of the books we buy as adults to know that pictures play a serious role in what we decide to read.

Publishers spend good money to make books visually appealing to adults, to put photographs for reference inside texts, to come up with clever fonts.

Even we really seem to want "picture" books after a fashion.

Why, in our quest to remedy the inattention to literacy at large would we try to take awat anything that gets children reading, even if it is a picture book?

At its heart, it is still a book.

So, I proudly admit that I will put down the romance novel I bought to kill time every now and again.

I will take breaks from Dr. Faustus as written by Christopher Marlowe.

I will put down Poppy Z. Brite's fabulous Liquor trilogy.

And I will go back, pick up The Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed and enjoy.

Please, parents, do the same.

Put down the worry and sit down and enjoy a picture book with your child.

I'd pull the Basset Hound into my lap and share the book with him but he's only interested in plotting ways to kill the bunny in the back yard.

But again, let your child delight in the quirky gloom of Robot Zot or the whimsy of The Tale of Two Bad Mice.

Delight yourself.

Because it's not what your child reads that matters when all is said and done.

It's that they want to read at all.

And, the last chorus of my above refrain: You cannot "make" a child read.

Even if you take away their picture books.