Selected Books on Trains

As promised, here are our favorite books on trains.  We'd love to hear about yours!

Huo Che Yao Kai Le (火车要开了) ISBN: 9787539420035.  This book is great for the train-obsessed toddler who is also in the midst of learning about the different colors.  The story is simple: Tom takes his toy train to school, and falls asleep in art class while the teacher is talking about colors.  He goes on a colorful journey in his dream on this toy train, and each page is an imaginary land with a color as its theme.  When he wakes up, he realizes his friends have drawn all these pictures similar to the places he visited on his adventure.  They place the pictures on the floor, and play "choo choo train" pretending they are going to all these places.  The story is a bit too simple for my older son Calvin now, but Jason has loved this book and has read it often for more than half a year now.  At first, he was a little scared of one of the pages - here Tom's train goes into a tunnel where some fierce black dog-like "monsters" are seen.  I was amazed though that the initial fear did not amount to anything, and now he reads through that page with no problems.  Jason's favorite is the page with snow, where a snow man sits on the train track with a big hole in his tummy.  Jason and I always throw up our hands on that page and yell: "Ai-ya, wo de du du bian cheng shan dong le! (Oh no, my tummy has turned into a tunnel!)"

Da Jia Yi Qi Pu Tie Gui (大家一起铺铁轨) ISBN: 9789862410271.  If I could only choose one book to keep for the rest of my life, to capture the spirit of the boys at this precious age, I would seriously consider choosing this book.  Calvin picked it out himself when he was three years old and shopping with my mom in a bookstore in Taiwan.  It became his favorite book for many months - perhaps close to a year.  At some point, it made the switch and became one of Jason's favorite books.  It still is.  The title means "Everybody builds the train tracks together", and that's pretty much what the book is about.  Six adorable kids in overalls and hard hats are building a train track together in the middle of a beautifully drawn natural land.  Every page only contains a few words, usually an obstacle, followed by the one-sentence resolution in the next page.  For example, one page is "There's a mountain in the front - what do we do?"  You turn the page to see these kids with drills and lamps on their hats working together digging a tunnel, and the words just say "Then we just dig a tunnel - ha, the tunnel has been completed!"  The most fun part about reading this book is, Calvin automatically assigned a characters to himself.  He assigned another one to Jason, which Jason readily accepted.  Then they would look at the pictures and talk about what those characters are doing using the first person perspective.  They would even start assigning their friends to the other characters - then we really had stories.  We can also start talking about their interactions: for example, I might say "Calvin and Jason are carrying a long piece of steel together", or "Calvin is driving the train to the station and look, Jason, you're so excited to see Ge-Ge (big brother) that you're jumping up and down."  When Jason gets too old for this book, I'm really going to be sad for a while.

Zhang Zhe Yan Jing De Huo Che Zhan (長著眼睛的火車站)  ISBN: 9867375637.  This is geared toward the older kid, but the water color paintings of trains present in almost every page are so enticing to the train addicts, even if they're too little to understand most of the words.  ...and this is how we started, first with Calvin willing to sit through the long narrative in order to absorb all the illustrations, then with Jason doing the same thing.  Now I believe both kids really understand the prose.  Yes, I call it "prose" because the story reads like it was written by a fourth grader who has won some award writing an essay about the day when his parents took him and his little brother to see five famous train stations along the coast in Taiwan.  The title means "train stations with eyes" and refers to a common architectural feature of these five stations - that they all have these round windows looking like cow's eyes.  Like the title itself, the prose contains lots of metaphors.  It is tempting to tell myself while reading this story that I'm contributing to their essay writing abilities in the future - but I'm not an expert in child psychology.  The same writer and painter also published two other children's books, both about trains.  One is "Huo Che Zai Wo Qu Kan Hai" (火车载我去看海) ISBN: 9867375602, and is about a boy's first time riding the train.  He rides it on a field trip with his class, and his excitement over every experience is described in first person, again in well written prose.  Calvin and Jason both enjoy this book as well, and again the water color paintings on every page is eye-catching.  The other one is "Zai Ji Ji Xia Che" (在集集下车) ISBN: 9867375645.  This is specifically about the earthquake in 1999 that hit Ji Ji (more commonly known as Chi-Chi), a rural city in central Taiwan, and killed around 2500 people.  The story takes the viewpoint of three trains running through the Chi-Chi station, carrying readers from before the earthquake, through a page describing the earthquake, to the successful re-building of Chi-Chi station after the shock.  This is a great story for an older child, and teaches many lessons about history, hope, working together.  However, my kids are still too young and have not been as interested in this book.

Shen Mi Xiao Huo Che (神秘小火车) ISBN: 9576083176.  This is one of a set of five books from a series of Aichi-published books sold only as sets (each with a VCD/CD).  I will find a time to review these sets of books in the near future, as we now have (I think) all the sets.  For now, I will focus on this book, which stars a little girl Xiao-Xiang who rides on a train herself for the first time.  She falls asleep and dreams of the train going through snowy mountains, a tropical island, and the black forest.  Of course, many animals appear on the way to make friends.  Xiao-Xiang is then woken up, and soon arrives at the station where she sees Grandpa and yells "Yie-Yie!"  The Chinese characters for Yie Yie are in super big print, so now Jason points them out and also shouts "Yie Yie!"  As Xiao-Xiang walks away from the station holding hands with Yie-Yie and telling him about her adventures on the train, this "Mysterious Little Train" (as the title indicates) is preparing its night journey for the animals, who all start getting on one-by-one...