What's the organizing principle of your guide?

The theory behind it comes from Neil, my husband. He said a book like this needs to be organized so that it can be easily used to find a lot of different things. The titles are organized developmentally, from wordless books to young adult books. Each book is assigned a number, and there are 60 different indexes, so they're completely cross-referenced. You can find books by author, by illustrator; you can find anthologies; you can find books about cats, bedtime, bears, death, grandparents. That's where you get to change the canon and be as politically adventurous as you want to be. You can talk about books in lots of different ways without making a fuss about it.

People use the guide to track down childhood favorites, don't they?

There's a wonderful passage in one of Graham Greene's essays that says the books you really remember are the ones that you read as a child. There's a tremendous urge to share with children the books that you have loved, but a lot of people can't remember the title or maybe the illustrator of some of their favorites. Everybody has these dim memories of some long-lost book they loved -- maybe you can recognize the style of the illustrations when you see them in this book. That can help you recall what the book was. And by and large people have pretty good taste. If you're a boomer you've been exposed to some pretty good books.

I've got the impression that most parents aren't as involved with sharing books with their kids as they used to be.

Children who are read to are the lucky minority. Not that there aren't aggravations to doing it. They'll have a book that they have to have read to them every single night until you want to throw it out the window. Our son had a picture book of nursery rhymes illustrated by William Joyce, and he was fixated on one particular spread -- Wee Willie Winkie. The book was recently reissued, so we took a look at it to try to figure out what so fascinated a 14-month-old about it, but he couldn't remember.

Have children's books changed much since the first edition of the guide?

What concerns me with children's books today is the phenomenon of marketing. Children are being sold all the time, even the little bitty ones. Imagine being manipulated not just by the page but by all the media and market forces. I worry for them. And their choices are being limited in a troubling way.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"