Looking for a few good books

My son's school is having a book fair this week. Of course, we will go. I have fond memories of school book fairs when I was little, and they haven't changed much. You look through the catalog, go through the tables at the fair, buy your books and stay up late over the weekend reading them all so you could trade books with friends the next week at school.

Or, at least, that's what it was like for me.

As mentioned before, we are a reading family. There are lots of studies citing the benefits of reading. This latest one - which was funded by Scholastic, but it reiterates information found in studies by the American Academy of Pediatrics - encourages parents to read to children more often to give them the framework they need to become independent readers later on in life. The study indicated that the number of children ages 6-17 who read for pleasure has decreased in the last few years.

Whether that is true or not (remember, a book seller funded the study), the study made me think about how to inject more book time into our days (mostly our weekends). Every night, I get to read several books to our son, but I'd like to include story time more often throughout the weekends.

We've read to our son since his infancy. (Yes, talking to babies is better, but sometimes it is hard to hold one-sided conversations for extended periods of time.) But I now think the type of books we read matters more. I'm starting to mix it up a bit to include more complex stories with bigger vocabulary words for him to absorb.

So far, we've been trying Peter Pan (the real version by J. M. Barrie) and the Tollins books, but I'm always looking for more. What more complex books do you recommend for little boys? Share with me in the comments.