Boo Boo’s Book List: Good Night Oregon

Wherever you go you’ve seen them. And even if you haven’t, they’re there, tirelessly wishing you a Good Night. Not only are they everywhere, they’re about everywhere. I am speaking of the Good Night Books, the ubiquitous works mostly written by Adam Gamble and Mark Jasper, with other collaborators seemingly dropping in for cameo appearances (just look at their website).

Among the Good Night books titles are Good Night Coral Reef (more positive but less realistic than Good Bye Forever Coral Reef), Good Night Country Store, Good Night Statue of Liberty, Good Night Pirate Ship and even the all-encompassing Good Night World. Apparently there’s also a Good Night book for every one of Earth’s creatures, real or imaginary: Good Night Unicorn, Good Night Mermaid, Good Night Golgatha Shit Monster…just kidding! 

This series is genius as a business model, but also polarizing. Anyone with a pride of place, or who wants a souvenir from a trip can buy one of these books. What ends up in the books is the controversial part. As a native of Kansas City, I’m pretty disappointed that the front cover of Good Night Missouri displays the Saint Louis Arch instead of the shuttlecocks at the Nelson! Or better yet, a slab of ribs! 

I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but the description on Amazon doesn’t bode any better: 

“Good Night Missouri highlights the mighty Mississippi, St. Louis Arch, Grant’s Farm, SEA LIFE Aquarium, St. Louis Zoo, Hannibal, sports teams, Lake of the Ozarks, City Museum, Silver Dollar City, Route 66, and more.”

I’m sure natives of other states and places have similar beefs with the series.

Anyway, this series is a racket, but a wholesome one at that. The books strive to capture the essence of the featured place. Each book starts in the morning, heads into the afternoon, strolls through the evening and then ends with a “good night”, all while bringing readers on a journey to various destinations across the featured state, city or place in general. Additionally the Good Night Books website states that “Children are further introduced to the practice of using polite salutations and greetings, all while being lulled to a good night’s sleep.”

But wait! There is apparently another agenda at play here. Here’s more from the website: 

“The series is, in part, inspired by Walk Whitman’s poems, such as the classic book Leaves of Grass and the famous poem “Song of Myself,” in which the poet catalogs item after item, in a process whereby the mere naming of each item draws attention to it and thus imbues it with a sense of import. The Good Night Our World series tries to recognize and celebrate the world in a Whitmanesque spirit.” 

The spirit may be Whitmanesque, but the tone is Mister Rogers. The books are relentlessly friendly and kind–a good counterweight to all the curse words and vulgarity laden rants the Boo Boo hears on the streets of Brooklyn, from the mouths of irate grown-ups waiting for the subway and posturing seven-year-olds playing tag in the playground alike (“Can’t catch me, b*tch!” “Yeah I can! I can outrun the fu*kin’ cops!”). 

Anyway. Good thing Boo Boo has about three Good Night books, including Good Night Brooklyn, Good Night Texas and Good Night Oregon. The one he has expressed the most interest in is Good Night Oregon. This might be because this one is the newest. But I like to think that he totally remembers when we went to Powell’s Books (the Strand’s West Coast competition) and picked up a copy. 

The text for the most part is very simple. But it manages to elicit excitement despite the simplicity of the text and images, and that is due to the small thrill (small for me, maybe big for Boo Boo) of recognizing a place you’ve been to in the pages of a book. You become curious about the places you didn’t see. These books are probably great for state tourism industries.

 

We recognized several places in Good Night Oregon that we saw: Multnomah Falls, the International Rose Test Garden and the Columbia River Gorge. And others are some I’d surely like to experience–the most intriguing being these elephants listening to a concert at the Oregon Zoo.

Good Night Oregon starts the day off at a beach at Haystack Rock. There are kids digging in the sand with shovels and buckets, beachcombers, kites flying and even someone with an easel. It was not one of our stops in Oregon, but Boo Boo is intrigued anyway. He is a big fan of buckets, and spent a nonzero fraction of his summer trying to steal other children’s buckets. 

The last page ends with two children each tucked into a twin bed, with their quilts (probably hand-made from old t-shirts, since this is Oregon we’re talking about) pulled over them. In the distance you can see a snow-clad Mount Hood. In Good Night Texas a young boy goes to bed clutching wearing a Dallas Cowboys jersey. In Good Night Brooklyn, the kids share a bed, because here no one bedroom is big enough for two twin beds. 

Because Boo Boo does not deign to keep covers on him and because he’s too long for his sleep sacks, he will go to sleep bundled in layers of clothes, in his parents’ room, overlooking the glowing lights from the windows of the apartments behind us. In the distance is the skyline of Manhattan, the skyscrapers looming up like giant cyborg fangs, or a deconstructed Death Star. 

It’s not Oregon, but it’s still a Good Night.