Book-A-Day Almanac

Today we celebrate an event everyone can enjoy. October is National Pizza Month, a perfect time to engage in America’s favorite pastime: eating a scrumptious pie. As a nation, we consume 350 slices of pizza each second! According to a recent Gallop poll, children three to eleven prefer pizza over any other food for lunch and dinner. But before you head out to snatch up your favorite kind, pick up one of the funniest, most original books written about the subject, William Steig’s Pete’s a Pizza.

William Steig was eighty-one years old when he published this contemporary classic, which works both for independent reading and as an activity for a family or class.  Poor Pete.  He’s having a bad day. But his father knows just what to do to cheer up his son.  Dad sets Pete down on a kitchen table, starts kneading him like dough, stretches him out, and tosses him back and forth with his mother. Then Dad begins to cover him in pizza ingredients. Although he pretends to pour on oil and flour, these substances are really water and talcum powder. Checkers come out next, substituting for tomatoes, and already Pete can’t control his giggling. Kids will be laughing long before then. Eventually, Pete the Pizza runs away, gets hugged, and heads out to play with his friends, happy at last. The story, accompanied by Steig’s watercolor and ink illustrations, is perfectly paced. Even the layout of the text, set in capital letters, makes it look like a printed recipe.

Sometimes teachers use a storyboard with felt to tell this saga, and families love to act out the book with their children. At some library events the reading is concluded with the best of all possible endings: pizza for the participants. However you use Pete’s a Pizza, the results are surefire. It is as no fail as suggesting that everyone can have pizza for dinner.

The book also stands as a tribute to octogenarians. There is no rule that our greatest children’s books need to be written and conceived by young writers—the authors just need to be young in spirit. Fortunately, William Steig remained true to his childlike spirit all of his creative life. Consequently in his eighties, he knew a great book idea when he discovered it, and he executed his concept flawlessly.