By Richard Scarry
The Pig family drives to the beach, and every single page is packed with hundreds of ridiculous vehicles and one hidden gold bug.
Ma, Pa and the Pig children set off for a picnic at the beach. That's the whole plot, and it barely matters. What matters is the road, which is stuffed corner to corner with vehicles - a pickle car, a broken-egg truck, a toothbrush car, a bathtub on wheels, hundreds of them, each one labeled. Underneath it all two things run the length of the book: Officer Flossy is chasing Dingo Dog, who drives like a maniac and keeps causing pile-ups, and Goldbug is hidden somewhere on every spread. It's 69 large pages and your child will not read them in order.
This isn't really a car book and it isn't really reading, which is exactly why it's lasted since 1974. Your child spends an hour on a single page - hunting Goldbug, tracing Dingo's next crash, demanding the name of every absurd vehicle - and comes away having absorbed several hundred words without once being read to in a straight line. For a car-mad child it's the best hours-per-pound on this shelf, and it's the one book here that grows with them: a three-year-old points, a five-year-old hunts, a seven-year-old reads the labels out to you.