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6. WHAT A WONDERFUL DAY TO BE A COW, by Carolyn Lesser, illustrated by Melissa Bay Mathis (Knopf; $15), is a calendar of gentle, friendly pastel illustrations of farm animals--kittens, piglets, barn swallows, mice--simple enough for a first book and with enough detail to be interesting for the first couple of years of being read to.
7. THE HOUSE GOBBALEEN, by Lloyd Alexander, illustrated by Diane Goode (Dutton; $15.99), has the look and sly feel of an Irish folk story. Tooley is a silly fellow who complains about his luck; Gladsake is a worldly-wise cat who tells him his luck is no worse than anyone else's ("It's the nature of a pig to break out of a sty, as it's the nature of a sty to be broken out of"). A greedy, fat elf called Hooks shows up and freeloads, fed by Tooley in the hope that he will bring luck. What Hooks is on the point of bringing is bankruptcy, until Gladsake conspires to roll him out the door. Fine, rascally illustrations make the tale easy to believe.
8. THE CAROUSEL, by Liz Rosenberg and Jim LaMarche (Harcourt Brace; $16), is a beautiful, dreamlike imagining: two sisters walking home from school one winter afternoon wander through their town park, hear whinnying noises from the long-broken carousel and discover that the wooden horses are alive. They ride up above the treetops, and the wild swirl and soar of LaMarche's paintings show what that riding must have been like. A haunting theme is that the girls' mother is no longer part of their household. Dead? Divorced? We're not told, but the sisters use a toolbox the mother has left behind to fix the mechanism of the broken carousel she once loved. It's a good, intuitive resolution of loss, and a point at which a grandparent reading aloud might, for instance, help an uneasy child through his fears.
9. JEREMY KOOLOO, by Tim Mahurin (Dutton; $13.99), is a funny, good-natured alphabet book for three-year-olds, whose mischievous hero is A Big Cat, Jeremy Kooloo himself. This greedy fuzzball, we're shown in a series of cheerfully cat-aclysmic illustrations, Drank Every Full Glass of milk, Hiccuped and so on, causing havoc through the full array of letters, until, sure enough, ZZZZ, or cat-alepsy.
10. SWAMI ON RYE, by Maira Kalman (Viking; "all is an illusion but you must still pay $16 for this book"), sends Max the pun-crazy dog off on the subway to get herring (don't ask) for his puppily pregnant wife when, suddenly, he's on a magic carpet over India, seeing the impossible possibled, spying "a woman carrying four baskets of fish on her head and four fish carrying a basket of women on their heads," and learning the meaning of life from a guru who googools, "As the bulbul bird barks you shall see." Inspired, irreverent nonsense for nine-year-olds whose thoughts bounce easily "from fish to knish to gibberish."