There's a lot of talk about content these days by the Internet people.  "How to add content to your website, blog or podcast."  "Content marketing."  "How to produce content."  "What your content says about you."  "How to write content that increases your customer base."

I find it disconcerting that the content in question rarely is accompanied by an adjective.  Case in point:  good content.   Reasonable content, thoughtful content, informative content, pleasing content, beautiful content, intriguing content.  Content can be many things.  One would hope that, above all, that content has some value.

I think that education requires some good content.  I have no idea how to produce content that increases my customer base, and, quite frankly, I don't give a flying rip about increasing my customer base.  I'm reasonably good at providing my children with valuable content.

Their days are filled with music and good books and bike riding and gardening and friendships.  That's good content.  But, for the purpose of this post, let's focus on books.  How do we know where to find good books?  How do we know what a good book is?  Of course there are the tried and true classic books, Charlotte's Web and Little Women, Little House on the Prairie, The Hobbit, Pride and Prejudice, The Indian in the Cupboard, just to name a random few of about thirty thousand books.

My goodness, where to start.  There are a few book guides that were my lifeline to good content when we started this journey.  HONEY FOR A CHILD'S HEART,  and BOOKS CHILDREN LOVE were a great place to start.  Then we discovered A LANDSCAPE WITH DRAGONS.  When we started to increase our capacity for and love of historical fiction, we stumbled across LET THE AUTHORS SPEAK, a remarkable collection of historical fiction arranged chronologically.

Good content to find good content on the literary end of the spectrum of content.  Now, because we have Internet land, we get things like the New York Public Library producing on line lists of children's books LIKE THIS ONE and about 1,234,340 results in .3 seconds for other such lists.  That's pretty good.

We live in the content age for sure.  With all that content to choose from, there's gotta be something good.  Let's work on getting the good stuff.