It’s the 50th anniversary of Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go this year and, like all the books in the Busytown series, it has lost none of its charm and appeal. It’s impossible to resist Scarry’s appropriately busy and whimsical illustrations, or the improbably complicated adventures of his anthropomorphic animal characters.

In Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, the Pig family are going on a picnic. Who would have expected them to encounter such heavy and unusual traffic along the way? To say nothing of the astonishingly variable weather, which puts Melbourne’s to shame. Between that and Dingo Dog’s terrible driving, Mistress Mouse is kept extremely busy with repairs, while Goldbug hides on every page. The wonderful Busytown books will delight and inspire children aged 3+ for years to come.