Post by Mark T. Locker.

Doctor Who: the visual by DK Publishing.

As always, the books I am exposed to are strictly at the mercy of my child’s whims. I feel pretty lucky, then, that my boy has pretty good taste. I have never been forced to recount those Disney stories, like Cars or anything about the dread purple shall-not-be-named dinosaur.

Thanks to my impulse purchase of a couple little Doctor Who figurines, my kid has developed a fascination by this newly trendy BBC science fiction. Unfortunately for him, this insanely awesome, flashy, full of weird monsters and robots and aliens show is TOTALLY inappropriate for a four-year-old. The old enemy of the Doctor, those weird metallic creatures, the Daleks, (one of the figurines I got was a Dalek) are cool looking and murderous. I can’t show him alien robots killing dozens of people!

To appease him, I tracked down a song from the 80’s about Doctor Who, and picked up this visual dictionary from the library. For hardcore nerds, this might be insufficient information; it mostly focuses on the last couple seasons of the series. For normal people, this visual dictionary, full of big full-color photos and brief descriptions of just about every aspect of the show, is fun to look at and far less scary for a kid than the show. And he gets to walk around shouting, “EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!” without being exposed to actual human extermination.