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BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Adventuring From a Child's Imagination to the Arctic

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Published: December 7, 1998

''In those days, as a little child,'' wrote the English poet John Masefield, ''I was living in Paradise, and had no need of the arts, that at best are only a shadow of Paradise.''

A paradise childhood may well be, but occasionally the grown-ups must intrude, especially at bedtime, and one of the ways we do this is with picture books, which, while mere shadows of paradise, are good for easing the way to bed. The following are the 10 best I found this year, arranged approximately from the most simple to the most complex.

FIRETRUCK, by Peter Sis. (Greenwillow Books; $14.95.) A boy named Matt loves firetrucks so much that one day when he wakes up, he is one. ''He drove around his neighborhood with sirens blaring. He raced down the road. He rescued a cat. He put out a fire. He saved a teddy bear.'' Then when he smells pancakes he changes back into a little boy and eats his breakfast. Peter Sis illustrates Matt's obsession in colors that are mostly fire-engine red.

SNOW, by Uri Shulevitz. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $16.) In a gray town, a single snowflake falls. The grown-ups say it means nothing, but more snowflakes come. Gradually, as the town turns white, you feel the child-eyed wonder of a snowfall and the coooooold.

BALLPARK, by Elisha Cooper. (Greenwillow Books; $15.) Baseball may be a nine-inning game to you, but to the ballpark it's also a red tractor mowing the outfield grass, a forklift moving boxes of peanuts, a dryer spitting out hot uniforms and a furry animal running out on the field. Mr. Cooper catches it all here in whimsical watercolors.

PETE'S A PIZZA, by William Steig. (Michaelo Di Capua Books/HarperCollins Publishers; $13.95.) In which Pete is teased out of the rainy-day grumps by being made into a pizza by his dad. In the process the ''dough gets tickled'' and ''laughs like crazy.'' When it's time to be sliced, the pizza runs away but gets captured and hugged. ''Now the sun has come out. And so the pizza decides to go look for his friends.'' Pete holding himself stiff as a crust while being carried to the oven-couch is alone enough to make you laugh.

PAINTED DREAMS, by Karen Lynn Williams, pictures by Catherine Stock. (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books/William Morrow & Company; $16.) Eight-year-old Ti Marie dreams of making pictures of ''huge green trees that would wrap the whole village in cool shade,'' if only she had paints like those of Msie Antoine, the local voodoo priest and healer. When she eventually improvises a solution, she proves that her art has commercial value as well as beauty. As does the art of this appealing book.

A BAD CASE OF STRIPES, by David Shannon. (Blue Sky Press/Scholastic Inc.; $15.95.) Although Camilla Cream loves lima beans, she won't ever eat them because all her friends hate them and she longs to fit in. One morning she wakes up covered with brightly colored stripes, which don't go away until she eats the lima beans brought to her by a sweet old woman. ''I knew the real you was in there somewhere,'' the woman tells Camilla at the end of this delicious visual metaphor for the disease of caring too much about what others think of you.

OVER THE MOON, by Rachel Vail, illustrated by Scott Nash. (Orchard Books; $15.95.) In her first three tries, the Mother Goose cow jumps under, next to and through the moon. ''It's my nursery rhyme,'' says the monkey-writer-director, Hiram Diddle Diddle. ''Can we please? Or do we need to bring in a stunt cow?'' ''No, no,'' says the cow. ''I need this job! I got calves to feed. I can do it. OVER the moon, right?'' And so it goes in this backstage tale of heartbreak and triumph starring also a cat with a Stradivarius, a dachshund that goes ''Ha!'' and a flighty dish and spoon.

THE ISLAND-BELOW-THE-STAR, by James Rumford. (Houghton Mifflin Company; $15.) Vibrant, engaging watercolors reveal how five brothers set out from a tiny South Pacific island for a new island they believe must lie under a brightly shining star. Surviving a vicious five-day storm, they sight a bird that leads them to what a concluding note explains are the Hawaiian Islands, lying below the star Arcturus, which are believed to have been discovered more than 1,500 years ago by explorers from the Marquesas Island, 2,500 miles to the south.

BLACK COWBOY, WILD HORSES: A True Story, by Julius Lester and Jerry Pinkney. (Dial Books/Penguin Putnam Inc.; $16.99.) In a land ''stretching as wide as love in every direction,'' the cowboy Bob Lemmons picks up and follows the trail of a pack of mustangs, the wild horses that live on the Western plains. With their poetic text and theatrical watercolors, Mr. Lester and Mr. Pinkney bring to life a true story based on the life of a black cowboy mentioned in ''The Adventures of the Negro Cowboys,'' by Philip Durham, and ''The Mustangs,'' by Everett L. Jones and J. Frank Dobie. The thunder of hoofbeats pounds on the page.

INTO THE ICE: The Story of Arctic Exploration, by Lynn Curlee. (Houghton Mifflin Company; $16.) A concise history of Arctic exploration, from St. Brendan's encounter with an iceberg in the North Atlantic about A.D. 550 to the flight a millennium later of Joseph Fletcher, the United States Air Force pilot who landed at the North Pole in 1952 and whose claim to have stood at the Pole was the first to go undisputed. The author's arctic landscapes are as clean and cool and inviting as polar ice with a topping of azure.

Photos: Tales for giving: A true story about a black cowboy and mustangs, left, (Dial Books) and a tale about a Haitian girl who dreams of becoming an artist. (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books)
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