It’s a sentimental week for parent readers. Fans of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s sprawling and often dark six-volume autobiographical novel, “My Struggle,” might be surprised to find the author showing his short-and-sweet side in “Autumn,” a slender book of essays about the material world addressed to his daughter. In time for school, we also recommend several books for parents, educators and kids. Lenora Chu’s “Little Soldiers” compares the schooling systems in China and the United States. Bruce Handy’s “Wild Things” is a spirited grown-up’s tour through classics of children’s literature. And new books for children feature a girl who grows up at a Renaissance faire, a cat who helps us with our ABC’s and a track star stepping up to challenges at home.

John Williams

Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer

AUTUMN, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated by Ingvild Burkey. (Penguin Press, $27.) In “Autumn,” the first book in a planned series named for the seasons, Knausgaard writes 60 short essays, each considering a single object or phenomenon. Where the author’s six-volume, 3,600-page autobiographical novel “My Struggle” was blunt and rangy, “Autumn,” addressed to the author’s fourth child, is sweet and slender. Our critic Parul Seghal wrote: “Loose teeth, chewing gum, it all becomes noble, almost holy, under Knausgaard’s patient, admiring gaze. The world feels repainted.”

NO APPARENT DISTRESS: A Doctor’s Coming-of-Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine, by Rachel Pearson. (Norton, $26.95.) In this med-school memoir that is also a probing moral inquiry, Pearson describes her struggles trying to treat patients left out of the American health care system. Pearson was a writer of poetry and fiction before she turned to medicine, and her literary skill is apparent.

WILD THINGS: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult, by Bruce Handy. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) The premise of Handy’s book is that we should take children’s literature seriously. It succeeds wonderfully, not so much as an argument but as an emanation of spirit.