The Diamond in the Window

Books for the Ages

So, I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when I was, um, maybe 30? And I had the eerie sensation, while reading it, of "Wow, I would have really grooved on this had I read it when I was 9." Especially that special weird bank that you nail to the floor.

But the thing was, I didn't read it when I was 9, and so it kind of ... wasn't that great. It was more sort of sweet. But it left me cold.

Which makes me think that some books have a sort of shelf life, except it's an age life. (Whereas some, like Green Eggs and Ham, are perfect anytime!) But they have, all of them, true greatness, and it's so worth it to be able to experience it to its utmost.

So, foolishly no doubt, I'm going to go ahead and make a completely talking-out-my-ass stab at listing some of them and the ages at which they should be read (or read to you) the first time. Once you get them in that first time, then you can reread them forever.
And then again, as C.S. Lewis said in his note to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, "My dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books.  As a result you are already to old for fairy tales…but some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

  That always kills me.

Before you're 9:
Now We Are Six (and all the Winnie the Pooh, books;

Before you're 11:
The Secret Garden    

The Jungle Book    

Before you're 12:
Little Women
Anne of Green Gables
All of a Kind Family

Before you're 14:
Robinson Crusoe

Before you're 15:
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn  

Before you're 16:

Jane Eyre

Before you're 20:
Look Homeward, Angel

Before you're 25 (but after you're 13, maybe?):

The Book of Daniel     

Update: The Book of Daniel is the novel by E.L. Doctorow, and I was too out of it to remember to link it or note that—sorry!

Pee!

Chestnut has lately been waxing enthusiastic about the Pinky and Rex books, which I had never read. "They're the greatest!" "If you ever find a whole giant set of them together and they're really cheap or something, you should buy them!" "I want to buy them all!"

We haven't yet gone so far as to buy them all, but I have had a vague sort of, "I wonder what she likes so much about them?" feeling, and this morning, when the first section of the newspaper was unavailable, she brought a few library copies down from her room for me to read. Her recommendation? Pinky and Rex and the Spelling Bee.
I must say, I don't know if I'm easily charmed or if she'd just softened me up by being so clearly touched herself, but it was so very nice! I liked that they were a boy and a girl who were friends, I liked that one was a good speller and the other wasn't, and then (spoiler alert!): the pee accident.
I so much appreciated the sweet quiet bravery of this book as it waded (sorry) into these troubled waters. Because, really, pee accidents happen in elementary school, and it's nice to see that kindly acknowledged. It's not the focus of the book or anything, it's just something that happens. This seems crucial to me, that it's not one of those "Billy's Special Problem," books, it just addresses this to the world of kids as a whole, as something that could happen to anyone, and I am certain that it has provided some sorely needed comfort to many a sorrowing second-grader's heart (and a bruised second-grader's ego). And then it moves on to its real business, telling its story, and showing kids the possible comforts and consolations of being, and having, a friend. How nice, really.

If I see a whole giant set for really cheap, I'm definitely going to buy it.

Is Reading Good for You?

The question up top there—I must say it's the sort of question that makes me uneasy. See, I know that reading is something that children need to know how to do and all of that, but there is something in me that cringes when people say, referring to one of my daughters, "Oh look, how wonderful, she's reading." It makes reading seem like this wholesome, healthful, therapeutic activity, as though it's exercise or flossing or something, rather than as the dangerous, delightful and thrilling obsession I know it to be.
It's not that I think everyone has to see reading this way, but it's weirdly—do I mean disempowering?—to reading to think of it as good for you. It defangs and declaws it, then sets it up on a lovely little pedestal. And of course, the problem is that things set up on pedestals are then left alone, sometimes admired, even dusted but usually simply ignored. It gives me the willies.
I know I'm oversimplifying greatly, and I know, too, that people mean the best when they say this: they mean, "Look, she's doing something wonderful and worthwhile," and I appreciate that, I do.
And, just to be clear: I'm all for virtue. I aspire to be good, to be patient and kind and generous (and all sorts of other nice virtues), it's just that it seems deeply wrong to me to try to induct reading into that circle of virtue.  I just don't know if reading, on its own, can bear the weight of the judgment: "GOOD." 

Catcher Caught?

So, this is the sort of thing that really ticks me off. It's a piece that uses the recent lawsuit by J.D. Salinger as a jumping off point to announce that "there are signs that Holden may be losing his grip on the kids."
There are so many things that irritate me about this it's hard for me to grasp the central one. First, as if—as if he used to have a "grip on the kids," as if that was ever the point, as if it used to be that all kids were crazy about him and now they're not.
That's not what the book is about, it's not what books are about in general.
The writer even goes so far as to take a quick ride on the old "kids today are different" bus.  Behold:  "teenagers seem more interested in getting into Harvard than in flunking out of Pencey Prep. Young people, with their compulsive text-messaging and hyperactive pop culture metabolism, are more enchanted by wide-eyed, quidditch-playing Harry Potter of Hogwarts...."
This whole thing manages  first, to disparage humanity by buying into some manufactured culture-wide stereotype about kids (today they're conservative and striving—and what? Were they all wild and rebellious in the 1950s? Really?), while at the same time giving a back-handed smack to poor Harry Potter, who did nothing more than be popular enough to require an inane explanation in an article that purports to figure out what sorts of heroes kids go for. Wide-eyed? No, it's just not true. I have my own issues and questions about Harry Potter, but this is just inaccurate, and was solely tossed in there to support the other point. A trumped up faux feud between two fictional characters, let's see who wins! Let's see who's the most popular! Grrr.
It just...gets to me.
Holden Caulfield was not created to serve as some hero to inspire all kids; he's a misfit now, he was a misfit then. He's not supposed to be popular. For heaven's sake, that's the whole narrative thrust of the book. Some kids will connect, others won't. Are we really so lacking in nuance as a species that we can't accept that? Does it have to result in stories about a cultural shift? Really? And do we have to use his "popularity" (a term as sickening to me now as it was in 7th grade) as a referendum on the worth of a novel? Why does whether kids today "like him" have to be the main referendum about the book?
There was also something in the tone of the piece that made the writer sound so very pleased about this purported change in Holden Caulfield's fortunes. Or maybe pleased about how out of touch grown-ups and previous lovers of the book are? I'm not quite sure which. But the writer's very glee about the whole thing made it stick in my craw all the more.
And I know—I know, an inconsequential article about a book that's in the news now. That's all it was, right? But hoo boy it grated.

The Classics

So, it's clear to me that reading those olde-tyme-books-of-yore is a dangerous business to my sense of myself as a parent. I try not to let it get to me. I do all sorts of reasonable things, like reminding myself that the mothers in those books didn't have to work outside the home, and they are being presented by their offspring (who don't want a lifelong family feud), and, oh yeah, they're fictional. But even so, sometimes one particularly awe-inspiring mother slips through and just gets me till I feel like I'm doing it all wrong.
Chestnut and I have gotten to Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown in the Betsy-Tacy series. The girls have turned 12, and Betsy has just acknowledged to herself and her family that she believes she is a writer. This is followed shortly by her mother's discovery that—gasp! She's been reading dime-store trash. One of her own first attempts is called Lady Gwendolyn's Sin.
Well.
Her mother doesn't get angry; she gets thoughtful (see, I'm already feeling bad, here, because when, given the chance, have I ever gone for thoughtful rather than angry?). She has a conversation with Betsy's father, the upshot of which is that they know that Betsy needs to read the classics if she's going to be a great writer, and so every other Saturday they are going to allow her to go downtown all by herself to the new library in town. She can stay there all morning, and they will give her 15 cents so she can go to the bakery and have lunch, then spend the rest of the afternoon in the library.
Could anything be finer?
The description of that first trip to library is so wonderful that you all ought to run out and read it right now. The library has a fireplace, and 15 cents at the bakery buys you a bologna sandwich on fresh-baked bread and an ice cream.
Oh, how I long to give my girls even one day in their lives of that sort of bliss.
But here's the thing: the classics. Is Betsy's mother right? Does it serve a writer better to read only Hawthorne, Swift, and Twain (all of which the intriguing librarian brings Betsy to start with), or is there worth (as I have always believed) in reading everything. Everything. The classics and junk and weak attempts and silly stories and romances and...everything.
I read one of Flannery O'Connor's essay in which she said that she knew she ought to have been more influenced by the great writers, but when it came down to it, everything she'd ever written could be traced back to days spent in her basement reading Edgar Allen Poe's Tales of the Grotesque. But then again, Poe is a great writer. Elizabeth Bishop compulsively read mystery novels. My house is full of Poke-dexes.
What's a mother to do?

What's in a Name?

Was looking for my beloved childhood book Miss Bianca, about which I remember almost nothing except that it concerns a very pretty mouse who has to clean a crystal palace, and that I loved it, loved it, loved it.

Note the extremely 1970s cover.
Upon searching I was informed that it was no longer called Miss Bianca but was now part of The Rescuers series.
No doubt, this shouldn't irritate me. Nor should it bother me that Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is now also called The Secret of NIMH (a movie change, like most of them). And don't even get me started on how Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass became Alice in Wonderland.
I'd like to have the energy and sense to write a thoughtful assessment of how this is really OK because hell, we all make mistakes, and it's what's inside the book that matters, but for some reason I get all curmudgeonly about this. It just gives me the sense that we're somehow loosing the signposts that we need—how am I supposed to know how to find anything if they keep changing the names on me?
Do I sound enough like an irritable old lady yet?
Oh, and to cap it all, when I went and reluctantly asked at the bookstore for, (OK, make me say it), a Rescuer's book, they had NO IDEA WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT. "We've never heard of those books."
Just in case I didn't feel obsolete enough.

We Recommend, Part 2!

When I first had the idea for this fabulous new feature, in which I (along with my collaborators here) try to help match up books and readers, I thought it was going to be nothing but nice, easy fun. People would write in, and magically I would think of just the right book, and we would all end the adventure happy and satisfied. What I didn't anticipate was that 1) (the harder side) I wouldn't be so exactly sure what the perfect book was, because I never quite know enough and 2) (the excellent side) I had no idea that readers would be so amazingly generous with their own super-powers of recommendation. It is all been quite pleasantly humbling.
Ahem.
At any rate, this week's subject wrote in with an intriguing situation:
an 8-year-old girl who is a very strong reader with a powerful desire to read books about animals, particularly guinea pigs (the mother opined that there were probably no guinea pig books she hadn't yet read). The child also vastly prefers books with pictures in them, and likes series. Oh, and in case you weren't feeling challenged (and were leaning toward Watership Down) she's having a lot of nightmares now and the book can't be scary.
Wow.
Here's what we came up with:

Diana is all for this one, and it is (can you believe it?) part of a series. It doesn't have illustrations, though (drat!) but the cover might make up for that. But just in case, here are the others we though of (it's summer after all, time for long happy trips to the library with nothing you have to read):
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Chet Gecko by Bruce Hale (very silly detective series with animals and lots of illustrations)
I am sure that now everyone will have many more excellent possibilities. I am interested to see.

Oops, and an update: if for any reason you have missed them, absolutely read the animal books that started it all: the amazing E.B.White books: Stuart Little, The Trumpet of the Swan, and Charlotte's Web, all of which have glorious illustrations.

Taking Care

I've always had a bit of...resistance when people equate loving reading with loving books themselves. I mean the actual, physical presence of the book: spine, pages, covers, dust jacket.  Throughout The Book Thief, the constant reference to how people who loved to read would never leave books open face down, or leave a cup of water balanced on the cover, or whatever; it just struck me as inaccurate. Books, to me, are a conduit. The physical manifestation is unimportant, all that matters is getting inside the story. While I am mildly interested in seeing or holding a first edition of Milton, what I find really amazing and wonderful is that anyone can own a genuine work of art, a masterpiece, for around $4.99 (or even less, if it's used or left out in a box).

It's tricky, though, when that place where my slightly self-congratulatory devil-may-care attitude  about taking care of books bumps up against the reality of what otherwise sweet and wonderful children can do to those books. Books in my house have been dropped in the bathtub--more than once, because they wanted to see what would happen. Dust jackets are routinely discarded, touching pen-and-ink illustrations have been "colorized." These are, I hasten to add, our books.

I more or less let this be. Which is maybe a mistake.

Today a little girl from across the street came over to get back her Bone books, which Diana had borrowed. What state the books were in when they came to us, I don't know. But the first night they came they started losing pages. We found the pages, determined that we would replace the book, then forgot to do it until she came over.

There were tears.

All is now well; Diana apologized profusely; the little girl is no longer weeping; we ran out and replaced the book (volume 4).  But it makes me question my whole attitude. Is what I thought of as a lack of preciousness, merely a mask for a lack of appreciation? I wonder.

An Excellent Book That I Thought Was Only a Movie

Some of the most indelibly etched memories of my life are the weird rainy days of childhood, when wherever it was they had stuck you—be it camp or school—had to come up with something to do rather than just let you wander around outside due to the weather.

I think they showed us this in camp. All my memories of the actual context—my age, the year, my friends—have vanished, but my memories of the movie (the boy melting the lead to create ballast for the canoe and pouring it in, the way the canoe shook a little when it bobbed on the water) are clear and wordless.

I was so very pleased when this book found its way into our hands, courtesy of Diana's and Chestnut's father (and his father). He had known this only through the book, and for some reason we were mostly able to avoid the "the book was way better, I bet the movie sucked" "No, the movie..." sort of thing. Instead I got to read it with both Chestnut and Diana, and to see that it held the same strange lure.

Why is it so good? Why is it so very compelling to find out what happened to the canoe, and where it goes? It's full of all this factual information but something about the very baldness of the presentation renders it interesting rather than off-putting. It's wonderful.

Maybe everyone has read this, and I was the only one who didn't know it was a book? But if you haven't read it, do.

Evil Genius, Revisited

So, I'm conflicted about this post. I've more or less decided that this blog was going to be a place to write about children's literature in a positive manner. Not that I don't enjoy reading the odd eviscerating review every now and then, but it's clear to me that for the most part, everyone who writes a book is trying their best. Really. It's hard to write a book, and it's dreadfully unfair, really, that not everyone who does it is equally talented. They'd write a better book if they could, I think, it's just not that simple.

We got Evil Genius on the recommendation of a clerk at one of our favorite bookstores. And it looked funny, and dark, and smart, so Diana cheerfully went ahead and we brought it home. She read it for a few hours, then abruptly put it down.

Usually this means something that makes her uneasy has occurred, but she wouldn't say what when I asked her, only said that she'd wanted to stop. So I decided to read it in case there was anything I would be hearing about in an upcoming nightmare.

Evil Genius isn't a bad book. It's fine. It is dark, and it is smart. It tries, and tries hard, to explore things that matter, like morality, and intelligence, and love. But it just...fails. At least for me. It's one of those books where I'm left thinking how clear it is that being smart isn't what makes someone a good writer. The author has good ideas, and lots of energy, and no end of intelligence, but no one comes through, not really. Characters blur, the ideas never blossom, and in all the attempts to convey true feeling is attempted to be conveyed by  come down to how many times the boy bursts into tears, as though to prove he really has feelings--and a heart--now. But it's a heart that never reaches us, somehow.

It feels sort of terrible to write this. I know the author had great vision and hope for this book, the whole thing exudes her ambition and desire. But I read it with hopes, too, and am left feeling sort of let down and blue. I don't think I'm going to write any more posts like this, I don't think it's what I want to do here. It's always so sad when a book can't bring you around to its point of view.

Diana ended up coming back to the book, and liking it OK. She never told me what it was that put her off, however temporarily. I guess I'll never know.