Children's books

Lowell House, on the Feast of St. Raymond of Penafort

All this week, I've had trouble settling down and focusing, but I shall overcome. At least the panic and the stress aren't so bad this year; I think I'm just far less depressed this semester than I was last semester, although I don't think I'll ever get straight A's again. Oh, how I miss high school, when the prospect of a final didn't approach with ominous music in the background, the sound of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse increasing in pitch as they draw near. (I suppose I think that by inserting in an oblique reference to the Doppler effect is a sad attempt to appease my angry conscience who has been tapping its foot and staring at me in firm disapproval all week. Unfortunately, conscience is unappeased and is ready to chase me about with a wooden spoon. I think I should stop anthropomorphizing parts of my mind.)

Anyway, sartorias just linked to an interesting post distinguishing between the Child Reader (which the writer defines both as the child who reads what is given to them and the adult's perception of the audience for "children's literature") and the Reading Child (the indiscriminate reader that reads for the joy of reading, almost to the point where the content doesn't matter). The problem in question seems to be that adults judge what is "good" and "bad" children's literature, but they don't really have any control over what the Reading Child actually reads and enjoys. I don't have so much to say on this issue precisely, but I think that things usually turn out for the better in most cases anyway. At least, I remember being the kind of voracious reader who compulsively had to read through the ingredients list on cereal boxes (for that matter, I still have to read every single advertisement in sight on subway trains), but I also remember being taught to have an open mind about books. And well, most of the children's books I enjoyed were classics (the same books that my teachers and parents read in their childhood) or on recommendation lists. I suppose that makes my childhood self in some ways a hybrid of the Child Reader and the Reading Child? And I mean, I discovered the Sweet Valley books at about the same time I did Narnia, and I will admit, in all honesty, that I did read several of the Sweet Valley series, fascinated by the exotic lives of California teenagers (what sort of alien creatures were these?), but even at that age, I knew pretty much that Sweet Valley was sugar candy--a novelty, but eat too much of it and you feel nauseated.

In elementary school, they used to give us Scholastic and Troll book order forms, and I accumulated many, many cheap paperback children's books this way. I still have all of them at home, from the Pony Pals and Babysitter's Club series to The Groovy Greeks and Maps. (I love that last book, by the way--it has a page on how to make your own pirate's treasure map and simulate the look of old parchment by blotting the paper with used tea bags. I always, always wanted to try it, but we never did have used tea bags lying around in the house.) But of that batch of Scholastic-book-order books, the ones that have been reread the most are Little Women and The Ordinary Princess (the latter is by M.M. Kaye and inspired me to go check out all the Andrew Lang fairy tale books from the library). The books that were read the most often on my bookshelf, of course, were the Anne series (I think I stopped counting after the twenty-fifth time), but those were bought from the bookstore. ^_^

I guess my point is that when people worry that children who read indiscriminately might never develop the critical reading skills to distinguish between what's just amusing trash and what's genuine literature, they're not giving enough credit to the books. I know it's easy to get pessimistic when the "masses" go for bestsellers that, to a critical eye, have little literary content, but I really do think that good literature has the power to speak for itself. There are barriers of language and personal tastes in style, philosophy, etc., but great literature endures, while books like The Da Vinci Code will not. (At least, I don't think it will.) All right, I suppose I'm thinking optimistically...but when I think of the books that I really, really remember from my childhood, they really are the books that appear on lists of children's classics and recommended fiction. (E. Nesbit, Edward Eager, L.M. Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Madeleine L'Engle, Hugh Lofting, C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, Eleanor Porter, Diana Wynne Jones, etc., etc.) Maybe all this means is that my taste in books was either goody-two-shoes or hopelessly old-fashioned or snobbishly elitist. >_> But optimistic I shall remain.

Also, I spent the summer after senior year tutoring middle school and high school students in reading and writing, and one of the students, the younger brother of a classmate, was definitely a Reading Child. And it was amazing--he hadn't yet developed the sort of engrained prejudice the older teenager has against old literature, and I could give him books like Ivanhoe and The Three Musketeers and A Tale of Two Cities, and he'd just swallow them up! Admittedly, he often didn't fully understand a quarter of what he read, but he would just plow through them and get excited about the fighting like any boy his age would. We read Don Quixote together, and of course, he had a lot of trouble with it, but he still laughed at the windmill scene and enjoyed the book, which is of course the point. I suppose that is the basis of my optimism. Of course, he still reads all the popular books for children his age, like Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl (although personally, I think Artemis Fowl is excellent--I say this having read the books at seventeen), but he also thought The Neverending Story was the best book he ever read. ^_^ Which reminds me, I want to reread that book.

Yours &c.

Post-script: Oh yes, new icon courtesy of kaydeefalls. She made it for me quite a while ago, but it took me some time to figure out which icon I wanted to delete, to make space for it. Argh, I want a paid account. Maybe I'll upgrade next month, if there's enough money left over from my allowance this month (although I'll need to buy new textbooks too...argh).