a couple of lines

from Here, There Be Dragons...

"Astraues," Aven called out. "God of the four winds and friend to sailors. Say a little prayer when you look at him, so he will give us what we need to keep on our course."

"A little prayer?" said Jack. "To a constellation?"

"To what it represents," said Aven.

"But I don't believe in what it represents," said Jack.

"Prayers aren't for the deity," said Aven. "They're for you, to recommit yourself to what you believe."

"Can't you do that without praying to a dead Greek god?"

"Sure," said Aven. "But how often would anyone do that, if not in prayer?" (p. 218)

"The Summer Country is a land greater than any in the Archipelago of Dreams, because it has within it everything to be found in the Archipelago, and more. But where someone like Ordo Maas could find it anywhere, the Winter King would never find it at all. Because to him, it is always just out of his reach--when, in truth, he had it in reach all along."

"It sounds," John said, "as if you're talking about our world."

"Yes," said Bert. "Your world is the Summer Country." (p. 310)

Is the Kindle elitist?

From the first time I saw a Kindle, I wanted one. It was an irrational desire, a visceral one. I couldn't explain it, though I tried to talk about saving my back (from the weight of all those books), more access, etc. Really it just looks like a cool piece of technology and sometimes Iwant them. But here's an interesting counter-perspective on the technology, from an interview with Sherman Alexie about his hatred of the Kindle:

Books saved my life, Edward. I rose out of poverty and incredible social dysfunction because of books. And all of my senses-sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste-come into play when I think and read about books. Books are tactile and eccentric. An eBook will always be a gorgeous but anonymous box. It will also be just a tool–perhaps an amazing and useful tool-but I don’t want it to replace the book. And I’m worried that many people don’t care about the book itself, and see the eBook as a replacement. And I’m worried that Amazon and other eBook distributors will completely replace bookstores. The careers of nearly every successful writer are based on the amazing human interaction between bookstore employees and readers.

read it all here

Famous Fictional Characters

The Guardian books blog poses the question today: who is the most famous fictional character? Apparently Penguin is promoting a new edition of the Sherlock Holmes stories this fall, and, according to The Guardian--"Sherlock Holmes," it is claimed on the promotional material, "is not only the most famous character in crime fiction, but arguably the most famous character in all fiction."

That's a big claim. The comments section over there suggests some interesting alternatives (Satan? God?), but I thought I'd bring it over here. I've long thought that children's lit provides many of the most famous fictional characters--Peter Pan, Alice, Mr. Toad, Winnie the Pooh. The nineteenth century offers us some important ones: I'd add Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and Scrooge to Peter and Alice, for example.

It seems to me, too, that "famous" here means "detachable from their original context." That is, many of us encounter these most famous characters long before we ever read their stories--if we ever do. So while Wilbur or even Harry Potter are obviously well-known, I'd say they're not as famous as Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland, whose names have become bywords. Wilbur and Harry still come in their original contexts, with stories attached, even if we meet them first in film rather than literature.

How Children's Literature Changed my Life

Wow, that sounds portentous, doesn't it? But I mean it quite literally. I have a very different life--ok, a sort of different life--than I had before I was teaching children's literature. One big difference is that these days I occasionally--even, often--write about living authors. One of the big perks, frankly, of being a Victorianist is that the authors are all dead. I mean this in the nicest possible way. They died many years ago, most of them of natural causes, having already written many wonderful (and sometimes not-so-wonderful) books, and I don't have to feel bad about anything I say about them because they don't know I've said it. (Or if they do, I think I'm safe in assuming they don't care.)

When you write about living authors, however, you can't just irresponsibly say whatever you want. (Not that I ever did that, of course...) You feel responsible. You can even occasionally wonder what they think. And, sometimes, you can even find out. Now, so far, this has actually been all good. I still have the message on my voicemail that John Green left me after he read my review of Paper Towns. (Yes, I'm a nerd that way. Or maybe a nerdfighter.) (He liked it. That's why I kept the message.) And the other day Neil Gaiman linked to my column on Coraline (scroll down), and said he liked it, and that made my day.

So actually of course I'm really glad to be writing about living authors. It's exciting and unpredictable. And it makes me feel like part of a community.

I'm giving a talk about Stephenie Meyer this weekend. Do you think she cares?

Kids' books for adults

I had the pleasure today of leading a discussion on "children's classics for adults" at the West End branch of the Richmond Public Library. A committed group of grown-ups gave up the most beautiful day in months--well, an hour of it--to talk about Bud, Not Buddy, Becoming Naomi Leon, A Single Shard, and The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place. We talked about art, families, agency, and finding a home--and left all kinds of things unsaid.

Which is just as well, as there are two more meetings, over the next two Saturdays, at two more branches (Ginter Park and Belmont, for those of you in town). I'll have a different group at each discussion, but some folks today said they wanted to come to the others, too. I hope they will--I want to hear more from them!

A fascinating sidelight: three out of the four books have important scenes in libraries. My favorite is in Bud, Not Buddy: the title character's first impulse when he's in trouble is to seek out his local librarian, a Miss Hill, who has (to his dismay) just married and moved to Chicago. I hadn't known this before, but a little research revealed that Miss Hill is in fact a historical figure, Charlemae Hill Rollins of the Chicago Public Library. I'm sorry I hadn't known about her sooner; read a little more about her here, and here, and you'll see why I'm glad to know about her now.

Book Art

Many years ago a friend gave me a copy of A Humument, a "treated book by British artist Tom Phillips based on the Victorian novel 'A Human Document' by W.H. Mallock." In those pre-internet days, what she gave me was a bound paperback book, a reproduction of, I believe, one of the first books Phillips treated. It was not really readable as a book, but was an astonishing work of art, something one could return to again and again.

A year or two ago my daughter told me she was interested in "altered books," and I eventually figured out she meant the same thing that Phillips had done. She began working on one, and I gave her my copy of A Humument to explore. Then a student showed me a piece she'd done in a mixed media workshop that similarly altered and revised published work.

But nothing I'd seen before prepared me for some of these new uses for books. Like Betsy at Fuse8 (where I originally saw this), I especially like the tea party. But some of the furniture and sculptures are well worth checking out, too.

A little children's lit love

It's the season for appreciating children's books. Holidays connect us profoundly with our childhoods, with their traditions that call us back to our families of origin even as we forge them anew with our own children. Years ago in a graduate seminar I had a professor gloss the difference between diachronic (clock-time, linear time) and synchronic (recurrent, cyclical) time through holidays: they are synchronic in being always the same, even as the particulars change. And so here we are, moving forward into December but backwards into our childhoods at the same time, and for some people that means appreciating the books that link us to our past.

First up is Andrew Martino in the Chronicle, (re)discovering his love of children's books: "By spending several months reading children's and young-adult fiction, I rediscovered not only what made me a reader in the first place, but also something essential about myself: my imagination. Reading "for fun" should not be just for children, but required of us all if we want to hold onto what makes us essentially human — our imaginations." The essay feels very familiar to me--it actually describes the process I went through on my first sabbatical, when I effectively converted myself from a Victorianist to a children's literature specialist. I had always been a somewhat addictive reader, losing myself especially in genre fiction (I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on Dorothy Sayers). But I'd lost a good deal of the pleasure of reading through years of graduate school and the pressures of the tenure track. I hasten to add, I love analysis; I can find deep pleasure in unpacking a complex text. But the addictive pleasure of speed, of plot, and of the freshness of experience, still stays with me. (I'm still trying to figure out, though, what "second-person" texts he read--any help on this on?)

I also recently enjoyed this piece by Gary Kamiya in Salon.com (click past the ads) about The Wind in the Willows. I can't remember the first time I read this novel; it seems I've always known it. And I think Kamiya really gets at the twin pleasures of the novel: the madcap adventures of the irredeemable Toad and the nostalgia, even melancholy, of the reflective Rat and Mole. As a family we used to watch the wonderful stop-motion version of the novel* (yes, it skips the "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" sequence, but is really quite lovely nonetheless), and we used to try to sort out which of us was which character: was Mark really Badger, despite wishing he was the Rat? Am I Mole? And isn't every toddler Toad? Just thinking about it all makes me want to read it again, or at least to revisit the Christmas carol scene.




*there was also a series, and some of those episodes picked up episodes missed from the novel adaptation, while others were new. All good, really.

YA books for adults

The line between YA and adult books is, for me, very blurry. And apparently for some publishers, too, which is why (for example) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is only one of many books published in both categories. Now the School Library Journal blog (link from Kids Lit) takes up the question, listing nine books for teens from the last year that would be equally at home in adult reading rooms. I've only read two (The Graveyard Book and Octavian Nothing, II) but I wholeheartedly agree about them. Then again, I'm an adult who routinely reads YA fiction, so I would, right? And Pratchett (another listee) and Gaiman already cross over all the time between children's, YA, and adult fiction, so they're no surprise. My husband thinks Octavian Nothing is categorically not for teens (we have these arguments periodically; they're fun); it is, certainly, a denser read than many books we typically think of as YA. But now I need to read the rest of the books on the list and figure out why they're there and not, say, Paper Towns, which was one of my favorite YA books of the year and far more engaging than, say, Prep, which also has a teenage protagonist but was published for adults.*

Categories are hard. Necessary, I guess, but hard.

*One (cynical) reason is marketing. It's also true that Paper Towns has few if any interesting and well-developed adult characters--they're just much less important to the story--while The Graveyard Book and Octavian Nothing each has several. For my money Prep** has no interesting characters of any age, but that's maybe just me.
**Yes, I'm aware that Prep didn't come out this year and the other books I'm talking about did. I couldn't think of a more recent "adult" fiction title with a teenaged protagonist.

More on The Graveyard Book

I've already said that I loved The Graveyard Book; now you can read (or listen to) a brief interview with Neil Gaiman, and check out another review and a brief excerpt. Go, now, what are you waiting for?

what I'm reading

I've actually managed to read two novels and a few picture books over the last couple of days--all of them non-required, almost-purely-for-pleasure books. (I say "almost" because when I read kids' and YA literature there's always a chance I'll teach it or write about it--but the initial reading is usually still for pleasure.) I've also bought a few more and am dying to get to them, although the treadmill starts up again tomorrow so I may not have time to get to them for a while.

First up was The Graveyard Book. What is there to say that hasn't already been said? I heard most of the first chapter of this read by the author himself almost a year ago, at the Fantasy Matters conference. It was so chilling, a large auditorium full of people just sat in silence, gasping occasionally, as he read. Since then he's read the entire novel, a chapter at a time, to different audiences on his book tour--and you, too, can listen and watch! I have heard about a chapter and a half so far, and it's absolutely spell-binding. But I can read to myself quicker than I can listen, and I can do it in bed, so I finished the book the old-fashioned way, page by page. I was at war with myself over whether to read faster so as to find out what happened, or more slowly so as to enjoy the experience longer. In the end faster won out, as it always does with me--but as soon as I can, I'll reread it so I can linger over the sentences again. I want to write about it more fully at some point, but for now--read it! (Oh, and apparently like everyone else, yes, I had trouble finding it in the bookstore. I checked YA, Fantasy/Sci Fi, and new YA--but it was in the children's section in a display all on its own.)

I also picked up Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist when I got The Graveyard Book, because I was planning to see the movie and wanted to read the novel first. But then I didn't. So. I enjoyed the movie, which has a great feel to it of one of those semi-aimless evenings where nothing happens but everything does. Then I read the book, which is really even better. Episodes get switched around in the movie, and heightened for dramatic effect--and I can't complain about that, as the drama is enjoyable--but the book, with its chapters alternating between Nick and Norah's voices, really is a compelling read all on its own. Again, others have already said much more than I, but I'm glad I read it (though I did stay up too late last night finishing it. Sigh).

The other books were all picture books dealing with elections, and I'll have more to say about them, I hope, in my next column. Stay tuned.

Literary Holidays

A post in the Guardian's Books Blog today asks, "If you were choosing a vacation destination on the basis of its bookish associations, where would you go?" You might not find the answers that surprising:

Travel website TripAdvisor has come up with a list of the world's top 10 literary spots, according to its editors. So, in order: London, Stratford-upon-Avon, Edinburgh, Dublin, New York, Concord in Massachusetts, Paris, San Francisco, Rome and St Petersburg.

I've been to 7 of these spots (not Paris, Rome, or Edinburgh), but I've only made a point of seeing the literary sites in Concord. (Well, I went to a play in Stratford-upon-Avon, but I didn't actually do a tour.) For sheer beauty and saturation of literary associations, I'd choose the Lake District in England, myself--in addition to Wordsworth and Coleridge you get Ruskin and Arthur Ransom, author of the Swallows and Amazons series, and some of the most glorious scenery in England. And then, as one commenter has already noted over on the Guardian blog, you could also choose Haworth and the Yorkshire moors for its Bronte resonances. How about Oxford, home of Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Philip Pullman, and setting of my favorite Dorothy L. Sayers novel, Gaudy Night?


Where would you go?

Two links..and a short note

So it's possible the newest Disney princess movie could have racist elements? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked. (Or maybe, as the article suggests, classist? Which seems even more likely...)

I love The Guardian's coverage of literature. This little piece on a new contract that requires children's book writers not to misbehave is a classic. Read the comments, too.

Today is Nick's birthday, and he is currently happily engrossed in a volume of Asterix stories that his sister gave him. He acquired one in French, while we were in France, and the volume she bought includes that one in English. Go, Mariah! He has also--so far--received copies of The Little Prince, The Magician: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel (he finished The Alchemyst yesterday), and The Discworld Graphic Novels. And all this is before today's mail has arrived...

Recent reading

As you can see from the sidebar, I did not complete my assigned reading while on vacation. I did, however, thoroughly enjoy both Out of the Wild* and Little Brother--and I passed the latter on to my brother-in-law, who enjoyed it as well. Part of the pleasure for both of us--more for him, a San Francisco native--was a familiarity with the locations. It's always fun to find a place one knows in fiction. But what I enjoyed even more was the unapologetic political nature of the novel, and the unabashed geekery. I have to confess I couldn't much follow the latter, but I found it compelling anyway--and more than a little paranoid.

The day before we left for France, I field a call from our bank for Mariah. She was out on her scooter, and the bank was concerned that her debit card had been used twice at gas stations in the last hour and a half. That's a pretty typical fraud pattern, they explained, so they just wanted to make sure she really did have the card. I called her and all was well, and we were grateful to the card company for checking. But after reading Little Brother I reflected again on how that information could be used. While I trust our bank (mostly) to keep our data safe, the fact that the information is out there means it could be misused, as it is in the novel. (For those who haven't read it, in the novel government agents use credit card, cell phone, internet, and toll-pass data to track citizens whom they suspect of terrorist involvement.) When do the potential harms outweigh the real benefits of this kind of data gathering? How do we know how our data is being used, and what can we do to protect it? The novel asks these questions in an always-entertaining, fast-paced adventure that explores the role of civil liberties in a civil society.

I can imagine Little Brother as one of the "surprise" YA titles of the sort discussed in Margo Rabb's piece in the New York Times, a book that began life as simply "a novel," that was then picked up and marketed as YA. Or maybe not--I don't know what Doctorow had in mind. But the book seems to me an obvious candidate for crossover, regardless.

Rabb, it seems to me, is saying much more diplomatically what Frank Cottrell Boyce said a month or so ago about YA literature: it's literature, and/but some people find the YA label off-putting. Others don't, of course (read Justine Larbalestier and Little Willow for more on this). But I did find myself defending the book a bit to my brother-in-law before passing it on. Maybe I have to work on my own attitudes...

*More on OOTW in another post. I am still mulling over some of the implications of the series and its attitudes towards fairy tales. I'll come back to it soon, I hope.

Carnival!

The June Carnival of Children's Literature is up! Lots of great stuff about fathers in/and children's literature, including lists of books! Great stuff...

Young Wizards, again

OK, so I've finished the last of the Young Wizards books (so far--another comes out this fall) and I stand by my earlier comparisons. I think they're just as good as Cooper or L'Engle's books, and engaged in much the same issues. There's an intriguing "problem" of time with them. The first book, published in 1982, takes place in a pre-PC world--no internet, no cellphones, not even the glimmerings. And that's all fine; the magic works, and it's no more jarring than reading, say, Cooper or L'Engle. But Duane has continued writing about these kids, and their world has increasingly become our world; the computer that arrives in the third book is an Apple IIIc+ (which didn't, as far as I can tell, ever exist, but like other personal computers of that vintage it's got a floppy drive, etc. Later it appears to evolve into something like a PowerBook, though with powers far beyond any I've ever owned.), the DVD and satellite TV enter the picture, everyone has a cellphone, and by the most recent book it's also clear that the towers have fallen in New York. This is all fine--except that the kids haven't finished middle school yet, which they'd just started in the first book. So the world has aged a good twenty years, but they haven't.

Still, it's easy to get over that. The characters in the Charlie Brown comics never aged, either, and the kids in the L'Engle books aged inconsistently, especially when you tried to match up the Austins with the Murrys (as L'Engle herself eventually did). The early books may seem a bit anachronistic to kids reading them today, but maybe not; I'm not sure these time "problems" would have bothered me as a child reader.

In many ways the books strike me as being almost as much s/f as fantasy. There is magic, but magic appears in some ways to be--as it often is for L'Engle as well--simply a higher understanding of the laws of physics. I like the way Duane brings in Celtic mythology in A Wizard Abroad, and I also like the way she deepens the relationships between and among her characters as the series progresses. I especially appreciate that she works hard to balance a sense of the costs and the pains of wizardry (and, for that matter, of life) with a generally optimistic sense that good can prevail. For example, the climax of the latest book, Wizards at War, recalls the encounter with IT at the end of A Wrinkle in Time, but the resolution is nowhere near as easy or as quick--it is not always easy to know what the right thing to do is, and even when the kids do know, it's not always easy to do it. As the books progress, more characters keep being added--this seems to me in keeping with the increasing scale of crises they have to face, and the overall theme of interconnectedness that animates the books. There is a deeply religious sensibility here, I think, though not perhaps a conventionally Christian one.

I've just done a quick read-through of these novels--all eight in one week, give or take--and I'll need to consider them further. But for now, I can see recommending them to kids who've enjoyed the Harry Potter series, or who have read and enjoyed L'Engle, Cooper, or Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. Nick, at the moment, is rather resisting most of my recommendations (this happens periodically and I just wait it out; he usually comes around), so I'll take these back to the library for now and see if he gets interested some other time. He's all about dragons at the moment, though--so if anyone's familiar with the Chris D'Lacey books, let me know what you think.

Middlemarch

Is Zadie Smith the sharpest critic writing today? I loved her two-part piece on reading (I mentioned it here and here), and now she's got a piece on one of my favorite novels of all time, George Eliot's Middlemarch. She seems to me just the kind of critic George Eliot was: sympathetic and tough at the same time.

A small taste:

The novel is a riot of subjectivity. To Mary Garth, Fred Vincy is the central character in Middlemarch. To Ladislaw it is Dorothea. To Lydgate, it is Rosamund Vincy. To Rosamund, it is herself.

Read the whole essay. And read the book!

(I saw this first on Educating Alice, who must get to her Guardian feeds before I do!)

Talking about books

Since I'm on sabbatical this year I don't talk about books as much as usual. I write about them, and I talk them up when I get a chance, but I always feel as if folks are humoring me just a little bit. (I do go on...)

But today I got to talk about the Twilight books with ten seventh graders who are big fans. (Well, nine of them are; the tenth was there to keep them honest.) These were smart, funny, articulate kids. They know at some level that there are better books than Twilight, but they love the feeling of giving themselves up to a book and just wallowing for a while. They love the action, the fantasy, the mystery--but also, I think, they love the predictability. They know Bella will whine, and Edward will let her, and Jacob will smolder, and Alice will be just perfect, and that's what they want.

There's a comfort to predictability, and smart girls are not above that comfort. But they were impatient with Bella, and troubled at the idea of giving up her humanity for Edward (at least one said she wouldn't change her name for a man, so why should Bella give up even more?). One called the books "anti-feminist," though others thought Bella's effort to establish herself on equal footing with Edward was admirable--if, perhaps, impossible.

They all loved Edward. When their teacher and I expressed a mild partiality for Jacob, not one agreed with us. They love Edward's perfection. Some compared him to Ashley Wilkes, though, wondering if he was "too perfect," or "perfect, but wrong for her." At least one had gone on to read Wuthering Heights after encountering the references to it in Eclipse. None had ever seen Buffy, or read Dracula (though some might, now that I've suggested it). None professed any particular interest in vampires.

I was fascinated by our conversation, which had lots of "likes" scattered throughout (they kept count on each other!), and occasional squealing, and plenty of in-jokes. The one who had pushed Twilight on the others denied ever crying about it, though the others teased her. One girl had read the series five times (!), but claimed that she found the characters slightly flat. All knew the date the next book will be out, and the movie date, too.

I think I'll go back and talk to them about books again. It's good to hear what kids are thinking about books, and good to know there's a new generation of readers coming up. I can't wait to get them in my own classes in a few years.

Something I can have, something I must have

I can have: Someone somewhere (was it Amazon?) told me that Philip Pullman's Once Upon a Time in the North would not be available until later this month, but I actually have a copy right now in my hot little hands. What a pleasure! (I haven't actually opened it yet...I have a big road trip coming up and I'm saving it for bedtime reading on the road.)

I must have: Today I learned that Neil Gaiman has written an introduction to one of my favorite childhood books, The Thirteen Clocks, by James Thurber. My brothers and sister and I grew up parroting lines like "He breaks up minstrels in his soup, like crackers" and "He'll slit you from your guggle to your zatch." I think I have a battered old copy, but a new one--with illustrations by Marc Simont, whose illustrations for Thurber's Many Moons are a complete delight, and introduction by Gaiman--is going on the wish list right now.

Anne turns 100

There have been all sorts of celebrations and recollections of Anne of Green Gables this year, the 100th anniversary of her first appearance. This one by Margaret Atwood is particularly thoughtful and interesting, I think--I especially like her recognition about Marilla. (A student of mine is writing a timely honors thesis on orphan girls in fiction; Anne holds a central place in her work.)

(Link from Jenny Davidson at Light Reading, who gets to everything before I do! And I'm grateful to her for it...)

Once upon a time...

Most of you already know this, but in case you don't--you can read an excerpt from Philip Pullman's forthcoming Once Upon a Time in the North right here. The book comes out April 3 in the UK, but we have to wait until April 22.