Ten Best

Betsy at Fuse8 is at it again. Last year she did a poll on the Top 100 Picture Books of all time--and I didn't participate, because--well, I didn't have a good reason. (Other than the whole not blogging thing, about which perhaps more another day.) Tomorrow is the deadline for her new poll, the Top 100 Chapter Books of all time--and this time I'm in. I just sent her my list, and since I don't expect all these books to make her top ten (though I'd be surprised if most of them don't turn up somewhere in the top 100) I thought I'd share my list here as well. It's a little idiosyncratic, as such things should be, and I'm sure it would look different if I did it tomorrow. I didn't go back and look at other lists I've seen over the years; I just went with what came to mind first. So here's my list:

1. Charlotte's Web, E.B. White
This one changes the landscape for chapter books in mid-century. It's a perfect read-aloud, but also a great book for a relatively new reader to take on. It's got humor and pathos, and the best retelling of the Easter story I've ever read in secular form. I can't read the end without crying, even after all these years.

2. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll
Another game-changer. Raises great questions about what it means to be a child and why we would want to think of children as different from adults, I think. Plus it's hilarious and deeply weird.

3. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
I know all the reasons not to like this--the shift in focus from Mary to Colin, the reassertion of the patriarchy at the end, the well-intentioned but nonetheless problematic depiction of India--but it's still one of those books I return to year after year. If, as Perry Nodelman says, children's books are all about teaching kids how to be kids, this one is the quintessential children's book. And yet its depiction of "appropriate childhood" is so appealing to me, even now, that I keep coming back to it.

4. The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963, Christopher Paul Curtis
One of the funniest books I've ever read, but also a great reworking of a historical shame. (And apparently a book I've never written about. Sigh.)

5. The Golden Compass/Northern Lights, Philip Pullman
Another game-changer, for me: this one is comfortable with ambiguity in a way that still feels radical to me in a children's book. By the end of the series good and evil get sorted out (a little too comfortably for my taste) but in this everything's still up in the air. Lyra is a work of genius--a worthy successor to Alice.

6. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle
Is it possible to be a bookish girl and not love this one?

7. Skellig, David Almond
My list skews towards "classics," I think, but this one is a modern classic. Just the right blend of fantasy/realism. A brilliant reworking of The Secret Garden, in some ways.

8. The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett
Because who doesn't love little blue men?

9. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone, J. K. Rowling
OK, another game-changer in that it made fantasy cool again (and funny). I know Diana Wynne Jones was already writing funny fantasy, but I think the opening chapters of this novel really are brilliant. Roald Dahl meets Dickens meets Cinderella, or something.

10. The Painted Garden (also published as Movie Shoes), Noel Streatfeild
I loved this book when I was a kid because it was such a terrific reworking of The Secret Garden. I still think it's brilliantly intertextual and really smart about what it means to try to inhabit a book. I used to want to be "discovered" as the next, next Mary Lennox.

You've got about 25 hours left to play. Go ahead, you know you want to!

The Future of Reading - ‘Reading Workshop’ Approach Lets Students Pick the Books - Series - NYTimes.com

The Future of Reading - ‘Reading Workshop’ Approach Lets Students Pick the Books - Series - NYTimes.com: "For years Lorrie McNeill loved teaching “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the Harper Lee classic that many Americans regard as a literary rite of passage.


But last fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign “Mockingbird” — or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb."

(click the link above to read the rest)

A dear friend of mine has been teaching English this way to her middle-schoolers for several years. I've met with her students and they are fantastic--thoughtful, engaged, widely read. But, it's true, she's teaching in a small independent school, with motivated students--and parents who chose a non-traditional curriculum. I wonder how this would work in a larger setting, with kids who aren't strong readers? I've got to believe it might be worth a try...

Terry Pratchett: State of the Nation - 8/24/2009 2:10:00 PM - School Library Journal

"What about children do you find compelling as characters?
Children as a whole are more interesting as main characters because, by definition, there is lot that they don't know, and at the beginning of the book there is a lot that the reader does not know and so they can learn together."

read the rest here:
Terry Pratchett: State of the Nation - 8/24/2009 2:10:00 PM - School Library Journal

The White Horse

The White Horse of Uffington appears to be about 3000 years old, and is part of a complex of ancient sites in the Vale of the White Horse. The horse itself was probably constructed by digging trenches and then re-filling the trenches with chalk blocks; it needs to be cleaned regularly to remain visible. In Terry Pratchett's Discworld, a remarkably similar location exists:

There were odd carvings in the chalk, too, which the shepherds sometimes weeded when they were out on the downs with the flocks and there was not a lot to do. The chalk was only a few inches under the turf. Hoofprints could last a season, but the carvings had lasted for thousands of years. They were pictures of horses and giants, but the strange thing was that you couldn't see them properly from anywhere on the ground. They looked as if they'd been made for views in the sky. (The Wee Free Men, 119)

The image appears on pre-Roman British coinage, and while there has been some debate as to whether it is really mean to be a horse, it has certainly been referred to as such since at least the 11th century. In A Hat Full of Sky, the sequel to The Wee Free Men, Tiffany reports that Granny Aching said, “Taint what a horse looks like, it's what a horse be." While there don't appear to be other carvings of similar age still extant [edited to add: in England; my brother reminds me of others in Peru] (the Cerne Abbas giant, for example, seems to date back only to the 17th century) , this may be because other carvings were not maintained as the Uffington White Horse has been.

Near the White Horse is the site of Uffington Castle, an Iron Age hill-fort. Also nearby is the “Dragon Hill,” reported to be the place where St. George slew the dragon. In The Wee Free Men, Tiffany walks to the top of “Arken Hill”:

There was a flat place at the top where nothing ever grew, and Tiffany knew there was a story that a hero had once fought a dragon up there and its blood had burned the ground where it fell. There was another story that said there was a heap of treasure under the hill, defended by the dragon, and another story that said a king was buried there in armor of solid gold. There were lots of stories about the hill; it was surprising it hadn't sunk under the weight of them. (52)

I took my class to the White Horse during the last week of classes. It was a warm, sunny, day and the wind blew along the ridge as we walked up the hill towards the carving. Then we sat up above and looked down at the flat-topped hill and thought about the people who lived on this land, and carved the horse, and buried their dead. Sheep graze on the hillside now and tourists come and walk among them.

In defense of Holden Caulfield

John Green is annoyed by the recent NYTimes piece on how Holden Caulfield is irrelevant today, and he blogs about it.

(Has anyone else noticed that he's blogging more lately?)

(For the record, I mostly agree with Green, but I love the cover of Catcher that the Times used to illustrate their piece...)

you read it here first!

Nancy Pearl loves E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. Of course she does! (I did, too. Last year.)

late to the party

I know Louis Menand's piece on the creative writing workshop (ostensibly a review of Mark McGurl's book, The Program Era, which sounds fascinating) has already been discussed all over the place. After all, it came out three weeks ago, and in internet time that's an eternity. But I am getting to my New Yorkers late, and I have a bizarre aversion to reading them online, so I just finished the piece this morning.

As someone who occasionally teaches a creative writing workshop (in nonfiction, I hasten to add!), I suppose I have a dog in the fight--though, as Menand presents it, in the end it's not much of a fight. Creative writing workshops are doing something, and they're not going away, so whether or not creative writing itself can be taught actually turns out to be sort of beside the point. But there's almost a throwaway line in his piece that I found very helpful, actually: "Creative-writing courses follow naturally from the 'learning by doing' theories of progressive education: they add practical, hands-on experience to traditional book learning" (109). I've been thinking a lot about progressive education lately, and this rings true to me. It also suggests that maybe in literature courses we ought to be making our students, say, write a sonnet or attempt some fiction. (I think this might be the Bennington approach--Terry?) It's an approach I have to admit I've resisted, because it's 1) not the way I was taught and 2) therefore would have me teaching something I'm not sure I know how to teach. Always a tricky thing.

But, as Menand's next-to-last paragraph reminds us, workshops can "teach [us] about the importance of making things, not just reading things"--and that is, I think, an increasingly valuable skilln(112). Matt Crawford might not think of fiction-making as the same kind of soulcraft that he identifies in manual labor, but there is a satisfaction to making, even making sentences and paragraphs, that I think it's important to acknowledge. And sometimes when students try to write something themselves, they gain an awareness of their reading as made object; they start to be able to look into the craft of it. And that, in turn, can improve their writing as they pay more attention to their own craft.

Sometimes in my children's lit class I've had students do a project taken from Molly Bang's Picture This! How Pictures Work, in which they have to make a picture that tells a story, using cut paper in only four colors. They laugh at themselves for enjoying such a kindergarten assignment so much, but it does give them some insight into what the illustrator's craft requires. I may have to revive that one, and maybe play around with some other hands-on assignments, this time through.