JENN FRANK'S FAVORITE BOOKS FOR KIDS

millionsmillions: Rest in peace E. L. Konigsburg, author of one...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:15:17 -0400

Rest in peace E. L. Konigsburg, author of one of the greatest children’s books of all time. (Hyperbole? Oh, go get lost in the Met’s fountain.)

The Atlantic - What Grown-Ups Can Learn From Kids' Books

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 13:05:33 -0400

The Atlantic - What Grown-Ups Can Learn From Kids' Books:

The little prince reminds us to have the proper perspective on the world around us: to be attentive and present, to know why we do what we do, to remain ever-curious, ever-inquisitive, ever-questioning, to remember the things that matter—and those that don’t. A child can’t realize the significance of the lesson, because it hasn’t yet been lost on him. The little prince’s vantage point is the only one he’s ever known.

Aw! I used to always get an invisible ink Yes and Know book for the airplane. Usually a spy-themed...

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 23:29:03 -0400

Aw! I used to always get an invisible ink Yes and Know book for the airplane. Usually a spy-themed one!

rickkanelives:

1-3-80
I had a nice Christmas! I got a radio controled car, and the book The Wind in the Willows. I also got Ben and Me, and The Cave of Time. They are both books. I also got The Mighty Man and Monster Maker. It is a kit that you can make monsters with. I also got the book James and the Giant Peach. It is a good book! I got a sweatband, and two lego sets. Me and my brother got a tape recorder! I also got a Yes and Know book. It is neat! I also got a Pogo book.

The worst part about this is, when the Scholastic Book Fair...

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 11:17:00 -0400

The worst part about this is, when the Scholastic Book Fair order forms go out during English class, some little girl will have to spend all her allowance money on both books.

Well, and then once she’s read both books she’ll feel her psyche divided into two distinct halves, and she’ll be a little bit devastated because she actually preferred the book “for boys” to the one “for girls,” and what does it all mean. What does it mean! (It doesn’t mean anything. Or it means she has some sort of taste.)

Actually—worst-case scenario—a girl buys the second book, and in spite of herself. Because, the way Scholastic Book Fair works is, you make these book selections in plain view of a room of peers, and if you are a preteen girl, oh, oh, everyone is judging you, everyone is staring at you, and every day is the end of the world, you awkward little mawkish thing.

Right around age 11 or 12, I think, girls suddenly experience this incredible social pressure. They have to decide whether to maintain the sorts of smart or adventurous hobbies they’ve always enjoyed (or nebbish ones, like computer games and reading, ahem), or whether to start imitating this boy-crazy, fashion-obsessed facade all in the hopes of proving their gender in a super-social, schoolyard-hierarchy way.

I point to my 13th birthday, August 14, 1995, as experiential data. That day, which was the First Day of My Teenagerhood, I chose a cool leather jacket (ugh, of all things) over the Virtual Boy, which! by the way! I had been waaaaiting for, for months and months and months and months. Every time I return to this memory—and I do! Neurotically!—I am depressed by my decision all over again. I wasn’t true to myself. Oh, God!

And when I look at a drawing of a girl talking on a cell phone from the harness of a zip-line, and how important it suddenly becomes to 12-year-old girls to be interpreted by their peers as “grown” and “sophisticated” and whatever else that even means—and what does it mean?!?! To suddenly behave in a vacuous, image-conscious, boy-crazy way when the truth is you’d never so much as poke any of your classmates with a stick? To suddenly act like the most you can offer the world is your well-groomed hair ?—ugh, I start to think about my own girlhood, how careful I became to conceal my computer-game-playing and my book-reading from all my peers, and I just get so, so depressed.

(Teaching children—and girls in particular—to be “image conscious,” by the way, is just daring kids to behave like bullying little sociopaths. )

You guys, I started shaving my legs when I was 11 and I didn’t even want to.

Update: Well, all right.

ryannorth:

BOYS ONLY: How to Survive Anything!
Table of Contents:
How to Survive a shark attack
How to Survive in a Forest
How to Survive Frostbite
How to Survive a Plane Crash
How to Survive in the Desert
How to Survive a Polar Bear Attack
How to Survive a Flash Flood
How to Survive a Broken Leg
How to Survive an Earthquake
How to Survive a Forest Fire
How to Survive in a Whiteout
How to Survive a Zombie Invasion
How to Survive a Snakebite
How to Survive if Your Parachute Fails
How to Survive a Croc Attack
How to Survive a Lightning Strike
How to Survive a T-Rex
How to Survive Whitewater Rapids
How to Survive a Sinking Ship
How to Survive a Vampire Attack
How to Survive an Avalanche
How to Survive a Tornado
How to Survive Quicksand
How to Survive a Fall
How to Survive a Swarm of Bees
How to Survive in Space

vs

GIRLS ONLY: How to Survive Anything!
Table of Contents:
How to survive a BFF Fight
How to Survive Soccer Tryouts
How to Survive a Breakout
How to Show You’re Sorry
(and chapter 3 is where we no longer care about “survival”)
How to Have the Best Sleepover Ever
How to Take the Perfect School Photo
How to Survive Brothers
Scary Survival Dos and Don’ts
(“don’t throw things or yell at your ghost. it may react badly.”)
How to Handle Becoming Rich
How to Keep Stuff Secret
How to Survive Tests
How to Survive Shyness
How to Handle Sudden Stardom
More Stardom Survival Tips
How to Survive a Camping Trip
(“fresh air is excellent for the skin”)
How to Survive a Fashion Disaster
How to Teach Your Cat to Sit
(are you #$&^%*@ kidding me?)
How to Turn a No Into a Yes
Top Tips for Speechmaking
How to Survive Embarrassment
How to Be a Mind Reader
How to Survive a Crush
Seaside Survival
(don’t wear heels. tie your hair back. sunglasses add glamour.)
How to Soothe Sunburn
How to Pick Perfect Sunglasses
Surviving a Zombie Attack
How to Spot a Frenemy
Brilliant Boredom Busters
How to Survive Truth or Dare
How to Beat Bullies
How to be an Amazing Babysitter

I came across these books myself and remarked on them to Jenn, but didn’t pick them up to open them. Jackie did, and it’s her comments in italics there. These books were published this year by Scholastic. They are not, as you have have guessed by the insane sexism, published in the 1950s. Scholastic: this is not your proudest moment?

Maybe - MAYBE - How To Pick Perfect Sunglasses is actually in the same class as Surviving When Your Parachute Fails. And maybe the authors truly believed this but also truly believed these two identical classes of disasters (for some reason?) needed to be in separate books. If you ever find yourself in this situation, please oh please don’t say “THIS ONE IS FOR BOYS AND THIS IS FOR GIRLS”. Perhaps instead say “THIS ONE HAS A BUNCH OF INTERESTING REAL-LIFE DISASTER SURVIVAL AND THIS ONE HAS A LOT OF PERSONAL HYGIENE AND INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIP STUFF IN IT, ALSO, TIPS ON GETTING YOUR CAT TO SIT DOWN, I DUNNO”.

The content of the book is what really makes it egregious, though I do recognize I react to “boys only” and “girls only” in most contexts really negatively (dating profiles and middle school sex ed classes being I suppose some exceptions). I can’t help subbing in other groups that have had privilege:

How To Survive Anything! STRAIGHT PEOPLE ONLY

How To Survive Anything! WHITE PEOPLE ONLY

Wow those book titles seem really horrible, huh? Weiiiiiiiiiiiird

Amy Fusselman tackles kids' books

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:30:11 -0400

Amy Fusselman is one of my favorite writers. Her zine, bunnyrabbit, was one of the first zines I ever read. Fifteen years ago! We’re talkin’ 15 years, here!

Anyway, she’s got a piece about children’s literature over at McSweeneys:

If you have children, you probably know The Fur Family, because it was written back in the Stone Age by Margaret Wise Brown, she of the positively creepy, Norman-Bates-ian maternal force that makes damn sure that the Runaway Bunny goes nowhere, thank you very much.

But this is not about that children’s classic, the sales of which could probably put my own children through college ten times over. This is about The Little Fur Family, which I myself owned. I remember having a tiny copy that was covered in grey fur, and who doesn’t like fur-covered books?

It isn’t reeeeaaaally entirely about kids’ books, as is Fusselman’s way, but you know.

"For a certain type of girl wending her way through adolescence in the mid 1990s, the bible was a..."

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:58:00 -0500

“For a certain type of girl wending her way through adolescence in the mid 1990s, the bible was a paperback novel with a hot pink spine. It was Blake Nelson’s debut and it was called, aptly, Girl. The cover bore a blurry black-and-white portrait of a girl in motion: in peasant blouse and pendant, she was flipping her dark hair over her shoulder in something between a head-bang and a shrug.”

- The Gospel According to Girl: A Profile of Blake Nelson at The Millions

(via fuckyeahsassymagazine)

An interview with Eureka’s Castle’s...

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 22:03:34 -0400

An interview with Eureka’s Castle’s “Jovial” Bob Stine! (Best Week Ever)

Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones snopes.com - The...

Sat, 14 May 2011 13:56:19 -0400

The Hairpin - Catching Up With Jessica and Elizabeth: Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 16:05:17 -0400

The Hairpin - Catching Up With Jessica and Elizabeth: Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later:

Edith Zimmerman explains the appeal:

I started reading the new Sweet Valley High book last night, and oh my god I love it I hate it I love it I hate it. It’s unexpectedly stirring — you can feel it in your heart, this fluttering memory of caring about Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, and aren’t we all Elizabeths? Did anyone identify with Jessica

and

OK so in case you haven’t heard, Sweet Valley High is back and it’s 10 years later, meaning the twins are 27 and so is everyone they grew up with (Lila Fowler/Enid Rollins OMG, etc.), which means the book’s being marketed to us and not pre-teens. Us being women who read SVH as kids and feel fond (or deeply, surprisingly hateful) of the characters, and who might get a thrill out of hearing Jessica and Elizabeth describe their wines and their orgasms, both of which they enjoy with ease. It’s kind of like running into someone super-pretty you went to high school with and discovering that they’ve become even more beautiful than they used to be (nooo!), but that they’ve got a shitty job/life, so phew.

Sparknotes: Goodnight Moon

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:21:00 -0500

Sparknotes: Goodnight Moon:

The book opens as a young bunny prepares for sleep in his bedroom. The first half of Brown’s magnum opus is entirely devoted to the contents of “the great green room.” As symbolic items such as a “balloon” and a “telephone” are described, our protagonist bunny, oppressively tucked into bed, resists the confines of sleep.

"People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book. I say, ‘If I had a serious brain..."

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:00:00 -0500

““People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book. I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.””

- Martin Amis, in a conversation on the BBC programme Faulks on Fiction.

"Man darf von jeder Tür aus in den literarischen Salon treten, aus der Gefängnistür, aus der..."

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 04:02:00 -0500

““Man darf von jeder Tür aus in den literarischen Salon treten, aus der Gefängnistür, aus der Irrenhaustür oder aus der Bordelltür. Nur aus einer Tür darf man nicht kommen, aus der Kinderzimmertür. Das vergibt einem die Kritik nicht. Das bekam schon der große Rudyard Kipling zu spüren. Ich frage mich immer, womit das eigentlich zu tun hat, woher diese eigentümliche Verachtung alles dessen herrührt, was mit dem Kind zu tun hat.”

“One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the children’s room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling felt similar critiques. I always ask myself from where this peculiar contempt towards anything related to a child comes.””

- Michael Ende about his children’s books really being books for all ages. From his Wikipedia article. (via aeazel)

McSweeney's Internet Tendency - An Open Letter to Madeleine L'engle.

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 09:58:48 -0500

McSweeney's Internet Tendency - An Open Letter to Madeleine L'engle. :

“And oh, Ms. L’Engle, if you could see what teenage girls are reading these days. YA novels just don’t sell anymore unless the conflict is outward, the enemy tangible, the sexual awakening exhibited via fangs and transparent metaphors. Love interests have “teams” now. I’m sorry to tell you this, but YA publishers no longer approve of nuclear families.”

Yes! Nutshell Library!

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:12:49 -0500

Yes! Nutshell Library!

Turn-of-the-Century Heroine and Her Lame Friend

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 06:54:00 -0500

When I tell you to keep your daughters away from The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911), I am not purporting that the book is bad. Obviously it is not. It is magical. When I tell you there is no bookshelf with space enough for Heidi (Johanna Spyri, 1880), I am not trying to be a jerk. But you will never catch me recommending either book to a child.

There is some turn-of-the-century literary trope that frustrates—that of the overbearingly pious, well-meaning moppet, the ingratiating orphan, the pesky Pollyanna idiot (1913) who inserts her Christlike wisdom into adult affairs—that is culturally indelible. These soft-headed cherubs, the Heidis, the Mary Lennoxes, even darling Anne of Green Gables herself (1908), meddle in adult lives, usually redeeming every grown-up in the parlor. The convention repeats itself even now, mostly in modern film and television stories: Haley Joel Osment’s tow-head in Pay It Forward, or Whoever the Kid in Disney’s the Kid. There is always a perfect child who is capable of salvaging a flawed adult with easy, blithe charm. Even Nick Hornby went Burnett with his About a Boy.

The problem isn’t with hopeless optimism, and thank goodness all these spirited authors turned the tide, essentially writing the notions of childhood and play into existence. Out with the “instructive” Victorian literature! Every mannerly child deserves to speak to his father before being spoken to, to have playclothes stitched from curtains, to know himself. And, to the nurse reading over her young charge’s shoulder, just think how your life would improve, too, if only that little ragamuffin were able to speak freely. Why, children say the darnedest things.

But like so many of your daughters, I suffered from “Disney Princess,” the pleasant, fallacious disease that little girls catch when they fit themselves into Narrativity’s tiara, casting themselves as the heroines of their own life stories. Like every Disney Princess, I’m sure I believed my pure heart could tame wild beasts with a whisper, sing with all the voices of the mountains, and paint with all the colors of unicorn mythology. I probably diagnosed myself with Disney Princess after some natural mishap: a cat scratch, maybe, or being pooped on, more likely. No, darling girl, the birds in the tree are not dancers in your world’s musical number.

Disney Princess Complex could be mistaken for hopeless optimism. It isn’t. Instead, it is egoism. It is a blanket entitlement to the lives, and the broken hearts, of others.

Where hope is childlike and good, egoism is childish and bad. When we are children and we have not yet known grief, we hold faith that the universe is tailored to our own dimensions. Adults, sensitive to our egoism, quarrel in the dark, in hisses and clenched fists and held tongues. They delay the lessons we all must inevitably learn.

I read The Secret Garden. I read Heidi, and I read Polyanna. Wasn’t there a Craven in my life, a grown man dying of grief and loss? Didn’t I have an Uncle, a recluse in the mountains, who needed my sacrifice? Wasn’t I very much like Mary Lennox, like Heidi, like Anne Shirley or Little Orphan Annie, or like Pollyanna herself—why are so many named Ann?—a young girl traveling alone, fortuitously dropped into the arms of elderly relatives? In many ways, the circumstances of my upbringing and adoption primed me for turn-of-the-century literature: all these books, written by lively grown women, for children just like me! I was not alone.

But I think these stories also did real damage. Sure, to an onlooker, my idiosyncrasies were superficial, even literate and cute! I put on every article of clothing all at once and sat at the kitchen table, a mountain of fabric, eating bread and cheese. What was I doing? “I am regaining my health! The Alpine air is helping, Auntie!” Oh, how terrible.

But I had developed another, more secret, more horrible quirk: specifically, I had been befriending kids who could not walk.

I was obsessed with the idea. Because there is Heidi’s friend Clara, confined to her wheelchair. There is The Secret Garden’s Colin, hunched and sallow in his bed. Even Pollyanna, in a freak accident, breaks both her legs and is informed by her physician that, alas, she will never walk again. In those cases, the heroine turns her attention from the metaphorically broken adult to her more literally broken peer.

Of course I taught nobody to walk.

But what a strange illness for turn-of-the-century children’s literature to fix itself on! When we think of great literature, we’re supposed to think of tuberculosis, aren’t we? TB—consumption, if you please—is that most romantic, incurable tragedy that plagues the sensitive. Artists and poets catch it. Then we might remind ourselves next of Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, in which the essayist cautions against appointing disease (cancer, tuberculosis) as synecdoche for deeper spiritual illness.

While we can exact certain controls over our destinies, things happen, too. And illness is a thing that can happen, and triumph and failure can also be things that just happen. They don’t need deeper symbology assigned; they are bad enough on their own.

In Clara’s world, and in Colin’s, and again in Pollyanna’s, broken legs walk again. Yes! And it would have been impossible without the heroine. Her perfect persevering encouragement—gradually, steadily!—cures the disabled. She nurtures them back into good health.

Cursorily this is a nice thought, except that conviction cannot mend spines.

Moreover, heroics cannot be selfless when the lame and infirm are relegated to the supporting cast. Their illnesses are not rightly her moment to shine, because their illnesses, or grief, are not all about her.

How do you solve a problem like Mary or Heidi? The trouble isn’t that each heroine assigns symbolism to the tragedies in her own life at all; rather, it is that she assigns symbolism to everyone else’s tragedy, and then co-opts those symbols as her own.

You’re right. Maybe that shouldn’t be problematic for me. Humans can be informed and shaped by the experiences of others, and isn’t that the end hope in giving a child any book? But this is a dangerous venture, because the book itself is a mimesis, and any child will in turn mimic, even in good faith, what she reads.

The Secret Garden, for instance, conveys both illness and grief in oversimple terms. Of course it must, else it all becomes too hopelessly complicated for its reader. So Craven’s heartsickness can be cured with the restoration of his mansion’s garden, just as his son Colin can be coaxed into just getting better!

Richard Kearney, in his essay Narrative and Ethics, cites Baudrillard’s warning of “depthless simulation.” Colin and Clara’s illnesses are exactly this: they do not, can not, represent real illness. Their sicknesses are mere literary device, here to aid the heroine in her own journey of growth.

But a reader, confronted at an early age with just the same tragedies, could not help but believe she is prepared to battle them. Even worse, she expects herself to be able to do anything about them. And worst of all, she applies the methodologies outlined in some work of fiction, then invariably learns that they do not work.

This, I think, is the greatest tragedy of all.

Sweet Valley Twins Super Chiller #3: The Carnival Ghost...

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 20:21:00 -0500

Sweet Valley Twins Super Chiller #3: The Carnival Ghost
“Francine Pascal” (Jamie Suzanne), 1990

In the summertimes of my girlhood, I was allowed to pick out a pair of flimsy paperbacks right before we drove to South Padre Island, or else, once we’d almost made it to the condo, I’d plead to go back to the last Wal-Mart, where they stocked a shelf of summer reading rations.

Then I’d go after the thickest YA books available. These books usually had “super” somewhere in the title: Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys Super Mystery, Baby-Sitters Club Super Special, Baby-Sitters Club Super Mystery, Fear Street Super Chiller. These books were extremely cheesy and, I’d assumed at the time, intended as beach reading. (I always blew my extra scratch on the latest issues of Mad Magazine and BOP!, God help me.)

The Sweet Valley High series was too intense for me—I was scared to enter high school, I guess, and I didn’t have much use for popular blonde identical twin girls anyway. But the Sweet Valley Twins series was a little too blah. The Super Chillers, however, were just right. They were just enough like R.L. “Jovial Bob” Stine’s Fear Street books, if duly sanitized for the under-12 girls.

There isn’t much to Sweet Valley Twins’ The Carnival Ghost, since the whole plot is right there in the title. A carnival comes to the boardwalk, and Elizabeth Wakefield (the “serious” twin) is immediately drawn to it. She makes friends with a ghost who is trying to kill her. And only Jessica Wakefield (the “fun” twin) can save her!

The book reads like made-for-TV horror, but it compensates for its lack of inventiveness with crazy good atmosphere. Beach carnivals are creepy! Also, there’s some sort of sapphic underpinning here that I still don’t totally get.

Another great beach carnival book is R.L. Stine’s Goodnight Kiss, a sexy, ridiculously trashy vampire horror for teen girls.

Wynken, Blynken, and NodEugene Field, 1889 Pictured above, a...

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 19:00:41 -0500

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
Eugene Field, 1889

Pictured above, a watercolor from illustrator Johanna Westerman. “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod”—the one with three fishermen in a flying shoe—is probably the very best bedtime poem. As a picture-book, it is transformed into a Goodnight Moon for the chamomile crowd.

The darling 1941 edition poses the three fishers as rosy-mouthed children in Hummel tableaux.

Criss CrossLynne Rae Perkins, 2005 Here is something I...

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 11:46:00 -0500

Criss Cross
Lynne Rae Perkins, 2005

Here is something I shouldn’t admit to: I have been anonymously antagonizing teenaged girls. For the last two years, I’ve picked up a couple copies of Criss Cross and then dropped them directly into the Christmas bookbins at the Barnes and Noble, hoping some 13-year-old girl gets her mitts on one.

Reviewers love to rant about Criss Cross, I think because it won a Newbery medal. It’s so sanctimonious. “It isn’t even written for kids,” they say. “It’s written for grown-ups and librarians.” And you know what? It’s true, it’s true. Maybe I would have hated this book as a kid; I read it one quiet, lazy summer as a quiet, lazy adult. Still, I hope you could throw this book at a kid and make a couple paragraphs stick to her for the rest of all time.

The book is about being an island, about small moments of human connection, about the danger of leaving important things unsaid. The movements characters make are very slight, so that the whole book is dangerously placid, all these delicate vignettes loosely tangled around one another. Probably I would have hated it as a kid, not the way I hated the supercilious Jacob Have I Loved or the million awful books about death and dogs. Instead I would have hated it in the way I hated Blake Nelson’s Girl (1994)—about a girl who likes grunge music and hangs out at the mall—which I hated and hated and kept rereading. Five stars out of 5.

George's Favorite Tooth - I Haven't Been This Mad in a Long Time

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 10:19:00 -0500

George's Favorite Tooth - I Haven't Been This Mad in a Long Time:

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Alvin Schwartz; illustrated by Stephen Gammell, 1981
Illustrated by Brett Helquist, 2010

The horror.

hateyourchildhood:

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (Alvin Schwartz, 1981) was a terrifying book. The stories alone were fine, but Caldecott award-winner Stephen Gammell’s macabre, gooey-fleshed drawings were nightmare poly-fill.

No more! HarperCollins has reissued the first in the trilogy, substituting Gammell’s paeans to sleeplessness with Brett Helquist’s comparatively sanitized illustrations. The anthology is now plagued with 1-star Amazon reviews.

Outrage! Outrage! Cross-posted! Triple-posted!

The 500 Hats of Bartholomew CubbinsDr. Seuss, 1938 Bartholomew...

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 09:41:00 -0500

The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins
Dr. Seuss, 1938

Bartholomew Cubbins, a pauper in a feathered cap, can’t seem to get his cap off his head. And if it doesn’t come off soon, that hat means certain death for young Cubbins.

Is this Dr. Seuss book the best Dr. Seuss book? It was always my favorite. It is a magical fairytale about the absurdity of authority, and the last 10 hats are really, really cool.