Molly's reading

[naomikritzer]

I keep a record of what Molly reads each week. (Some may have spotted these posts occasionally when I forgot to filter them.) In the last week, her reading suddenly took a turn for the meatier. Her favorite books for a while were the Boxcar Children; more recently, she got really fond of The Babysitter's Club. She also really liked Trixie Belden. Generally, however, she prefered series books.

This past week, she read a couple of Cam Jansen books, but also The Phantom Tollbooth, The Great Brain, and Coraline. These all involved some significant branching out for her. Phantom Tollbooth and the Great Brain are both books with boy protagonists, which for a long time she wouldn't have anything to do with. And Coraline is fantasy -- dark, creepy fantasy. I pointed out Coraline to her at the library, warning her that it was a scary book, and she said she liked scary books and checked it out. Neil Gaiman has said that adults find Coraline much scarier than children do, because they read it as a child-in-peril story; kids read it as an adventure, and since children's literature generally obliges with happy endings, they expect it all to work out. And my experience vs. Molly's seems to bear this out. Molly found it creepy but not too scary. I found it so scary that I actually had a nightmare based on the book, the first time I read it.

In the last couple of weeks, we've been going to the East Lake Library instead of the Nokomis Library. The East Lake Library is the one closest to our house, and was my prefered library for quite a while, but was closed for two years for renovation. It re-opened in early March, and I thought it might be nice to make that our home library base rather than Nokomis. (This requires more advance thought than you might think, because I have all my requests sent to whichever library I'm expecting to go to. Ed also has all his stuff sent there and has me pick it up for him. So just going by the whim of the week doesn't work so well.) East Lake has a really poor selection of juvenile paperbacks, which is frustrating to Molly because all the Babysitter's Club books are paperbacks. (I was also kind of dismayed by the fact that they spent vast amounts of money and enlarged the building but don't appear to have expanded the collection even slightly. They made the aisles wider and they added a bunch of computers, but there aren't any more books.) However, lacking Babysitter's Club options, Molly actually explored the rest of the juvenils stacks this week -- in the past, she has focused on the series books and the revolving racks at Nokomis that hold the paperbacks. She's welcome to read Babysitter's Club or even the Twelve Candles Club if that's what appeals to her, but it's nice to see her expanding her horizons.

So long as she doesn't read this or this or this or this. I just about hyperventilated when I saw them on the shelves. Kids who see the movie and want to read the book should read the actual book. And its six sequels. They're excellent books, and they're not particularly difficult despite the scaaaaaary British vocabulary. I can think of absolutely no reason for that "Peter's Destiny" and "Susan's Journey" tripe. (Given the limited space and budgets of this library system, I can't believe they're wasting space on it. Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.)

Comments

[racebannon42.livejournal.com]

I absolutely loved the Great Brain books when I was a kid.

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

Has she read "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet" yet? Thats the book I credit for getting my started on SF.

Yes, East Lake has fewer books than before the renovation. It sucks. And the "Marketplace", aka New, books can't be renewed; I found that out the hard way.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

RE: Coraline, I'm glad I'm not the only person who had nightmares after reading that. Oy.

RE: Great Brain, those books are great! I loved them when I was a kid (although I think I was a year or two older than Molly).

RE: movie-based Narnia marketing-ploy tripe, I'm hyperventilating with outrage just thinking about it. This is what publishers are publishing?! (And I actually quite liked the recent movie; but when a movie is based on a book, there should not be marketing people pretending that the reverse is true. That pisses me off SO MUCH.)

[squigsoup.livejournal.com]

Is she beyond "Paddington"? They are a series of books, of which I have fond memories.

[pumpkin-soup.livejournal.com]

Wrinkle in Time (L'Engle) was the book that really got me into reading period and SF/Fantasy in general. I still have my first copy - taped up and falling apart, but still grand.

Egad!

[muneraven.livejournal.com]

Man I was already thinking the world is going to heck in a handbasket because of the political crap going on and Windows Vista, and now you had to show me those hideous Narnia adaption things?

That's it, I'm putting a profanity-laced rap playlist on the MP3 player. It's what hip middle-aged white chicks do to express their rage, you know.

The only thing that made me feel better was that Molly read "The Phantom Tollbooth." See, the world isn't completely rotten because kids still love the good books. On the bad days my kids, and the kids of other cool people, they just rescue me. I know it's corny to say that kids give you hope but that doesn't mean it's never true.

Hey Naomi...can I ask what the Minicon panel called "Minions and How to Acquire Them" is about? My son asked me and I had to tell him I have NO idea, lol. He's thirteen and I think he would really like to have minions, but I told him I suspect it is about something literary rather than real-world.

But hey, if it IS about how to acquire real-life minions, I'll be there. I could use a few. Do minions do laundry?

[trinitysite.livejournal.com]

Whoa. Those fake Narnia books are scary. I loved the series when I was a kid ever since my mother read "The Magician's Nephew" to me (and yes, I read them in the "wrong" order.)

...fond memories of Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Greensky trilogy...

[kellymccullough.livejournal.com]

Interesting point on Coraline. Turns out I read young adult/children's lit as a young adult or child would. Cool. I wonder if that's part of why my YA writing is much darker than my adult stuff.