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

[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.)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I'm only not hyperventilating with outrage because I have recently used my inhaler anyway.

This makes me think of traditional Celtic tortures for traitors.

Libraries should not buy those books, and children should not read them, and the US should get a healthservice and welfare system already so that people cannot be made to be sufficiently desperate as to have to write them.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

You know, on principle I am opposed to library censorship of all kinds. But if libraries are going to censor something, it should bloody well be this kind of stuff, not Harry Potter or
Newberry Award winners that happen to have the word "scrotum" on the first page. (http://naomikritzer.livejournal.com/144317.html)

[naomikritzer]

Yep, my first response to seeing these books was an overpowering desire to start a book-banning campaign. Followed by, "OMG what am I thinking?" Followed by, "Maybe in this case it would be justified..."

I hope C.S. Lewis's ghost shows up to haunt whoever thought they were a good idea.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

From your lips [fingertips??] to C.S. Lewis's ghost's ears...

[naomikritzer]

Have you read The Great Divorce? On the way home from the library today (the fake Narnia books were all missing, hopefully because some adult followed one of my impulses, which was to hide them in the accounting section) I was thinking about how the authors who wrote these monstrosities are going to have to apologize to C.S. Lewis when they take that bus ride to heaven.

(If you haven't read The Great Divorce, it's actually my favorite of his books, even over the Narnia books. It's hilariously funny in a "oh my gosh, I know that person! And that person! And ... oh dear, that one's me..." sort of way.)

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

No, I haven't read that one. ::goes off to search for it in library catalogue::

I hope very much that, as someone suggested, those authors were very hard up for cash, because otherwise there's just no excuse.

[naomikritzer]

The premise of The Great Divorce is that every day a bus runs from hell to heaven, and anyone who'd like to can hop on board. Of course, most of the people who go to heaven can't deal with staying there, because once you get to heaven, you encounter (sometimes in very tangible form) the reasons that you went to hell in the first place.

If anyone else had written it, it would be unbearable tripe. Since it was written by Lewis, it's hilariously funny. The people getting off the bus are startlingly recognizable, not as types but as individuals I swear to God I've met. (And of course, some are recognizable as me. I think most people reading this book have that experience, which is a lot of what makes it so brilliant.)

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Well, I will look forward to reading it, then :D

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I am outraged at the Narnia adaptations. I don't know if Michael Flexer wrote them out of financial desperation, or misplaced love of the originals. I just had the disturbing thought that he might have been trying to make them into more obvious Christian allegories, for evangelical reasons. (I have no evidence for this, and it's a horrible accusation to make. I've just been tripping over religious propaganda elsewhere so it's on my mind.) I haven't read them, though I saw one on the shelf the other day (in an elementary school library. It's horrible!) At Boskone, I met a 6-year-old who said he loved the Narnia movie and was reading the books all by himself. I mentioned how much I loved the books, and asked what he thought of _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_. He had not even HEARD of that book. I thought he must be starting with _The Magician's Nephew_, and was only mildly puzzled. As Boskone tends to be distracting, I didn't figure out what was going on.

[naomikritzer]

Hopefully he was just starting with "The Magician's Nephew." *shudders at possible alternatives*

[naomikritzer]

My first response to seeing these books was an overpowering desire to start a book-banning campaign. Followed by, "OMG what am I thinking?" Followed by, "Maybe in this case it would be justified..."

I hope C.S. Lewis's ghost shows up to haunt whoever thought they were a good idea.