Molly's reading
Mar. 29th, 2007 08:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
naomikritzerI 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.)
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.)
Re: Egad!
Date: 2007-04-02 04:43 am (UTC)So, you know, not no one, unless you have a non-lj blog I don't know about.