Word Blur

RIP, Lloyd Alexander

Lloyd Alexander died on May 17^th. He was the author of many, many great children’s books and is most famous for his Chronicles of Prydain, beginning with The Book of Three. My mom read fantastic serials out loud to us growing up: Little House (if you top it off with “on the Prairie” it tags you as one of the uninitiated), Narnia, etc., but I think Lloyd Alexander made the biggest impression on me. Somewhere half way through the series I got way too old for bedtime reading, so I finished it for my younger sister. Than I reread them all one summer with my first great love boyfriend and reread them again last year. They seemed only a little dated – the spunky heroine Princess Eilowny has been outdone in terms of women’s liberation by contemporary standards (not you Hermione!), although as a kid I found her highly subversive; there weren’t many like her. Prydain is drawn heavily from Welsh legends and the scale is appropriately epic, but Alexander’s strength is in driving home the humanity and vulnerability of his characters. To write a story of flawed individuals navigating the battle between good and evil is no small task, but to do it for children with such nuance is nothing short of amazing. It’s hard to imagine a canon that could produce Harry Potter or The Golden Compass without Lloyd Alexander. Sure, we’ll find out whether or not said Harry Potter lives or dies this July, but you’ll have to wait until August to read Alexander’s last novel The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio.

More links to other people's stuff

My friend's friend reviews books here, where you can read at length about the fourth Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants book.  If you're going to read anything at all about the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, I suggest you get your info. from someone who knows the difference between Anthony Lane and David Denby.

The End?

As I intimated yesterday, I was deeply disappointed by The End, the final book in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.  I thought the environment (a deserted island) was more fully realized than those of the last few books, but when you write a mystery spanning over thirteen volumes, it’s fair for the reader to expect that some of the questions you’ve burned into our brain will be answered.  I think there are some who will argue that Snicket/Handler was taking some bold risks in his disavowal of tidy endings and his reflections on moral ambiguity, but I found it fairly miserly.  I suspect a dash of laziness was mixed in with whatever loftier goals were present.  Twin Peaks syndrome!  Too many loose ends!  Unless, of course, that’s precisely the hook for more Baudelaire-related adventures, in which case I say bring them on.

Beatrice

Awhile ago I finished The Beatrice Letters, a sort of castaway extra in Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, that actually delivered a little more mystery and revelation that the final volume.  And it’s pretty.

Phillipa Pearce, RIP

I was just logging on to write all about Amy Sedaris’s marvelous I Like You, when I learned that the British children’s writer Philippa Pearce died on Dec. 21^st. Pearce is most famous for Tom’s Midnight Garden, an exquisite book that I somehow managed to miss as a child (which is weird, because if there‘s one sort of book my mother steered me to as a kid, it‘s this), but read a couple of years ago. It’s the story of a young boy, Tom Long, who is shipped off to an aunt and uncle for measles quarantine and ends up traveling through time late at night and befriending a young girl in her garden. There’s hardly more to it than that, but I was quite literally sobbing with pleasure at the end of this book (in the interest of full disclosure I’ll state that I was nursing a very young baby at the time, so probably flooded with hormones).

Where's Wallace

Earlier this week we were looking everywhere for a copy of Where's Wallace? to give a young friend as a birthday gift.  Lately I've been really impressed by the way crowds are rendered in children's books (e.g. Anno, Richard Scarry, etc.), but Hilary Knight's Where's Wallace? is everyone's favorite book in my house right now.  Knight, who illustrated the Eloise books, applies his distinctive style to this story of a chimp who keeps leaving the zoo and hiding out in basball fields, department stores, circus tents, and so on.  It's up to the reader to pick him out of panoramas full of detail and humor.  Other recurring characters include indviduals we've chosen to call the knitting lady, the trouble girl, the running boy, the cello kid, and the baby.  The tragedy is that Where's Wallace? is out-of-print.  If you know a bookstore that hasn't turned its inventory over in quite some time, you might luck out.  And you can find it for as cheap as a dollar and the cost of shipping at ABE Books (see first link, above).  Luckily for Gertie-who-just-turned-three my mom had three copies.  I give her a hard time about her pack rat ways, but they do pay off from time to time.  One thing that dates this book: it's strange, particularly in children's literature to see so many white people on one page.

Ha! Nation.

I’m just a few pages shy of completing The Penultimate Peril and wondering if I am the only person who is starting to picture Count Olaf as a kind of campier and more overbearing Stephen Colbert.  I see him everywhere, everywhere I tell you.

Truth vs. Fiction

I bought someone a copy of Lydia Davis's novel, The End of the Story, because I enjoyed reading her short story collection Samuel Johnson is Indignant, earlier this year.  I like the starkness and the weirdness of her prose.  So now I'm adding that to my list, because it's ridiculous to give someone something you haven't actually read yourself.  What this means is another book added to the teetering pile that's literally overtaking my bedroom, while what I'm actually reading are the last three books (including The Beatrice Letters) in the Lemony Snicket series.

Um, Narnia

So I’m back, or trying to be. I’ve been slowly, over the last few months, rereading The Chronicles of Narnia series. Most recently I finished The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Although it has less of a complete story arc than some of the others – it’s more of an episodic sea travel adventure – I think I might love it best. The redemption of the Penvensie children’s somewhat odious cousin Eustace appeals to me (probably because I’m still awaiting my own parallel transformation). Mostly though, I love the descriptions as the Dawn Treader gets closer and closer to Aslan’s country, or the end of the world. The language is incredibly light and beautiful and, like the travelers, you start to feel as if you’re just coasting along it. Plus, I’ve always loved The Odyssey. 

Is it about God, or Jesus? It really doesn’t matter to me; I’m willing to take it for what it is on the surface. Does it get a little prim and bossy in its lessons about how to be good? Every so often. Am I willing to overlook this because it brings magic to life so convincingly? Absolutely. More troubling are the racist and sexist overtones, but I think I’ll save that discussion for The Horse and His Boy.

Haven't seen the movie, but I intend to.

The Biggest Book Club

There was an interesting tiny article in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education about the practice that many colleges and universities have of assigning summer reading (I won't bother linking to it, because the Chronicle has really limited online access). It seems that Smith students were recently asked to read Diane Gilliam Fisher’s Kettle Bottom, a volume of poetry about West Virginia coal miners ca. 1920. Apparently poetry hardly ever makes these summer reading lists. I love the idea of large scale reading assignments. I’m fascinated by one-book community reading programs, in which a whole state or city forms a giant book club around a single work on an annual basis. Vermont READS  is promoting Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman for 2005, so I really ought to add that to my list.

Ivanhoe, The Milk Sop

I’ve been re-reading the works of Edward Eager (not his plays, but the books he wrote for children), which is really, really satisfying (vacation rules!).  These were also favorites of mine when I was a kid.  They feature several elements of a good story  – magic, time travel, country houses, kids left to their own devices, and smart ass creatures that talk.  What I didn’t remember is how funny they are.  In Knight’s Castle (spoiler alert), the characters of Ivanhoe find themselves briefly living in a modern magic city.  When the Unknown Knight makes a bid for Rebecca’s heart and is rejected he asks:

‘What?  Beateth it still for Wilfred of Ivanhoe, that mewling, puling, milk sop?’

Also, it turns out the books were written more or less as an homage to the incomparable E. Nesbit.  Anyway, good Edward Eager books to start with would be Half Magic, Knight’s Castle, and The Time Garden.

The Westing Game

I re-read The Westing Game by Ellen Ranskin.  This came about for three reasons: 1) I remembered loving it as a kid, when I recently made a list of my all-time favorite books; 2) I just went to The Flying Pig, a wonderful children’s bookstore in Charlotte, VT, for the first time and their website reports the book as a bestseller, and 3) my friend Anne and I were talking about it while floating on inflatable rafts in the middle of the pond where my cabin is last weekend.

I read this book about twenty times, within a few years of its publication date (1978) and in later years looked back on it as a minor work (maybe an act of self-abnegation?).  It’s not.  It’s terrific, and as it turns out, it won the Newbery Medal.  It’s this fantastic mystery with a spirited cast of characters, all living in a high rise apartment complex and chasing down the murderer of Samuel Westing, through a series of clues orchestrated by Westing himself.  The shin-kicking heroine, Turtle Wexler, is the spunkiest of them all.  In retrospect, only one thing about the book seems dated; the slapstick portrayal of Madame Hoo.  I could say more, but that would be telling.  It turns out my eleven-year-old-self actually had quite impeccable taste.