Boys and Girls Forever by Alison Lurie

Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter

Alison Lurie

London: Chatto and Windus, 2003.

I went book shopping yesterday and came home with a book I already own.  This is happening with more frequency.  Can full-blown senility be far behind my dotty bibliophilia?  Luckily the book was Boys and Girls Forever, so I can enjoy telling you about a marvelous book before they cart me off to the seniors’ home.

Many of the essays collected in this book first appeared in The New York Review of Books.   I’ve been away from this kind of leisurely book review for far too long, and one of the primary pleasures of this collection for me was to read an unhurried essay, not a review that would determine a sale.  Of course, I am more than happy to be persuaded to buy a book, but there was such delight in reading an expert’s take on children’s classics that eventually came around to a contemporary occasion for its discussion: a new film of Little Women, the centenary of The Wizard of Oz, a new biography of the author.  Parenthood has brought with it many joys, among them (re)reading children’s books, but time in which to read the likes of The New York Review of Books of a weekend morning is in scarce supply.  Oddly, I raced through this book precisely because it was so wonderful to enjoy again the pleasure of a leisurely-paced essay.

The central theme of this collection, as stated in its brief introduction, is that many children’s authors failed to grow up.  It’s a bit forced, this argument, as well as being a bit facile, and the forced nature of the introduction really does not do justice to the wonderful work done in the individual essays.  I see no reason to apologise for reprinting essays in book form and so have little patience for false pretenses.  In the essays, Lurie does tell us how the authors’ lives and times informed their creations, so there was a common biographical thread throughout, but they were also so much more than that, and I found that in almost every instance my appreciation of the works under discussion deepened.

I have to admit to not being a huge fan of Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, but I am a huge fan of her fans, which is to say that I find enthusiasm about books ever so infectious, and I delight in others’ delight of her work.  Lurie is definitely one of Jansson’s admirers, and she revels in the Moomin books’ complexity and darkness.  I love Jansson’s language, especially her names for her characters, and I’ve collected all of the beautiful Drawn & Quarterly editions of her books, but the reading of the books always falls flat for me somehow.  What I love about Lurie’s chapter on Jansson is that it makes me want to go back and give the Moomintrolls another go.  (Tove is pronounced Tova, and in both the hardcover and paperback editions of Lurie’s book, her name is misspelled several times as Tova, as if the author had slipped up between sound and spelling.  There are also several other glaring errors, like Patrick rather than Philip Pullman, that made me feel a bit less alone in my absent-mindedness.  I may buy multiple copies of books by mistake, people, but at least my spel-ckeck wroks.)

Not all of the essays are full of praise.  Lurie, while largely enthusiastic about Theodor Seuss Geisel, has nothing much good to say about Dr. Seuss’s all-American, fame-and wealth-driven definition of success to be found in Oh! The Places You’ll Go!:

Who is buying this book, and why?  Apparently it is a very popular college-graduation gift, and also often given to people who are changing jobs or careers.  It is a pep talk, and meets the same need that is satisfied by those stiffly smiling financial experts who declare on television that any glitch in America’s prosperity is a Gunk that will soon be unthunk, to be followed-On Beyond Zebra!- by even greater success.  (104)

So, there’s a bit of spit and vinegar in this collection, too.

The  book ends with an essay on nature in children’s literature that begins with a wonderful piece of memoir:

When I was seven years old, my family moved to the country, and my perception of the world entirely altered.  I had been used to regular, ordered spaces: labeled city and suburban streets and apartment buildings and parks with flat rectangular lawns and beds of bright “Do Not Touch” flowers behind wire fencing.  Suddenly I found myself in a landscape of thrilling disorder, variety, and surprise.

As the child of modern, enlightened parents I had been told that many of the most interesting characters in my favourite stories were not real: there were no witches or fairies or dragons or giants.  It had been easy for me to believe this; clearly, there was no room for them in a New York City apartment building.  But the house we moved to was deep in the country, surrounded by fields and woods, and there were cows in the meadow across the road.  Well, I thought, if there were cows, which I’d seen before only in pictures, why shouldn’t there be fairies and elves in the woods behind our house?  Why shouldn’t there be a troll stamping and fuming in the loud, mossy darkness under the bridge that crossed the brook?  There might even be one or two small hissing and smoking dragons–the size of teakettles, as my favourite children’s author, E. Nesbit, described them–in the impenetrable thicket of blackberry briars and skunk cabbage beyond our garden.  (171-172)

I adore this retreat from urban rationality to rural possibility.  The child she was sees the natural world for the first time through eyes educated by story.

Though nowhere near as transformative, Lurie’s book took me on a pleasurable tour of my own bookshelves and gave me new eyes through which to see some of the books perched there.  Really, the only problem with books about books like these, books that make you want to go back to your shelves and pull down great piles of things, is that they bring home the fact, yet again, that there are so many books and so little time.

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My Ideal Bookshelf by Jane Mount and Thessaly La Force

What kind of fool buys a book like this?  A romantic fool.  A fool in love with books.  Me.

My Ideal Bookshelf collects brief essays and interviews from dozens of readers and pairs them with painted portraits of the books the subjects chose for their ideal bookshelf.  Jane Mount’s paintings of the books are beautiful to behold.  I know that there is this great current of fear out there that we are fetishizing the book and that we do books and publishing no great service by over-emphasizing the book-as-object.  But we do, and we collect and we covet and it’s a delicious indulgence.   You know that thrill of scanning a person’s bookshelves to see what’s on there?  With this book, you get to do that with the slight twist of looking at those books through the veil of art.  The spines are all hand-lettered, the Penguin Classics get the added beauty of the uneven line, the imperfect reproduction.  You recognize immediately the red and cream of the spine of The Catcher in the Rye, but it’s slightly off; mine, but not mine.

As interesting as the mix of subjects who share their ideal books (lawyers, chefs, designers, writers, dancers) is the mixed approach they took to the task: some made a desert island selection, some chose books that captured their childhood, some chose books that would make a good introduction to their field.  Haruki Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle appeared on a startlingly high number of shelves.

This is not the best book about books you will ever read, this is not the most moving selection of praises sung to the book.  The selection of people who contributed their ideal bookshelves was an odd collection (vampire lit’s Stephenie Meyer and cookbook author Mark Bittman; novelist Dave Eggers and fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy; picture-book writer Oliver Jeffers and essayist Malcolm Gladwell), and the essays are often annoyingly brief, cut short.  But the book had some great moments.  Did you know that there is a book out there that is a collection of photographs of junkyard dogs paired with quotations from William Shakespeare?  It’s called Junkyard Dogs and William Shakespeare.  It will, apparently, make you cry.

Coralie Bickford-Smith, a book designer for Penguin, wrote one of my favourite entries.  She describes the design for Bram Stoker’s Dracula:

The pattern I created for Dracula is composed of garlic flowers.  In the book, the heroine wears garlic flowers around her neck to stop Dracula from biting her in her sleep.  So the idea is that they’re wreathed around the book, too, to keep in the evil.

I love the fact that I get to repackage amazing literature that has stood the test of time.  I really couldn’t be designing anything more important.  (22)

Agreed.

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A Tale Dark and Grimm and In a Glass Grimmly by Adam Gidwitz

A Tale Dark and Grimm.  New York: Dutton Children’s Books, 2010.

In a Glass Grimmly.  New York: Dutton Children’s Books, 2012.

by Adam Gidwitz

In each of these books, Gidwitz has cleverly linked several fairy tales into a continuous narrative, starring siblings Hansel and Gretel in the Tale and cousins Jack and Jill in Glass.  The pairs battle their way through adversity (hunger, homelessness, goblins, dragons) to arrive at (spoiler alert) a suitably happy ending.  They go at a rollicking pace, and I read them with relish, albeit with occasional difficulty suspending disbelief.

I love an intrusive narrator and, in fact, all narrative techniques that break the barrier between life and fiction.  Embedded texts, stories that circle back on themselves, meta-narratives, books about books (!).  The more the better.  In this case, while I very much enjoyed the narrator’s voice (comparisons to Lemony Snickett’s narrator are inevitable), I found other self-referential aspects of the telling tried too hard.

The acknowledgements indicate that the author thinks these books are ground-breaking because they re-introduce violence into the stories, and he expresses gratitude to those who assured him that kids can handle it.  There is plenty of gore, but there is also a very intrusive narrator who, in bold print, will occasionally interrupt his telling of the stories to suggest that we clear the room of little children.  The gore, in other words, is simultaneously highlighted and robbed of its ability to truly frighten with the comedic interruptions.  For some reason, the narrator also finds it necessary to claim that these are the real, true versions of the stories, as if we should treat them as historical fact.  Retelling and playing with the original tales becomes a kind of assertion of primacy on the basis of truth, an odd stance in books that feature magic, conversations with the devil and confronting a dragon.  I found that particular rhetorical technique distracted from my enjoyment of the stories.

In both books, it is the children who really come to the fore as the heroes and heroines of the tales, and it’s a role that is celebrated with much pomp and ceremony.  In handing back the spine-chilling gore of the original Grimms’ tales, he is also handing children their right to star in their own adventures, often in spite of adult interference.  Each book ends with a fairly heavy-handed moral about the importance of valuing yourself and your own point of view, but somehow the stories do call for that extra bit of didacticism at the end.

I bought these to read to my middle son, who is having a year of Grimm.  He’s immersed in the fairy tales, he did a drama production with the Canadian Opera Company about the Grimms’ tales, and we are reading several versions of the classic tales each week and comparing tellings and illustrations.  The thing is, I am so back-logged with the books I want to read to him.  I just jumped ahead and read these myself to clear some space on the TBR shelf.  They will now sit on the kids’ bookshelf and wait for him to read them to himself when he’s ready.

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Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

In a post-Christmas reading spree, I gobbled The Fellowship of the Rings, inspired by our umpteenth watching of the films, a Christmas tradition, and I finished re-reading Paradise Lost, which I’ve had on the go for a month.  (That one was inspired by reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy to the boys earlier this year.  It’s loosely based on Milton, and I wanted to remind myself of Milton’s Satan.  Definitely the best character in the epic, all pale ire, envy and despair.)

You will understand, then, that I had quite a hefty hangover and could not settle into my next read.  I wanted a bibliophilic one.  I wanted a page-turner.  I wanted humour and escape, but it had to be smart.  I tried a few Jasper Ffordes, but reading out of sequence is something I do not do lightly, and Thursday Next is not a series to read out of sequence, apparently.  (I really liked The Eyre Affair, but there are, what, eight books in the series now?  I’m missing a few, but I have the most recent ones and just wanted to read them already.  Didn’t work.  Will I ever catch up?)

Thank heavens for Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, another suitably bibliophilic read, a page-turner, and a fun note on which to end the year.  This book was under the tree for me this year, a perfect gift for holiday reading.  Part bibliophilic novel, part mystery, part fantasy, it had a sprinkling of many things to please.

The narrator, Clay Jannon, is a newly-hired clerk in the eponymous San Francisco bookstore, which appears to be a front for a book-based cult.

Now: I was pretty sure “24-hour bookstore” was a euphemism for something.  It was on Broadway, in a euphemistic part of town.  (7)

We get an inside look at the cult’s underground library of leather-bound, one-of-a-kind books, as well as a look inside the operations at Google, where the narrator’s girlfriend works.  It’s a wonderful mixture of old and new, with many a sly wink at the reader who knows better than to believe in rumors about the death of the book.  Various generations of human readers file in and out of the narrative, as do generations of computers and electronic reading devices.  Even the Canadian Kobo gets a walk-on part.  Typography features heavily in the plot, and I found myself itching to google as I read in order to find the font the author describes.  The narrator made me laugh out loud, and his arch humour was the perfect counterpoint to the more fantastical aspects of the plot.  He does not take himself too seriously, and that, I think is the key to the book’s success for me.

I may be able to squeeze one more book in before the toll of midnight tomorrow, but if I don’t, I am content to end a year of reading on this book about books.

Happy New Year, all!

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Bonus Post

Can’t resist posting this link to the mysterious book sculptor who is out to save libraries.  This is from the latest round of sculptures. (These are some earlier ones.)

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The Herring in the Library by L.C. Tyler

The Herring in the Library

L.C. Tyler

London: Pan Macmillan, 2011.

I do love a good mystery, and when a writer contrives to write a series that spoofs The Great Mysteries of Yore, I’m in heaven.  This book was hilarious.   I started out with a pencil in hand, but soon realized that if I made note of every passage that made me laugh, I’d have the whole book marked up, which would rather defeat the purpose.  The humour is arch, the narrators wonderfully unreliable, and although the allusions to Dame Agatha heavy enough to serve as murder weapons themselves, it is P.G. Wodehouse who is the presiding muse.

The comic series features mystery writer Ethelred Tressider, a woebegone man who is obsessed with his unsatisfactory amazon rankings, and his literary agent Elsie Thirkettle, an interfering chocoholic who reminds poor Ethelred endlessly that he’s a second-rate writer.  In this one, the pair confronts a classic locked room mystery, and they take turns narrating (and undercutting each other’s progress) to the solution.

I will admit that the plot of this third in the series was a wee bit thin, but the characterization more than made up for it.  The outcome of the investigation was also a foregone conclusion, but getting there was so much fun that I forgive all.  I have every intention of reading the rest of the series, and am thrilled to discover that L.C. Tyler ranks with Sarah Caudwell for intelligent and witty comfort reading.

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Cara Barer is Coming to Toronto

Cara Barer, one of my favourite about-book artists, is coming to Toronto!

November 10-24, at Bau-Xi Photo.

 

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More Baths Less Talking by Nick Hornby

More Baths Less Talking

Nick Hornby

San Francisco: Believer Books, 2012.

After I read Nick Hornby’s three previous collections of book reviews, I knew who I wanted to be when I grew up.  I bought a subscription to The Believer so that I could read his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column hot off the press.  I didn’t renew my subscription when it came time to, though, because the magazines just piled up, waiting for me to read past Hornby’s column.  They stayed mostly unread, and there’s only so much “unread” I can cope with.  Thankfully, this book collects his columns from May 2010 to December 2011, so I feel all caught up again.  And it’s so much more fun to gorge on these things than to have to wait another month for the next installment, no?

As usual, I have left this book with additions to my wish list, including a couple of books for the kids (Mr. Gum books by Andy Stanton: a cross between Roald Dahl and Monty Python), and with a few bits of surprising and wonderful knowledge:

In England after the war, no TV was shown between the hours of six and eight p.m., a hiatus that became known as the Toddler’s Truce; the BBC decided that bedtime was stressful enough for parents as it was, and, as there was only one TV channel in the U.K. until 1955, childless viewers were left to twiddle their thumbs. (28)

I just don’t even know how to begin wrapping my head around that fact.

Read the book.  It’s wonderful for all the usual reasons Hornby is wonderful.

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Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! by Virago

Stop What You’re Doing and Read This!

London: Vintage, 2011.

This collection of essays about reading, with a forward authored by “Vintage Books” and not a named editor, is a self-proclaimed manifesto to, well, make you read this book and to make reading part of your daily life.  The editors seem to have been pushed into action by a study of British schoolchildren and falling literacy rates.  Here’s the thing:  If you are in a bookstore or the library and you are in the literary essays section and you see and take home this book, you probably don’t need a manifesto about the joys of reading.  I get a bit annoyed with the doomsday prophesies about the end of the book and of reading.

One in three teenagers reads only two books a year, or fewer, and one in six children rarely reads books outside of the classroom.

But that means that five out of six children do read outside of the classroom, right?

Stories and poems, for these thousands of children, are not a source of enchantment or excitement.  Books are associated with school, or worse–they are associated with acute feelings of shame and frustration.

While this is certainly pitiable, I don’t particularly feel welcomed into the text by this kind of approach.  The tone of the introduction to this collection of essays was thoroughly off-putting.  Aside from the fact that they are preaching to the converted, the kind of rhetoric that relies on fear-mongering about the death of reading just does not work for me as a means to encourage more reading.

So, if you, fellow book-lover, are in the literary essays section of bookstore or library, and you take home this book, I suggest you skip the introduction because lots of great essays lie ahead.  Zadie Smith writes about the enormous impact living 100 yards from Willesden Green Library had on her life.  I love the kind of autobiographical detail she provides in bringing that library to life: bits of information to tether a writer to her world.  Tim Parks waxes lyrical about the importance of enchantment, perfectly describing the holiday books often give me from my own racing mind:

It’s a wonderful thing to let go of your own way of telling yourself the world and allow someone else to do it for you.  (69)

And Mark Haddon, in one of my favourite essays, adds a very measured message:

because the passion we feel about reading is so strong, and because we are good people, we sometimes fall into the trap of believing that books made us good people and that they can do the same things for others.  This, I think, does a disservice to both readers and to the books themselves.  Partly because of the snobbery implicit in the phrase “good books”–meaning, of course, the ones that you and I enjoy reading.  Partly because there are so many things that can change lives: boxing, learning to play the piano, tending an allotment. … Talking about reading as the cause of anything is to get things back to front.  It exists in the valley of its own making.  It gives us pleasure; and our embarrassment about pleasure, our fear that reading is fundamentally no different from sex or sport, tempts us into claiming that reading improves us.  But pleasure is a very broad church indeed, and we do literature no great service if we try to sell it as a kind of moral calisthenics. (90)

And, this, I think gets at my annoyance with the tone of the introduction.  Reading will cause feelings of shame and frustration if it is prescribed, forced or served with a side of self-righteousness.  Much better to approach a book with love than with duty, and that goes for book lovers and reluctant readers, however many there are.

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Treasure Island!!! by Sarah Levine

Treasure Island!!!

Sara Levine

New York: Europa Editions, 2012.

I’ve been marooned in the land of Game of Thrones.  Nothing like half a dozen 800-page books to slow down the reading pace.  I got hooked when I rented the first season of the HBO series, then I went back to read the book of the ten hours of movies I’d just devoured.  Somewhere around 1200 pages in, though, I got fed up and had to switch gears quickly.

Treasure Island was the cure.  A different marooning.  My friend Kelly recommended Levine’s book, but I wanted to go back to the original first.  I read an edition illustrated by Robert Ingpen, which was deliciously drawn.  Each page of the book is in full colour, to make it look like the book is printed on aged parchment.  Long John Silver is perfectly menacing in all his scarred glory, but Ingpen very cleverly leaves the boy hero Jim Hawkins vaguely drawn so that the reader can imagine him or herself as the narrating hero.

And this is exactly what the narrator of Levine’s humourous telling does.  A drifter of a twenty-something, the unnamed narrator is insufferably self-absorbed.  Luckily, she’s also funny.

If life were a sea adventure, I knew: I wouldn’t be a sailor, pirate, or cabin boy but more likely a barnacle clinging to the side of the boat.  Why not rise, I thought.  Why not spring up that very moment, in the spirit of Jim, and create my own adventure?  …  I must have been the tiniest of boats rocking on the sea of Robert Louis Stevenson’s consciousness…; I must have been a sea-bird streaking through the azure sky of his daydream; in just the same way spirits are said to commune across cultures, time and continents, Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Treasure Island felt cosmically intended for me. (15)

Like Gabriel Betteredge, from Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, who treats Robinson Crusoe as his bible and font of all wisdom, Levine’s narrator adopts Treasure Island as her personal self-help bible in order to make herself the hero of her own life.

I delved into my backpack for the golden compass I had made for my new life.  This was not a long, gangly composition; I had merely–merely!–written down boy hero Jim Hawkins’ best qualities, which formed, I realized every moment with increasing warmth, the Core Values of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

I am copying it out hurriedly here; of course, the original was carefully hand-lettered in a serifed style on a creamy seventy-pound piece of paper with a lovely deckled edge.

BOLDNESS

RESOLUTION

INDEPENDENCE

HORN-BLOWING (17)

We are to treat “independence” with enormous irony.  Never was there a more barnacle-like hanger on of a boomerang child.  Never was there a narrator more unreliable, less honest and brave than good old Jim Hawkins.  Another of the narrator’s lists is of her therapists.  It is long, and deservedly so.  She is batshit crazy.

Levine’s short novel develops into an anti-adventure.  Instead of heading out to conquer the world, the narrator must move back home with her parents after a series of mishaps that leave her unemployed, homeless and in charge of a stolen parrot.

Her sister, whose library copy of Treasure Island the narrator steals, complains that she hates books without any female characters.  (She has been looking for books to read to her third grade class.)  This sense of a faulty script is the key to understanding the narrator’s predicament.  She is one of the lost Special Snowflake generation.  What is a college graduate with an over-developed sense of entitlement  to do in the world that cares nothing for her ability to write a good English essay?  (Thanks, Marcelle.)

Bury herself in her index cards and wreak havoc on the lives of those around her.

The result is a very funny read, full of madcap (domestic) mayhem.

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