In Which We Do What We Do When We Do It For the Children And Them Alone

How I Got This Way

by ALEX CARNEVALE

As I got older, I learned some tough stuff about the world. For instance, that there was no Jack in the Box on the east coast. I still don't get that.

And once I was able to be a little more choosy about my own reading, all these saccharine kids' books really led me in a differnt direction. Here's where I ended up:

Big Friendly Author?5. Danny the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl

Dahl was an admitted anti-Semite, making it all the more inappropriate that my parents permitted me to read his books. Many of his books have outrageous Jewish stereotypes, and I'm sure this one is no different (it's not kind to Gypsies either), but at the time, it was a simple story of revenge and wonder, plus the nature element. It's the best of his books and it's not particularly close, although the Henry Sugar novella always will hold a steely place in my heart.

4. Incident at Hawk's Hill, Allan Eckert

For a kid's book, this was some pretty dark shit. This was the assigned reading in Mr. Z's sixth grade class. Mr. Z himself was a psychotic local Republican who somehow was permitted to teach children reading. In hindsight, this book was wholly inappropriate, as were his frequent stories about how he once had a leg cast as a kid and he kept shoving food down there and he got maggots. I've carried that with me long enough.

 

3. Books of Blood, Clive Barker

After a bad experience in 1994 when I had to run into my mother's arms because Jurassic Park was way too real for me, I realized I had to toughen up. Fortunately or unfortunately, I decided to toughen up on the greatest series of horror stories ever written. Barker's a native Englishman perhaps most familiar for the Hellraiser series. He's a capable novelist--Weaveworld and The Damnation Game are both enjoyable for what they are--but Books of Blood, which brought Barker onto the scene as a master of the genre, blows anything he ever did after BOB away. This stuff is still scary to me today, and it's flat out fun to read. It's probably available as a dollar paperback at any decent used bookstore.

     

2. Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card

The first book in the series, the universally acclaimed Ender's Game, is the ultimate kid's science fiction book in that it's wonderful throughout, but once you know the end, it's friggin' pointless. South Park parodied Ender's Game with an episode that had Kenny playing the PSP against Satan's Army. Having delivered one decent book that gained a massive audience, Orson Scott Card--whose politics leave something to be desired--had it in him to write one more great book before resigning himself to a lifetime of mediocrity.

That book is Speaker for the Dead. The two books have very little to do with each other besides the same central character. SFTD holds up quite well--it's a philosophical intrigue that even young people can digest, and the mystery behind everything is fun and enjoyable to grasp. In many way it reminds me of Joe Haldeman's far superior All My Sins Remembered (one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written) and any comparison to Haldeman is high praise from me.

1. Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling

I didn't read Harry Potter when I was very young. The first Potter came out in 1997 (I was 14), and it wasn't very good. It had some great world building and plenty of memorable characters, not much of a plot. The Potters are hardly my favorite children's books, but they are wonderful, and since they're going to be far and away the first real influential books of this century it's worth thinking about what they might be doing for our culture and whether or not they're actually bad or good.

People who don't read Harry Potter irritate me. If something is going to hold this kind of thrall over young people, who are digesting 600 page novels as if they were Pop Tarts, I'd say it's pretty important to get your hands on a copy.

In short, if you really care about reading, and what the future of prose literature might be, you have to have read this.

Like I said, the first one's just world-building. The second one has some high notes. The third one, adapted into another terrible Alfonso Cuaron film that looked great, was the best up to that point. Goblet of Fire topped it with its massive set pieces and violence. The Order of the Phoenix was Rowling going a bit crazy with exposition and a tedious final scene, with plenty of more adult fun in between.

one could hardly call such a thing beautyThe next one was a better effort than the Order, but churning them out at such speed hasn't helped the quality, though Rowling's improved at plot tremendously as she's moved along.

A.S. Byatt, a marvelously talented writer in her own right, penned the strongest possible repudiation of Rowling, although like most criticism of institutions, it was rendered pointless. The book is "cliched"-- thanks, we didn't catch that.

Byatt's argument:

Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.

Similarly, some of Ms. Rowling's adult readers are simply reverting to the child they were when they read the Billy Bunter books, or invested Enid Blyton's pasteboard kids with their own childish desires and hopes. A surprising number of people — including many students of literature — will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books. But in the days before dumbing down and cultural studies no one reviewed Enid Blyton or Georgette Heyer — as they do not now review the great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences.

It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has fed this phenomenon. And it is the leveling effect of cultural studies, which are as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don't really believe exists. It's fine to compare the Brontës with bodice-rippers. It's become respectable to read and discuss what Roland Barthes called "consumable" books. There is nothing wrong with this, but it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's "magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."

Say what you want about her views, but Byatt's identified the trend here--consumable books not designed to be savored, but to be ingested or plowed through like Lost on DVD. The problem Byatt faces in dissing Rowling is that she has to find something to praise. Terry Pratchett's an even more terrible writer, so that's not gonna help.

The chief benefit of this phenomenon seems to me to be that people are reading, and that it doesn't really matter what. Overall, after taking the interweb into account, it seems that people are reading as much as ever, if not in exactly the same way that the publishing companies would like them to. This is a notable change in world culture, and for us to process what it really means will take some time. For now, who cares what children read? Why bring taste into a discussion that already has babies in it? Babies only know what tastes good.

LULLABIES FOR THE LITTLE ONES

"Butterfly Nets" -- Bishop Allen (mp3)

"Roscoe" - Midlake (mp3)

"Son of a Preacher Man" - Dusty Springfield (mp3)

"96 Tears" - ? and the Mysterians (mp3)

Find some sweet MP3s here.