No More Adventures in Absurdity… no really, please no more.
Once again we have another one of those children’s books of today suck because they are dark and gloomy and bad for kids type of articles. This time from the New York Times written as an oped from a folklorist. The piece isn’t as raw and ballsy as the famous Meghan Cox Gurdon WSJ article but it still points some very long fingers and reaches a bit too far to make a point. The point seeming to be that Peter Pan rulez, why can’t it all be about never growing up and comedy? Children are smart, and they know things in the real world are dark. They read the paper, watch the news, go to school, see their classmates bullied into suicide due to bullying focusing on the fact they are different. We don’t need to go around waving the I’LL PROTECT YOU flag, and chances are they probably don’t want us waving that flag in their name anyway. I wanted to touch upon a few things in this article that struck me as strange or far fetched.
Many authors of more recent books for children and teenagers have similarly crossed over to the dark side, and we applaud them for it. But the savagery we offer children today is more unforgiving than it once was, and the shadows are rarely banished by comic relief. Instead of stories about children who will not grow up, we have stories about children who struggle to survive.
Saying that anything dark needs to be combatted with comedy or light is a very subjective argument to make. Throw in the word savagery and I wonder what exactly the author is reading. Animal science books perhaps?
In 2009, Neil Gaiman won the Newbery Medal, the most distinguished award in the field of children’s literature, for “The Graveyard Book,” a work that makes no bones about its subject matter. Here is what children read on Page 1: “There was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife.” A few paragraphs later, the wielder of the knife has finished off three family members and is on his way to the nursery to slash the throat of the fourth. It is up to the hero, Bod — short for Nobody — to find the killer.
This whole paragraph makes me think that the author of the piece either didn’t read The Graveyard Book in it’s entirety or just focused on one subplot of the book to make her point hit home. There was so much more to this book than finding a murderer. So much more than the murders themselves to forced Bod to move forward. The Graveyard book is a quintessential coming of age story, Bod needs to find his way back into the world being absent for so long and to grow up and put to rest the bad things that happened in his life so he can be a happy child. Bod needs resolution yes, but he also needs to learn to grow into a young man and step back into being alive again. I would never go as far as to call this book savage.
But neither the Harry Potter books nor “His Dark Materials” has anything to equal the horrors of what Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark suffer in Suzanne Collins’s wildly successful trilogy, “The Hunger Games.” Katniss must kill to survive in gladiator-like contests, and her victims are not the fabulous monsters of fairy tales or of Wonderland and Neverland, but other children.
Because its totally fair to compare a fairly new dystopian book to an incredibly old fantasy book. And while we are here can we please note that this lady tends to lean towards really old volumes written when literature was a veritable sausage-fest?
They were as passionate about their young readers as they were about the books they wrote. In 1856, Carroll purchased a camera with the hope of freezing time through his portraits of little girls. By capturing them in photographs, he made sure they never grew up.
I am sure today’s authors can find a way less creepy way to be passionate about their young readers. But hey, if any of you want to capture my little girl forever on your camera… I am sure we can make a deal.
All in all I was incredibly flummoxed reading an article by a folklorist from Harvard that couldn’t appreciate the new folklore happening all around her now. Instead Maria Tatar would rather live in the sausage-fest past and focus her attentions on a boy who never grew up.
Sony gets newspapers!
From Yahoo! News
“Sony Electronics, which has delayed the delivery of its electronic book reader, is hoping a deal with News Corp. will make it worth the wait for consumers. The companies sealed a deal Thursday that will enable Sony Reader users to view content from The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. The deal comes after reports that News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch was unhappy with the company’s deal with Amazon.com for the Kindle.”
“Consumers will have to choose between two different subscription models to access the publications’ digital content, and News Corp. will reportedly get better control of subscriptions. A monthly digital subscription to the Journal will cost $14.99. The price for MarketWatch news and columns is $10.99, and a monthly subscription to the Post will be set at $9.99, according to Sony.”
