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13/12/05 09:0552 books in 52 weeks? Sounds like a resolution to emulate...and I could even succeed, if I read the YAs I ought to be reading anyway.
13/12/05
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13/12/05 22:45A book came out, last year or a little earlier, called Welcome to Lizard Motel, (which I haven't read yet), which is about the severe dreariness of children's books. We wonder why it took Harry Potter to get kids to read, but it's pretty freaking simple: Harry Potter is about a boy who gets to be a wizard and he has cool friends and a pet owl and he's reasonably popular and good at sports. Yeah, kids like wish-fulfilment. What's news about that? Why should we keep trying to get kids to read things like The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green, and then be astonished that they don't want to read? I mean, I don't want to read this book. I am reading it out of a grim sense of professional duty, which is the attitude with which I'm going to read most of the ALA best books for young adults and a couple of the Newbery honor books. (The most recent winner is Kira-Kira, a book about a Japanese-American family who get discriminated against and the daughter has cancer. YAY.)
Now it certainly was simplistic and biased to have books that stuck to middle-class kids in happy families, and I appreciate the need for books that let children in very unhappy situations feel that they aren't alone. But that's not the reason that these books get on the best-books lists; they get on the best-books lists because people have got it into their heads that the proper form of litrachur is to be 'realistic' to the point of misery. And...it's not that it's a bad book. It's a pretty good book. But I can't imagine anyone reading it for *fun* (and it's not like I only read pure escapism, either; The Brothers Karamazov was pretty fun).
Hah. I feel like such a bad librarian because I hate this book. But perhaps there should be more librarians who hate books that are tediously unpleasant in the name of being literature.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, on the other hand... THAT was fun. I am such a sucker for the pretty CGI and the generic fantasy score and the British accents and general loveliness.
Now it certainly was simplistic and biased to have books that stuck to middle-class kids in happy families, and I appreciate the need for books that let children in very unhappy situations feel that they aren't alone. But that's not the reason that these books get on the best-books lists; they get on the best-books lists because people have got it into their heads that the proper form of litrachur is to be 'realistic' to the point of misery. And...it's not that it's a bad book. It's a pretty good book. But I can't imagine anyone reading it for *fun* (and it's not like I only read pure escapism, either; The Brothers Karamazov was pretty fun).
Hah. I feel like such a bad librarian because I hate this book. But perhaps there should be more librarians who hate books that are tediously unpleasant in the name of being literature.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, on the other hand... THAT was fun. I am such a sucker for the pretty CGI and the generic fantasy score and the British accents and general loveliness.