Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray?

Annals of Japery Essays Notable Articles
April 29, 2010 | 10 books mentioned 19 4 min read

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My son Conor is fourteen months old, and my wife and I, like all new parents, marvel at his growth: he’s gone from a screaming little yam to a genuine person, with his own catalog of gestures, habits, and idiosyncrasies.  Playtime is no longer a one-sided affair: we roll a ball back and forth, chase each other around, whack at a toy guitar.  When exhaustion creeps in, we choose a book from his growing kiddie library; Conor sits rapt for a few seconds as we read, then crawls off to wreck something.

Aside from the trenchant Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, which I’d never before heard of, I tend to choose books that I remember loving: Caps For Sale, Ferdinand, anything with Curious George.  And while Conor is off in the corner, headbutting the cat or tearing up a magazine, I keep reading, as much for myself as for him.  One would think it a pleasure to return to one’s childhood favorites—and for a few nostalgia-stirring pages, it is.  But as an adult, having developed the keen critical powers of a precocious kindergartner, I can’t help but find fault with nearly everything on his shelf.  What I previously considered whimsical trifles now reveal themselves as other things entirely: thinly-veiled endorsements of chaos, malfeasance, naïveté.  Here are five of the most flagrant offenders:

Caps For Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina

coverCaps For Sale tells the story of a Russian peddler whose entire stock of pageboy caps is stolen by a troop of insouciant monkeys.  The man shakes his fists, making impotent demands (“You must give me back my caps!”) as the thieves grin down from their tree, taunting his frantic need. (“Tsz, tsz, tsz!”)  They seem to know that they control him, can gut him as cleanly as Maggiorani in The Bicycle Thief.  Ultimately, however, they lose their nerve and fling down the caps—and while this brings the incident to a close, it’s where the real trouble begins.  The peddler balances his wares upon his head and returns to town, eager to unload caps that were just worn by monkeys. The steady spread of head lice and untold ape-mites throughout his drab little village seems a given: once again, craven business interests trump the health of unwitting consumers.  He may have reclaimed his caps, but the peddler has lost his integrity—with his own neighbors paying a tragic price.

Interestingly, it’s now widely believed that Outbreak, the 1995 Dustin Hoffman Ebola thriller, was at least partially inspired by Caps For Sale.

Horton Hears a Who! by Dr. Seuss

coverIn a 2000 New York Times Magazine essay, A.O. Scott called Horton Hears a Who! “a response to the atom bomb,” and the book, written in 1954, carries a warm dedication to a “Great Friend” from Japan.  These days, however, Seuss’ tale reads as an invitation to stateside revolt: if the residents of Who-ville will only scream loudly enough, their Nool Jungle overlords will have no choice but to recognize them.  The Who-hero, Jo-Jo, lives “in the Fairfax Apartments”—presumably not far from the Fairfax County, VA bases of DynCorp, General Dynamics, and the CIA.  Is his initial “shirking” merely subterfuge as he works to destroy the system from within?

While such brazen calls-to-arms might have energized me in my youth, I now know that in reality, the Wickersham Brothers would have co-opted the Whos’ rousing energy for political and marketing purposes, deflating their cause with poisonous efficiency.  Their spirits crushed, the Whos would find themselves adrift near the bottom of the savage Nool hierarchy—their memories of Horton’s optimism haunting their dreams as they toss upon their pale orange thistle-tuft.

Blueberries For Sal by Robert McCloskey

coverBlueberries For Sal follows a young girl and her mother as they pick blueberries, an activity that will allow them, somewhat disconcertingly, to “have food for winter.” (A sequel, Anemia For Sal, was rejected by Viking Press in 1951.)  After a few pages of berry-picking antics, we learn that a hungry mother bear and her cub are on the opposite side of the hill.  A storybook mix-up ensues, with Sal trailing the female bear and the cub following Sal’s mother.  When the bear—and the woman—realize what’s happened, their reactions are bizarrely muted: “That is not my child”; “You are not little Sal.”  And that’s that.  Soon enough, each species is breezily reunited, with none of the lung-shredding gore that would ordinarily be expected.

When I was in my early twenties, I went for a solo hike in Montana’s Glacier National Park.  As the sun descended, I worked my way into well-marked grizzly country, but I shrugged off the danger: after all, what could go wrong?  About a mile in, I was nearly attacked by a fully-grown black bear, coming terrifyingly close to becoming a wet pile of organs.  Whenever I’ve told the story, and been asked why I acted so stupidly, I’ve always kind of shrugged.  But now I know why: I had absorbed the deadly lessons of Blueberries For Sal. Thanks a lot, McCloskey.

Ferdinand by Munro Leaf

coverI’m all for keeping kids as far away as possible from the world’s raging horror, but there’s a clear line between sensible protection and willful dubiousness—a line crossed in Blueberries For Sal, and again in Ferdinand.  Ferdinand is a fey young bull who’d rather sit beneath a tree, listening to The xx, than scrap with his mates.  It’s a nice portrait of youthful otherness, a bovine Freaks and Geeks.  But after Ferdinand is carted to the Plaza de Toros—and he lazes in the center of the ring, too blithe to charge—he’s chauffered right back to his meadow, free to sniff the daisies and ponder Egon Schiele.  I’ve been to a bullfight and seen what happens to those that survive the toreros: they’re dragged outside to have their throats slit.  Perhaps Leaf could’ve avoided the bullfighting angle altogether, and simply jumped to the bulls’ 15-year high school reunion.  There, his former peers, all of them now alcoholic financial advisers, mutter resentfully by the bar about Ferdinand’s thriving fruit-bouquet franchise.

Curious George Flies a Kite by Margret Rey

coverI don’t have any philosophical argument against Curious George Flies a Kite.  My complaint is more basic: the book is unrepentantly, almost diabolically, boring; it’s the sort of thing Jigsaw might read to his victims as they writhe in a maggoty pit.  This is the first book I read to Conor, choosing it out of lazy brand loyalty, I suppose—because what’s more fun than Curious George?  As it turns out, there are a few things: being jabbed in the armpit with a rusty sewing needle.  Vomiting wing sauce into a concert-lot Port-a-John.  Watching Elizabethtown with a corpse on your lap.  I’d eagerly choose any of these before again entering the episodic, joy-killing world of that insipid little chimp.  I’d try to explain the plot, but that would only make me exhale sadly and rest my head against the wall.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go rescue the cat.

Update: Again, I Ask: Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray?

is a staff writer for The Millions and an associate editor at MAD magazine. Find links to more of his work and follow him @Jacob_Lambert.

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Annals of Japery

Why I Must Charge People Fees for Their Own Art

Annals of Japery
January 25, 2012 | 10 books mentioned 14 5 min read

I sell rocking chairs. I love the curve of the rockers, the feel of the wood, the stain, the spindles, the splat. America wouldn’t be America without the rocking chair. I sell them because I love them.

Truth be told, I don’t sell very many of them. People don’t want to buy rocking chairs anymore. I can’t explain this. Rocking chairs seem to be as useful now as they ever were, as enjoyable as they are essential. I don’t understand why there isn’t one — or seven, or twelve — in every home. Sure, there are the unfinished ones lined up for the masses at Cracker Barrel, but I’m talking about serious rocking chairs.

The lack of sales doesn’t stop people from making rocking chairs. They make them like nobody’s business. More people make them than want to sit in them. I have so many people who want to supply me with rocking chairs that I don’t even have time to look at all of the rocking chairs they try to send me.

As a result, we rocking chair sellers have come up with a solution. Anyone who wants me to try to sell their rocking chair must first buy a rocking chair from me.

We call this a contest. The fee to enter is completely reasonable, given the fact that, as sure as I sit in a shop full of rocking chairs, I have no other way to make money. None.

Chances are, if you enter, I probably will not sit in your rocking chair myself. There are just too many. Someone on my staff will do it. I pay my staff nothing. If I paid my staff something, then I’d probably have to make people buy two rocking chairs to enter the contest.

But my staff never complains. They sit in rocking chairs simply because they love to sit in rocking chairs. I think they must have other jobs, but I have no idea how one of those works. I pay my staff in love, and it’s kind of beautiful, if you ask me.

My staff does not have nearly as much experience as I do in terms of gauging the quality of rocking chairs, but looking at so many rocking chairs is too much work for just me. They pick their top twenty rocking chairs. I’m pretty sure that they’re picking the twenty best rocking chairs, but if they don’t, it doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to buy the winner, anyway.

Once our volunteer staff has narrowed down the field, we send those twenty rocking chairs to a national celebrity judge of rocking chairs.
Half of the fees we collect goes to rent, the other half to these celebrity judges. The judges are incredibly popular. At least, among rocking chair enthusiasts. Outside of that small set of people, nobody even knows their name. But people like me think they’re just about as famous as you can get.

Why? Because they once made fantastic rocking chairs. Some of the best rocking chairs of all time. Hardly anyone has sat in those rocking chairs, but still, there is universal agreement that they are the best rocking chair makers alive. (The very best makers of rocking chairs are all dead, of course, so we can’t get them to judge. But sometimes we put their name on the contest so that people think that their rocking chairs are sort of associated with the all-time best rocking chairs.)

Those celebrity judges still make money from other sources, but not from their rocking chairs. They go on a tour, called a Visiting Rocker Series, where they take their rocking chair with them and sit on stage and rock in it. Who doesn’t love watching old people rock? They sit there and rock, and talk about how they made that chair. People can’t get enough of it. Some of them don’t even have to make new rocking chairs. They just truck out the same ones and rock in them, and talk about all the same things.

Yes, organizations will pay significant money to have these celebrity rocking chair makers come and rock, and people will turn out to see them. All that is true, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how to get people to be interested in other rocking chairs. I once thought about it for a whole afternoon, and have concluded it just can’t be done.

Of course, I make rocking chairs myself. That’s how I started out in this business: I couldn’t get anyone to sell my rocking chairs, either, so I opened my own shop. My rocking chairs are as good as anyone else’s rocking chairs, so I’ve offered them for sale in my shop. No one buys them, either, but at least they’re in a shop.

Getting your rocking chair into a shop is important. It gives a person license to teach others how to make rocking chairs. It doesn’t matter if nobody buys your rocking chair or sits in it; what matters is that it’s in the shop.

Since the goal is to just make it into the shop, it makes sense to charge a contest fee. In my contest, everybody gets a rocking chair, so entrants get something for something. In fact, some of my colleagues run contests where people don’t even get a rocking chair for their fee. Is that unfair? I don’t think so. This isn’t about selling the rocking chairs. It’s about selling the idea of rocking chairs.

As a result, I only open my contests to people who have never made a rocking chair before. We want the very first, most primitive effort. Leaving the celebrity judges aside and the undeniable popularity of their work, we believe that people don’t in fact appreciate the rocking chair of an experienced maker. What people enjoy is youth and promise. They like to predict who will eventually become a master craftsperson, no matter how crappy a first effort is.

I don’t even care anymore if the rocking chairs in my shop are comfortable. In fact, some of them are intentionally uncomfortable. Some of them don’t even rock. I have one that will break your pelvis if you move so much as a hair.

I’ve heard people complain and say that a rocking chair is not meant to punish you. Those people are ignorant. A rocking chair is a piece of art; it’s an experience. Just looking at it and experiencing its essence enlarges your life. So what if you find a leg where the seat should be? Maybe you need to find a new way to sit.

Look, do I think everyone should have more rocking chairs in their home? Of course I do. But I’m not making the rules. I can’t convince someone to love the same things I love. I can’t tell someone hey, I think a rocking chair is a perfect place to wind up at the end of the day and, I don’t know, curl up with a good… a good… well, okay, I have no idea what you could do in a rocking chair.

You see the problem now, don’t you?

In fact, I’m thinking of giving up the rocking chair business altogether. I think it would be fun to start a restaurant. I think I could offer a real service to people. The problem everyone always has with a restaurant is attracting customers, but I’ve got that figured out.

All kinds of people like to cook, right? I’d get five hundred cooks and have them each prepare a meal. Then I’d charge all of them twenty dollars for the chance to serve their meal in my restaurant. I’d find some waiters who really love being around food to work for free and they’d sample about twenty of the meals, then I’d pay a real professional eater to decide which of those twenty meals is the best, and I’d pay the winning cook.

See? Make the cooks the customers. Everybody eats their own, and some people even get paid! I don’t know why someone hasn’t thought of this system before.

Now, if I could only get rid of these rocking chairs…

Image credit: Kezee/Flickr

Annals of Japery
| 10 books mentioned 14 5 min read
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Essays

Of Mondegreens and Eggcorns: Language Keeps Talking About Itself

Essays
April 6, 2017 | 10 books mentioned 2 4 min read

1.
When the writer Sylvia Wright was a child, her mother would read to her from Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, including this stanza:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
Writing in 1954 for Harper’s Magazine, the grown-up Wright recalled tears coming to her eyes over the tragic image of the Earl Amurray and Lady Mondegreen clasping hands as they perished together. Though the poem described the Earl at great length, it didn’t mention Lady Mondegreen before or after that moment. But that fact didn’t strike Wright as odd at the time. She knew all she needed to know about Lady Mondegreen’s fatal loyalty to the dashing Earl from one simple line.

It was only later in life that Wright learned what was already clear to anyone who had read the poem in print rather than heard it recited aloud: There is no Lady Mondegreen. The line that begat both her existence and her demise actually reads “And laid him on the green.” In honor of her misinterpretation, Wright coined the term mondegreen for instances of mishearing a word or phrase in a way that gives it a new, unintended meaning.

Language is laced with such legends about itself. If someone falls victim to a mondegreen, is corrected, but stubbornly insists on continuing with the error, we call that a mumpsimus. The term stems from a Catholic priest who flubbed the Latin term sumpsimus during mass and then continued saying mumpsimus thereafter. This story was first relayed by the theologian Erasmus in a letter dated 1516. And here we are 500 years later, with mumpsimus appearing on a Huffington Post listicle of “10 Useful Words for Work.” (The blended word listicle is a portmanteau, a term coined by none other than Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.) The name of the recalcitrant priest is long since forgotten, but the relic of language he inspired lives on.

2.
If you search for information about mondegreens, you may fall down a linguistic rabbit hole, following mondegreento homophonyto heteronym. The churning sea of language raises its watery head to look around and then dives back into itself, splashing out words like litotes, genericide, and yes, metaphor. I collect these terms like Easter eggs, thrilled to have names for the ways we outfit our messages with color, rhythm, and nuance.

There are those of us who worship language and what it can do, arriving at the altar at a young age. As we learn, we stack up vocabulary into semantic pyramids — to forget is an infinitive is a verb; forgotten is a past participle is an adjective (sometimes) is a modifier (usually). We are the ones who read ahead in our English textbooks and who sign up for high school Spanish and French classes to see if other people in other corners of the world wield language differently from our own clumsy grips. We become readers to consume language and writers to spread it and editors to protect it.

Those early dissections, slicing language into sentences and paragraphs and extracting subjects and predicates, are our first lessons in the vocabulary of language’s favorite subject: itself. Lewis Thomas writes in Et Cetera, Et Cetera, his collection of meandering etymological essays, “The language keeps talking about itself, cannot seem to have enough of itself. At a guess, I’d say there are more roots for the various ways of using language than for all other human activities together, some of them hidden away inside longer words that seem to be designed for other purposes, most of them standing baldly out in full view.” ­

3.
Mondegreens are particularly prevalent in song lyrics. (Consider all the people who thought Taylor Swift was singing about lonely Starbucks lovers.) When a mondegreen involves song lyrics from another language, it’s called soramimi. When a mondegreen results in a nonsensical phrase, it’s called a malapropism. But if the ersatz word or phrase makes some sort of twisted sense, such as “old-timer’s disease” in place of “Alzheimer’s disease,” it’s an eggcorn (itself an eggcorn for acorn).

Language cares about these subtle distinctions. It digests the complicated things we try to do with it and feeds us back distilled linguistic pearls, from anacoluthon to zeugma. It looks in the mirror and describes its patterns (hypallage, paligogy); it opens its mouth and listens to how it sounds (fricative, glottal). It teases apart its letters only to coax them back together more closely (blend words) or in a different order (metathesis), lop some letters off (haplology), or add new ones (paragoge). It tracks the movement of its words across questions and responses (pied-piping, wh-movement).

For every linguistic guideline, there’s a word coined to denote how to skirt that guideline for rhetorical effect. “I came, saw, and conquered” just doesn’t have the same decisive intonement without the phrase-beginning repetition of anaphora, nor would we still be singing Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” had he not employed the phrase-ending repetition of epistrophe.

Language flexes and adapts. It knows it will be both mangled and elevated, depending on who wields it — quite often by the same person. The damage of careless or misleading words can be immensely far-reaching, as history has borne again and again. At its worse, language can be used to confuse facts and cloud intention, sowing fear, hostility, and oppression. But at its best, it’s the ultimate form of synecdoche, when a term for part of something refers to the thing in its entirety. Language lets us use things as small as phonemes to represent our entire world.

Image Credit: Flickr/Thomas Quine.

Essays
| 10 books mentioned 2 4 min read
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Annals of Japery Lists

The Five Scariest Books Ever Written

Annals of Japery Lists
October 31, 2016 | 10 books mentioned 6 3 min read

With Halloween upon us, now is the perfect time to curl up with a good, scary book. But if you’ve already read such standbys as Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Shining, you might be in need of a suggestion. With that in mind, here are five absolute chillers that will have you turning pages deep into the night — and are guaranteed to have your teeth a-chattering as you pray for the sun to rise!

Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom
The elderly, disease-wracked Morrie is dying — immobile and helpless in what is soon to be his deathbed. Outside his New England home, the pained echoes of atrocities past — witch burnings, the slaughter of native peoples — can still be faintly heard. Once each week, as regular as the doomsday clock, he is visited by a much younger man — a man known, terrifyingly, as “Mitch” — who has arrived from the murder-pocked wastelands of Detroit. Mitch hovers above Morrie’s bed, extracting stories, memories, and anecdotes from the elder as if withdrawing his very blood. Morrie, unsurprisingly, withers as Mitch’s visits mount. Is Morrie’s terminal illness sapping his will to live? Or is he a victim of Mitch’s vampiric need for enough material to fill an easily giftable book?

It’s All Good by Gwyneth Paltrow
In It’s All Good, a pallid wraith of a woman named Gwyneth, all eerie eyes and jutting bones, drags us into the depths of her madness — a state in which simple, good-hearted folk might gobble down such witchy horrors as preserved lemons and quail eggs. Early on, we learn that Gwenyth shuns red meat — it is, perhaps, too close to the taste of human flesh — and any poultry raised inorganically. Her goal, she proclaims, is to “cleanse” her “system.” This obsession with scouring her bowels of the merest impurity raises a troubling question: what is so vile within her that it must be so harshly scrubbed away? And if we read her book, are we just as poisoned as she?

Crippled America by Donald Trump
In Crippled America, a glaring, angry madman called Donald guides us through a harrowing realm of poverty, violence, and ruin — a shattered deathscape that, if viewed through a certain prism, can begin to look like our own. As in other works of dystopian horror, Crippled America is vague on what has brought such pestilence, and at times Donald’s prose, as H.P. Lovecraft’s, becomes difficult to follow (“If you have laws that you don’t enforce, then you don’t have laws,” he writes. “This leads to lawlessness.”). At other times, however, he is as convincingly menacing as the Cryptkeeper himself — as when he declares his lunatic intentions to rule this ravaged land. It’s a far-fetched bit of plotting, to be sure — but just plausible enough to send a shiver down your spine.

Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen
Like Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Chicken Soup for the Soul is a collection of stories that, taken as a whole, form a mosaic of punishing psychological horror. Taking place in an eerie world in which humanity’s quirks and edges have been worn away — shades of Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives — Chicken Soup for the Soul pounds the reader with sun-dappled tales of love, flowers, and workplace hugging. Chicken Soup for the Soul succeeds in terrifying by relentlessly piling false “goodness” upon false “goodness” — and for the quivering, goose-pimpled reader, the effect is that of being forced to eat an entire sheet cake at riflepoint.

The Carrie Diaries by Candace Bushnell
A modern classic of terror, The Carrie Diaries tells the story of Carrie White, a fragile teenager who is born with telekinetic powers — powers that, as she matures, will allow her to avenge the high-school abusers who torment her endlessly. Bushnell controls the action with a firm and expert grip, allowing the horror of The Carrie Diaries to slowly build, a sense of dread permeating each page, until a catastrophic climax that stands as one of the…wait a minute — what? Oh. Really? Oh. Okay. So then..what’s The Carrie Diaries? Oh. Like a Sex and the City prequel? For fuck’s sake. That’s even scarier than whatever the hell it was I was originally talking about.

Image Credit: Pixabay.

Annals of Japery Lists
| 10 books mentioned 6 3 min read
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19 comments:

  1. Finally someone blows the whistle on the sinister side of children’s literature. Dr. Seuss may never recover. Another very funny piece from Jacob Lambert. My only regret is that he didn’t discuss Pippi Longstocking or any of the Moomin books.

  3. Laughed, laughed, laughed!

    A fun essay to read, Jacob! Perhaps, it’s not the literal story lines so much as the reading memories that make these so universally treasured, despite their absurdities. Then again, isn’t that the essence of childhood–believing in the unbelievable? That a bull would want to smell daisies instead of fight; that there are tiny worlds floating right under our noses. Technical details of reality be damned! ;)

    Thanks for the end-of-the-week giggle!

    P.S. I agree with Edan, that last paragraph was clutch! Hilarious.

  4. It’s all true! I mean, Hop on Pop is virtually a call for government overthrow!

    And we don’t even want to get into the nefarious food-inspired plots behind Green Eggs and Ham and The Very Hungry Caterpillar….

  5. As a lover and advocate of picture books, I am appalled at your disrespect and disdain for some of America’s finest classics.

    As a human being with a sense of humor, I find your article to be absolutely hilarious! Yeah, I agree… some of those beloved childhood treasures sure read differently now!

    I agree with a previous poster that there’s plenty more fodder out there; with that in mind, I’m looking forward to part two!

  6. Curious George *groans*. How is it that all the originals are rambling and mostly plotless (or maybe I should say overly full of plot)? It takes a valiant effort to read these to my son, who, it goes without saying, adores them. And, it kind of always irks me that all George gets for his naughtiness is a wink, a nod, and typically a medal or a bunny.

  7. This is why librarians have far more evil powers than ordinary mortals. If picture books are this subversive, imagine the tips we get from middle grade novels!

  8. Pingback: Books & Authors » Daily Lit Links for 4/30
  9. Pingback: Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray? « "Read Me A Story" Book Reviews

  10. My deepest apologies for reading all of those books to you in your impressionable years, Jay. Had that bear made mincemeat of you in 2000, I would never have realized it was my fault for having read to you Blueberries for Sal. Glad you survived!

    Love you, Mom

  11. Pingback: Siden sist! : bokmerker.org

  13. I’m sorry, I have a sense of humor just like anyone else, but you need to relax. I too am appalled at the sheer disrespect you have shown these classic books. If you look hard enough you can find subversive messages in anything. And if you think Curious George has a simplified plot line – just be glad we’ve moved on from Dick and Jane. Courtesy of Dr. Seuss.

  14. Subversive plots can be found in anything even a cereal box. Dr. Seuss did write with political twists for sure and Curious George books are boring- yet kids do adore the wee little monkey. I’m just mad at the man with the yellow hat for stealing George from the jungle! Good thing we teach children the difference between fiction and nonfiction as Blueberries for Sal is most definetely in the first category…can’t blame the book for your own innocence about hiking around bears!!

  15. If we continue to let kids read these books, we will soon be steeped in a society that thinks nothing of unnatural and unhealthy colored Eggs and Ham. Soon, our entire society will be tripping on mold spore food and having itself a Wild Rumpus Romp!

  16. Pingback: Monday before BEA Links « Bib-Laura-graphy

  17. For a while I took my granddaughter to the library while waiting for her brother to have his piano lesson. I looked at so many books that had nothing to do with her lifestyle and everything to do with alternative lifestyles or about potty talk (kids need no help with that) or left wing endings that are not helpful in raising a child to be responsible for herself, to accept results for an action and to have a good work ethic and most importantly to have fun in life. So I wrote my own book called Up In Smoke. It is about a loving, multi-generational family who gets together to harvest oats using the antique steam tractor. They have lots of fun and make great memories. It is a true story based on an event in my husbands family. If you want to pick it apart and say Oh, this is so dangerous or that is not good for you, I will say true but you cannot shield your child from everything that may hurt them but you can teach them to take care of themselves.

  18. Pingback: And we grew up okay…. » KidLit.org

  19. I agree with your point about “Blueberries for Sal.” Children should not absorb dangerously unrealistic notions about our relationship with other animal predators. As for “Caps for Sale” I am willing to believe that in the world of picture books monkeys do not have lice. When the book takes a fantastical tone we have to make allowances for a different set of natural laws. I did lose my taste for “Curious George” as I gained some critical thinking skills but “Horton Hears a Who” remains on my favorites list. Horton is a hero, a voice for the voiceless. The world needs more Hortons. And Ferdinand? A fantasy true – but also a vision for a better world where peace-loving bulls are not slaughtered and put into flower-covered meadows. Who’s to say the upcoming generation will not change the rules to save the bulls?

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Essays

Dispatch from the Borders-Land

Essays
March 4, 2010 | 10 books mentioned 13 5 min read

1.
The literary world, and I speak here primarily of its online incarnation, does some things really well. We chew on abstract issues like why literature matters, what counts as art, and how to navigate the writing life. What we don’t do as well is consider “average” or “real” readers, the people who subsidize most of the book production in the country. This wouldn’t be a big deal if we simply left them alone. (Not that I’m advocating this strategy.) But these people come up all the time, if only by proxy: we chuckle at Dan Brown’s unit sales or snipe at HarperCollins’s “It” imprint, all without necessarily engaging with the readers behind these trends.

So, late on a late December Friday, I decided to try something different: I headed to a mall-bound Borders and asked 37 customers about their relationship to books. I realize my approach has its own problems (sample size, anyone?), but it offers something others can’t—readers speaking in their own voices.

2.
Don’t be fooled by the Seattle’s Best Coffee and all those overstuffed chairs: Borders is not a great place to talk books, mostly because, in my experience, doing so requires weeks of answering machines and unrequited emails—all to secure the Borders Group’s tepid “yes” and a two-hour time limit.

At least I didn’t have much territory to canvass. In the last year, especially, Borders has flailed about for a business model—like Barnes & Noble, it’s now looking to lose its mall locations—and one new initiative has been Borders Ink, a teen-themed sub-store. If the Borders I visited were laid out like the back of a paperback book, the bar code would be checkout area; the author photo would be the coffee shop; and the three blurbs would be music, movies, and Borders Ink and its mass of Twilight merchandise. (Does any celebrity look more like his plastic figurines than Robert Pattinson?) The paperback’s plot summary—maybe 30 percent of the space—would be the tables and shelves of books.

My first interview ended up being my favorite. Mary Anne, an older woman with red clogs and a kind face, tells me that “reading is a real passion of mine.” Her favorite author is Diana Gabaldon, and Mary Anne likes to let the TV hum in the background as she reads (or rereads) 10 to 12 books of historical fiction per week. “Books put me right in the moment,” she says. “The story, the characters, the period stuff.” (Dan Brown elicits an “eh”—he’s “outlandishly far-fetched,” in her nice phrase.)

I start every interview by asking people what they read, coming across all the names the bestseller lists would suggest: Clive Cussler, Robert Ludlum, Mitch Albom, Steve Berry and James Rollins, Stephen King (“The cheeseburger of American lit,” as one Borders employee puts it), Janet Evanovich, James Patterson, and plenty more I hadn’t heard of. (I confess to writing Diane Gabeldern? in my notes.) Bob, an older man in a grubby New York Giants hat, gives the same one-word answer to “What do you read?” and “Why do you read?”: “mystery.” Another guy admits he reads “whatever’s in the airport.”

Most people, though, classify their reading tastes as “eclectic.” Kelly, a young English major, reads Shakespeare and Jane Austen for “inspiration” and “this stuff” (she gestures at the Borders Ink sign) for “relaxation.” But where Kelly seems genuinely eclectic, others invoke the descriptor simply because they aren’t in the habit of talking about books. “I’ll read anything” is the easiest answer to questions you don’t regularly think about, and, when pressed for specifics, most of the people I talked to either reaffirmed their eclecticism or settled on a sub-category—yes, romance, that’s it. All of them lacked a ready vocabulary for stuff like style, technique, or genre.

3.
People were more articulate on why they read, which is also, of course, a genre-inflected question. Beth, a mom loading up on chapter books, reads to learn something. “I didn’t pay too much attention in school,” she says, “so I like to read about our nation’s history.” Ted, who sticks to sports, demands books on current events—ideally someone “with a checkered past.” Tom relied on Ian Fleming to survive his New York City commute; he’s got a different job, now, and “it’s been harder to find the time.”

Renee, a bubbly twentysomething, says she reads “all kinds of stuff”—David Sedaris is a favorite—but also cops to a Twilight addiction. Just don’t ask her about the movies: “The books are so much more horrifying. With movies, you can only feel by seeing. With a book, your imagination does the work.”

This is an idea I hear again and again—the idea that, more than any other medium, books let you “put your own spin on things” and “escape from the real world,” in the words of Stephanie, a college student. Leah and Tammy, two moms in the Nicholas Sparks section who don’t appear to know each other but immediately begin swapping stories about reading after their kids fall asleep, agree that books offer a unique, imaginative escape. Cheryl, a middle-aged woman, enjoys novels steeped in “criminology and anthropology.” Books provide her with “details and depth that the TV shows just can’t match.”

4.
Cheryl also stresses that she tries to remain faithful to her favorite authors. “I just love the way she writes,” she says of Patricia Cromwell*. Most of my conversations were similarly author-centric. (At least as it pertained to novelists; not a single person named a journalist or historian.) When I asked people if they attend author readings, though, I got the weirdest stares. I think you could make a pretty solid argument that these readers have a healthier connection to their authors (and to their art) than do more literary audiences.

But this brings up another question: How else do the people I talked to interact with the book world? Renee subscribes to Entertainment Weekly and reads its page of book reviews. Beth, a fan of “mysteries and romances,” reads the New York Times Book Review “religiously.” And… that’s it. Mary Anne watches the bookish segments on CBS’s Sunday Morning, but she distrusts professional critics because “they don’t look at the story, which matters to me. Besides, they’re too worried about trends.”

No one else seeks out any more extensive book coverage, online or off. Those who do surf the web stick to authors’ official sites or to those of Borders or Barnes & Noble. Only one woman mentions Amazon; a couple of people bring up used-book stores or warehouse club chains. When I ask how they learn about new books or authors, people point to browsing book stores and seeking out “if you like X, you’ll really like Y” recommendations from the staff. (I should add that the Borders staff I talked to, while universally helpful and kind, were not exactly the literary equivalent to the cast of High Fidelity.) The biggest driver of book sales seems to be word-of-mouth. Stephanie is currently reading Gregory Maguire’s Wicked because her sister gave it to her. And let’s give the last word to Mary Anne: “I always buy books for everyone for Christmas—especially for my six grandchildren.”

5.
On one of the sinks in the Borders’ bathroom, I found someone’s forgotten Christmas list, printed out and water-stained:

Urban Outfitters gift card
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Where the Wild Things Are Stuff
indie rock CDs

The list went on for a full page. It even included two books: Chuck Palahniuk’s Pygmy and Charles Bukowski’s Dangling in the Tournefortia. Point is, the people I talked to might not live for books, but they still live with and through them.

*Update: Paul Constant, the estimable Books Editor at The Stranger, emailed to let me know that Cheryl was almost certainly speaking of Patricia Cornwell, the bestselling crime writer, and not Patricia Cromwell, whom I appear to have invented. Sigh. I hope it’s clear that my heart was always in the right place.

[Image credit: Kevin Dooley]

Essays
| 10 books mentioned 13 5 min read
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