Over at The Believer, Amy Benfer pens a paean to the serial novels of her youth. “They are the training bras of literature; books that teach young girls how to be older girls before they get there,” Benfer writes.
On Sweet Valley, On Nancy Drew
The Idealistic Hero
“What is missing from Testimony is the customary idealistic hero, the one last encountered in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass who doesn’t avert his eyes from suffering and sordidness, but who nevertheless is full of hope for a better future. Testimony is a corrective, an anti-epic.” Charles Simić recounts Charles Reznikoff’s long poem Testimony: The United States (1885-1915): Recitative in the NYRB.
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Dangerous Minds
Sex ed for teenagers is a famously knotty subject, which explains why Pavel Astakhov, Russia’s children’s ombudsman, wants to eschew sex ed classes in favor of literature courses. “It is unacceptable to allow things that could corrupt children,” he said in a television interview. “The best sex education that exists is Russian literature.” (No word yet on what he thinks of Crime and Punishment.) (h/t The Paris Review)
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Revolutionary Word
Lewis Lapham, namesake and founder of Lapham’s Quarterly, has compiled a “revolutionary reading list.”
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Digital Eustace
Sparksheet interviews Blake Eskin, the New Yorker’s first and only web editor, who shares the venerable magazine’s unique approach to having an online presence. (via)
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I wonder what equivalent we boys had to read growing up. What was our training jock strap of literature? The best I can come up with is the Hardy Boys. I don’t think we really had much else in the way of serial young adult novels.