I always mean to keep a list of the books I read in a given year, but I never do.
With that in mind, I start a book list. It will most likely be incomplete unless it is a total of a year, and it may be but that would hardly make for a book list worth reading.
So with that in mind, here is my 2009 non-required reading so far:
I read a version of Rapunzel that was given to F6 for Christmas. It was a sweet and thoughtful gift and I am an ingrate and a beast for what I am about to write. It is a terrible retelling.
The pictures are okay but really can’t compensate. Among the good points: it explains what rapunzel means, which modern readers might not really know without some explanation. And also good is that the description is accurate but brief. (It would be interesting to add in a footnote, although I doubt any children’s author ever will, that early modern people in some places held the mistaken belief that a pregnant woman who did not satisfy her dietary cravings risked giving birth to a monstrous child. It was a horrible way to explain various unexpectedly shaped children and an early modern scam was pretty successfully executed by a couple who claimed to have given birth to, I think, a rabbit or something. I can’t remember what. But the gist of it was that denying her craving to eat rabbit caused the child to be turned into a rabbit or something. I took a class on this and should have saved my notes so I could give some credit but it was many moves ago. It does add meaning to the parents’ actions.)
On the downside: complete omission of Rapunzel’s child. I think this really does a disservice to children, not just the omission but the reasoning behind it. In the time when these stories were told, children were much more aware of the process of reproduction. So fairy tales often involve issues of blended families, etc. In Rapunzel, there is some illegitimacy, which should not be such a huge thing now when so few families are two married adults with however many biological children born after wedlock, but the thing is, and maybe this is a cultural attempt to come to grips with the separation of sexuality, parenthood, and family structure, we now try to hide sexuality from children until a really late age. So, whereas the audience of the tale as it was told would likely have witnessed animals copulating and shared a bedroom (if they even had one) with their parents and yet had siblings, these days we pretend that even acknowledging the events that lead up to the existence of so many children (i.e. sex without marriage) will completely destroy the same kids who are bombarded with sexual imagery any time they watch tv.
I disapprove. Also, I think anyone who ever even wished they had premarital sex should wear a scarlet “H” for hypocrite if they really have a problem with unbowdlerized fairy tales as children’s literature.
Hansel and Gretel by Cynthia Rylant, illustrated by Jen Corace
This was the big drool item on my wish list this year. Well, the only one that we could really afford. And it is beautiful. I got the autographed (by Jen Corace) version from tiny showcase and was so excited that I put it under the “tree” (actually a rosemary bush on the table) unwrapped and refused to let anyone read it. And here is where I am a big hypocrite. I love it. The whole point of fairy tales in childhood education is that they present archetypal characters and morally charged situations and do not offer commentary on them. Children are smart and they get it. They do not need to be told that Goldilocks should have respected the bears’ privacy and even if they don’t get that before hearing the tale, they will after the 67th “read it again!” The point of these stories is that they teach without sermonizing. Okay, there are a lot of points to them, but that one is a big one.
Rylant crosses that line. She explains. And either I am making excuses for my own bad behavior or I see a valid distinction here. She explains without condescending. This is part of why I love her so much. She can write pretty much any story for any age group without belaboring the point. Even if she does explain a bit, she does not clonk the kids over the head with it. She tells it well and offers explanations that kids won’t really mind since they do not scold or break up the storyline too much. She has written many, many books, and we read most of them and love quite a few of her original characters too but she does Hansel and Gretel like an adored grandmother, recounting it from memory to a beloved little one in footie pajamas. Not the stern grandmother who gives you the eye when you squirm in church. The one who slips you a cookie when no one is looking.
And it passes the giggle test. My dad says that when he played the opera of Hansel and Gretel, he could hear the kids cheering every time Gretel pushes the witch in the oven. When I read fairy tales wherein evildoers get their just rewards, F giggles. The worse the reward, the more gleeful the giggle. If the story is told badly, no giggle. If the characters are coerced into a modernized sanitized version and reconcile or some other nonsense, he does not giggle and I have to stifle the urge to scream obscenities.
With this version, he giggled and I sighed as the witch gets hers. He retold that scene to me the next day, commenting on how that witch never saw it coming. No she didn’t. It is a good version indeed.
And I can’t not mention that the thing that first attracted me to the book on the bookstore shelf was Corace’s lovely, dreamlike, hard-candy-stained-glass-glowing-colored illustrations. Go see them yourself. They are beyond words.
I also read F one of his Christmas books: Elsa Beskow’s classic, Ollie’s Ski Trip. It is good, but not as good as Children of the Forest or Woody, Hazel, and Little Pip. Those are my two favorites. I like all her illustrations and the illustrations in this one are better than the story itself, in my opinion. There is more decorative symmetry than usual and it may be because Christmas is often in the 70’s here, but the lovely snow scenes are just gorgeously surreal to me. Then again, when we lived in Europe, I was shocked to discover that seasons were not an old wives’ tale but something that actually happened by the book in some places, so maybe the illustrations are not surreal. Either way, they are gorgeous. I almost would rather look at them without reading, but can’t really see text and not read it so that would require scissors and would scandalize my children, even if I bought a special copy for it. Elsa Beskow is awesome, or was awesome, and I highly recommend her works, but I no longer get excited about them.
I am about to read The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch. I am not supposed to be reading for pleasure because I have work to do, but I also have pneumonia so for a few days I am going to break all the rules, eat tangerines in bed, and read with abandon. I am already thrilled because the copy I got from bookmooch has a really almost impossibly fitting bit of writing and stamping on the inside cover. (I will giddily pay extra for marginalia if the handwriting or the content is intriguing and this marginalia was in a free book so it is just bonus. ) I will share if I remember it.
