Four years of Annie and Aunt!

Dear Aunt Debbie,

As I was sitting down to write this post, I realized that we've just hit our 4-year mark: We began Annie and Aunt on April 27, 2010, when Eleanor was 3, Isabel was a baby, and Will wasn't even a thought in anybody's mind. Time flies. Happy anniversary!

While our posting regularity has slipped in the last year or so since Will's birth, I continue to love writing to you about the books I'm reading with my kids, and to love learning from you about books old and new. Here's to another great year to come!

A family reading update:

In the last couple of weeks, we've gone on spring break and returned, tired and happy. Eleanor brought The Fairy's Return with her to Florida and read it obsessively (see new picture to the upper right) -- that's a book with staying power. It's lovely to see her reading it independently now, since it started for us three years ago as a read-aloud.

Together, Isabel and Eleanor and I are moving through the Chronicles of Narnia. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was our vacation reading. It's a far more rollicking adventure than Prince Caspian, filled with visits to islands inhabited by strange creatures and teeming with unexpected dangers. Kind of an elementary-school version of The Odyssey, without all the death.

Only Lucy and Edmund Pevensie are in this book, Peter and Susan having been deemed too old to return to Narnia. What enlivens the narrative most is the bad behavior of the Pevensies' cousin Eustace Scrubb, who comes along for the ride. He's a perfect pill of a boy until he gets turned into a dragon about halfway through the book (it's his own fault, and he turns out okay). C.S. Lewis is at his best when he has normal, changeable, imperfect kids to write about. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Edmund plays the role of stinker, and his bad behavior gives the other kids something to play off of. By the end of the book, however, he's redeemed, and in Prince Caspian all four Pevensie children are terribly decent throughout. While I'd love to see my own children be so polite, functional, and moral, it's not as interesting a story to read.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader begins with Eustace, and you know immediately you're in for some fun:

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and his masters called him Scrubb. I can't tell you how his friends spoke to him for he had none. He didn't call his Father and Mother "Father" and "Mother", but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and tee-totallers, and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on beds and the windows were always open.

Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

Eustance Clarence disliked his cousins, the four Pevensies -- Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. But he was quite glad when he heard that Edmund and Lucy were coming to stay. For deep down inside him he liked bossing and bullying; and, though he was a puny little person who couldn't have stood up even to Lucy, let alone Edmund, in a fight, he knew that there are dozens of ways to give people a bad time if you are in your own home and they are only visitors.

While Eustace becomes reformed over the course of the voyage, he retains his personality. He and a classmate of his, a girl named Jill Pole, are the two humans transported to Narnia in the next book, The Silver Chair. We're a few chapters in, and Jill and Eustace's minor bickering is highly entertaining. The narrative -- they've been sent by Aslan to find the lost prince of Narnia and bring him home, and are headed into giant country -- is gripping. We're clearly going to be reading all seven of the books in a row.

Will's current favorite is a book you gave Isabel three years ago: Nina Laden's excellent board book Peek-a WHO? We read it over and over, and he laughs every time.

Your gifts keep on giving.

Love, Annie

Return to Narnia

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I shudder to think of all those good adventure books relegated to the "boys' library" -- and yet, as we've touched on before, there are many ways in which our own era divides books neatly into "girls' books" and "boys' books." I'm noticing and appreciating series with paired boy-girl protagonists as a way to buck this trend: Sixty-Eight Rooms, Pinky and Rex, even Magic Treehouse, though it's not my favorite thing to read. Emily of New Moon goes right on my list, and I'm sure it will be a hit with Eleanor. But doesn't that cover just scream "Girl Book"?

Isabel announced a couple of weeks ago that she was ready to try a chapter book. Practically holding my breath with excitement, I asked her what she'd like to read. "Something with magic in it. Something with good guys and bad guys, and someone with powers."

And so we return to Narnia.

I first read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to Eleanor when she was 3 1/2, which feels crazy young when I think about it now, but she was ready for it then. We've re-read it a couple of times since then, getting a little more out of it each time. When I pulled it out to read to Isabel, Eleanor picked it up and re-read several parts on her own.

When we first read the book, Eleanor was quite frightened by Michael Hague's intense illustration of the White Witch and her attendant ghouls preparing to sacrifice Aslan on the Stone Table. She would turn the page quickly, peeking at it and then away:

By contrast, this was the picture that convinced Isabel, fresh from the apocalyptic battles of the final Bone books, that she wanted to read the book. She pored over Hague's richly-colored illustrations, learning much of the story that way before we even started reading.

What a joy to read a chapter book to both girls at once! We sped through it, devoting morning and bedtime reading to the story. Isabel really listened, sometimes holding the book open to see one of the color plates while I read. When we finished a chapter, Eleanor often took the book to bed with her to read it again.

Hoping to keep the ball rolling, I started Prince Caspian immediately. In the second Narnia book (second that Lewis published, that is. If you go by Narnian chronology, it's number 4, but who really starts with The Magician's Nephew?), the four Pevensie children return to Narnia about a year after their first visit. In Narnian time, however, they've been gone for hundreds of years. They have passed into legend, as the Narnian Kings and Queens of old, and it turns out they've been called back magically to help Prince Caspian defeat his wicked uncle, King Miraz, and restore the Old Narnia.

Our reading is going okay -- Prince Caspian has nothing like the elemental power of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but the time-travel aspect is engaging, and there are several excellent characters. The version we're reading from is a giant paperback containing all seven Narnia books, with each chapter headed by one of Pauline Baynes's black and white line drawings. What I wouldn't give for more Michael Hague color plates! Without them, Isabel's attention wanders. Yesterday, she didn't want me to read it at bedtime, and we started off with a picture book. When Eleanor chose more Prince Caspian, Isabel did get into it in spite of herself. How could she not, in a chapter involving a fight with a hag and a werewolf?

Are there any really good illustrated versions of the other Narnia books? I did a quick search and didn't come up with any. But really, even a large drawing of the fighting mouse Reepicheep or the centaur Glenstorm would go a long way.

In the meantime, we'll be returning to picture books and graphic novels more often, charting Isabel's course in a different way than Eleanor's. As it should be.

Love, Annie

The pleasures of a complete universe

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I'm afraid we've reached the limit of my recent YA series knowledge, but I have been thinking about what these series we're calling keepers have in common: Harry Potter, The Golden Compass, the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings.

Part of it, I think, is the pleasure of getting to know a complete universe.  Each of these series allows you to become familiar with a world over a period of time.  They are rich worlds, filled with detail, like our world in some ways but totally unlike it in others. 

And they are worlds we want to inhabit.  There is some kind of magic in each of them that is deeply attractive.  In Narnia, there is the portal to another world, the prospect of going through the back of your closet and into a forest populated with talking animals and other fantastic creatures.  In The Golden Compass, there are the daemons: each person in this alternate world has one, an animal of the opposite gender who is part of that person and travels with them throughout life, able to change shape until the person hits puberty, then choosing its permanent animal form.  How can you read Philip Pullman and not wonder who your own daemon would be, what form he would take?  And then of course there's Hogwarts.  Even without Harry, Hermione, and Ron there, who wouldn't want to get the letter from that first owl, proving that the strange sense of not-belonging you've been experiencing was an indication that you are secretly a wizard?  Though all these worlds are mired in war, there's a sense of what they would be like in peace as well.  There is an invitation to join them.

I loved reading Chaos Walking and The Hunger Games, but the worlds they describe are not places I would ever want to be.  Their dystopian strength seems to me to be about showing me dark things about the world I live in already, rather than opening an aspirational escape.  I wonder whether this makes them more of our moment, and whether they will last.

Love, Annie

Emerging Readers

Dear Annie,

I love the idea of trading favorite book recommendations with friends.And Paul Fleischman's lovely apprehensions about a friend's taste ("This actually made them laugh, you think (or cry, keep turning the page, etc.)  Can I still regard this person as a friend?  As human?") was perfect. Thank you so much, Paul, for joining our discussion.

Before leaving Narnia, I'd like to mention a book that sounds great, although I have yet to read it (no time, no time...). 
The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia by Laura Miller. She's someone who loved the Narnia books as a child, felt betrayed when she understood later that they were full of Christianity, then went back and wrote about them in intelligent adult ways later in life. Full of contradictions, those books.

I thought today that I'd recount a conversation I was in a week ago at cousin Ellen's wedding.  It was with the mother of the delightful Dancing Boy -- an eight- or nine-year old who spent most of the night by himself on the dance floor.  She was lamenting that he seemed not to be interested in reading, and how does one get boys interested in reading these days.  The conversation had two parts.

First, it turned out that he reads, but not the books his parents expected him to.  He likes non-fiction, books that give him information.  And he was reading Asterix and Tintin comic books.  But he wasn't reading novels, including books that we might consider classics.  One of the issues parents get to face as their children grow up is that their taste may differ from the older generation's.  Also, as one is emerging into being an independent reader, novels are harder than a lot of other types of reading.  First and foremost, you have to read the whole thing.  If you read two-thirds of a novel and give up on it, you've failed. But if you read one page of The Guinness Book of World Records, or one story in a comic book, you've gotten something.  Reading a page or two here or there is all good practice, keeping one in shape for whatever one wants to read in the future.

Then your father joined the conversation, bringing your brother up as an example.  Michael is remembered as reading nothing but Archie comic books until the summer before he went to high school.  (True?  Michael - are you reading this?)  At that point he switched over to reading Dostoevsky, and never looked back.  Paul Fleischman's sentence in the last post reminded me of Michael:

The book was on the shelves in my childhood home, but I didn't discover reading for pleasure until high school.

 (Although, of course, one assumes Michael was reading Archie for pleasure.)

I started out thinking I was going to write a post on boys and reading, because I've received a number of questions lately about how-can-I-get-this-boy-to-read.  And what's being written in general these days about boy books and girl books drives me slightly crazy.  And I'm sure I'll come back to this topic lots.  But we all need to remember that children engage in reading in different ways, at different ages.  Feeding individual interests is helpful.  And being a household that loves books, where parents read for pleasure themselves (I know, no time, no time...) -- it all contributes to kids loving books.

Love,

Deborah

Other people's favorite books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Chaos Walking now goes on my list, absolutely.  I'm drooling to get my hands on Mockingjay.

One of the things I'm enjoying about blogging is the increased number of book recommendations I've gotten in the last few months, both from you, from our readers (hi readers -- please keep posting comments and recommendations!), and from friends in conversation.  When we wrote about Paul Fleischman's work a little while ago (here and here), I emailed him to let him know we were talking about his books.

I met Paul in 2002 at a teaching conference where I was promoting with their eyes, the book of interview-based monologues about the aftermath of September 11th that my students and I created that year.  (I'm planning to write more about the book next Friday, as the anniversary comes up.)  Paul was signing books at the HarperCollins stall too, and we got to talking; as well as being an excellent writer, he's a perfectly lovely guy.  In the years since then, we've kept up a correspondence.

After reading my post on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Paul mentioned that he'd never read it, and we made a deal: he'd read one of my favorite children's books, and I'd read one of his.  For me, he suggested one of the following:

The Night of the Comet by Leon Garfield: A hilarious comedy-of-errors by a British YA master, with prose that contains more pleasure per paragraph than almost any book I know.

Krippendorf's Tribe by Frank Parkin.  For adults, perfect for parents.  If by chance you saw the movie, erase it from your mind.  Comic writing at its best.

Flashman by George Macdonald Fraser.  The first in a series, a terrific account of a ne'er-do-well's rise to the top during the time when Britain, not we, were mired in Afghanistan.  Withering and wry, a savory literary kebab.

I haven't kept my end of the bargain yet, but he has, and here's his reaction:

In Breakout there's a line about people's disinterest in walking a mile in each others' shoes, not to mention their families, diets, politics, favorite colors, and definitions of fun.  A book from someone's All-Time Favorite list can be similarly hard to love.  This actually made them laugh, you think (or cry, keep turning the page, etc.)  Can I still regard this person as a friend?  As human?  Despite which, I'm a believer in serendipity and therefore constantly writing down suggested titles and bringing them home from the library.  Recently I took the plunge and read one of Annie's favorites, one I should have read decades ago--The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  The book was on the shelves in my childhood home, but I didn't discover reading for pleasure until high school and had already put away childish things.  Its reputation as a Christian allegory didn't help.  Plus, I've never been a reader of fantasy, in the same way other people can't eat dairy.  The wacky names and top-heavy morality have always put me off.   This actually gave the present project added impetus: I'd walk a mile, or at least around the block--the book was brief--in some footwear most definitely not my own.

My report?  I can certainly see kids being attracted to it.  To pass through a wardrobe into a hidden forest is a hook with immense appeal.  I was going to say that having the four siblings come from our world would help children identify, but today's young readers might regard names like Edmund and Lucy and phrases like "by Jove" and "hang it all" as coming from a realm light-years away.  Entering into a world of danger without parents at hand, but with each other and a cast of beneficent animals holds great appeal as well.  Alas, I see books through a writer's eyes as well and found much to squint at here.  The narrator--an intrusive old-fashioned sort--subverts suspense by giving away actions and cushioning readers from too much anxiety.  The deck feels too strongly stacked for the forces of good, with Aslan as the deus ex machina that writers are always urged to avoid.  The children do a bit to earn the ending, but far less than we're accustomed to.   They're also amazingly undeveloped, as is the world they've been evacuated from (covered in one sentence) and the house they're occupying, headed by its mysterious professor.  I found gaps at every quarter, from the children's never even remarking on the animals happening to speak English to the one mention of their mother, far offstage.  I might have been pulled into the fantasy more fully if the avuncular narration contained more original description--but that's a quibble I feel about most books I read.  Full disclosure: I'm hard to please.  I deal with issues like the above all day, month, and year, and expect other writers to solve them before setting their books in type.  Many of my complaints are the result of the changes wrought by the last sixty years.  Can't blame C.S. Lewis for those.  Most of them will be as unnoticed by young readers as the book's Christian element.  And I must admit that I feel more likely to try more fantasy in the future, having now passed through the wardrobe into that world.  Overall, a positive experience.  Thanks, Annie...

~Paul

I'll be sure to post my thoughts on one of Paul's favorites sometime soon.  And what a great project to take up with a friend!

Love, Annie

The Scary Parts

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Oh, I hope that they'll reprint the Michael Hague-illustrated The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I'll have to check out his Tolkien, too, when we get to that age.  I wasn't a huge Tolkien fan myself, though I did eventually read them all (and saw all the movies).  I remember getting stuck on the beginning of The Hobbit at least three times, as Tolkien went on and on about every detail of the entrance hallway, just before Bilbo Baggins left his house for the rest of the book.  But I know Lizzie loved the books; I remember visiting your house when she was in high school and marveling at the life-sized cutout of Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn propped up in the corner of her room.

So what is the right age to introduce your kids to books with scary bits?  After my last post, my good friend Cyd commented about her daughter Rebekah's strong reaction to the dog running away in Beverly Cleary's Ribsy, saying that she couldn't believe Eleanor (a month younger than Rebekah) was ready for Narnia.  This got me thinking about what does and doesn't scare Eleanor, and why.

My theory is that things like witches (which she knows are imaginary) and death (which she doesn't fully understand), are far less scary to Eleanor than things closer to home.  Rebekah really does have a wonderful dog of her own, so I can imagine that the thought of a dog getting lost and not being able to find his way home would be extremely frightening.  When we watched the movie Up with Eleanor, the moment which upset her most was when Carl, the old man, lost his house.  Eleanor burst into tears: "But where is he going to live?"  Out of all the frightening and sad things that had happened in the movie, this was the one she could relate to most.

We've read a number of fairy tales with Eleanor, and I've been surprised by her hardiness in the face of awful plot developments.  We have a gorgeous edition of Rapunzel illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman from the library right now, and of course I didn't pre-read it before we read it together, and I had forgotten how dark it is.  Rapunzel's parents have their baby taken from them by the witch, and never see her again; Rapunzel grows up with no contact with anyone but her witch-mother, and is locked away by her when she turns twelve (such interesting puberty-related issues there!); after the witch has discovered Rapunzel's relationship with the prince, she attacks him and he falls from the tower, landing on thorn bushes which poke his eyes and blind him.  Rough stuff.  When faced with this (or with the White Witch, or Aslan's death), Eleanor has taken to doing what she does during the scary parts of movies: she gets a blanket and hides in it.  She doesn't want me to stop reading, and in fact will say "I like the scary parts," but she wants to hide nonetheless, and will turn away even from a book, like Narnia, that doesn't have pictures on every page.  It's a measure of control, I suppose.

I'm trying to go along with where she seems to be, prepping her for some of the scary parts when it's something I've read beforehand (that's what we did with The Wizard of Oz, and with Narnia), and stopping when she wants to.  As in so many other aspects of life, we do our best to follow her lead and enjoy the surprises along the way.

Love, Annie

Hague and some Housekeeping

Dear Annie,

Your Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe experience sounds just wonderful.  And the illustrations -- wow, I'd never seen those.  We became very familiar with Michael Hague illustrations the many times we read Lizzie The Hobbit in the paperback oversized edition.  I liked the pictures you posted so much that I e-mailed my Harper sales rep (they're the current C.S. Lewis rights-holders) and asked if anyone's ever considered re-issuing that edition.  She passed the question along -- will post the answer here if I get one.

I have no memory of  reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe as a kid.  My father (your grandfather) had little patience with those Oxford guys.  I remember his railing against Tolkien -- he felt the language and the stories were both too fussy -- whom I also didn't read as a kid.  And I can imagine Grandpa having little patience with the C.S. Lewis brand of Christianity.  We read The Lion, The Witch with both girls -- I really like it, despite the crucifixion/resurrection thing.  I'm curious to see if you and Eleanor charge on into the other Narnia books.  I think we slogged through them all at least once.  Nothing as magical as Lion, but I remember feeling Dawn Treader was probably the most kid-friendly.

So now that you've read the book, are you going to see the movie?

That last sentence, of course, is a reference to an earlier discussion on this blog.  Leading me into today's other topic: Annie and Aunt are (is?) entering a contest. The Third Annual  Book Blogger Appreciation Week is September 13-17.  The week encourages people to explore book blogs across a range of topics, and it also gives awards to the best blogs in a variety of categories.  We are, of course, hoping to be named Best Kidlit Book Blog.  One of the requirements for entering the contest is to post our intention to do so (yes! we intend!), and to list five blog entries on which we would like to be judged.

Here they are:

Mother Goose was a Poet
The Bard of Columbus
Bravo for Frances
More on Starter Chapter Books
On Twilight. Oy.
(We figure, given how many fifth and sixth graders have been reading Twilight, that it qualifies for a younger-than-YA blog category.)

So here we go, venturing further out into the blogosphere.

Love,

Deborah

On entering Narnia

Dear Aunt Debbie,

The ALA convention sounds fabulous; I've put The Lion and the Mouse on our library hold list, and am jonesing to read Rebecca Stead now as well.  Thank you for keeping me up to date!

By contrast, the great pleasure I've had this past week has been a classic one.  On Thursday afternoon, Isabel was taking a long nap and I was tired of the particular stack of library books Eleanor kept returning to, so I picked up Jeff's childhood copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe just to see if it would take.  It took.  We've been reading a few chapters a day, at Eleanor's request, and finished the book tonight.  I have been in heaven.

In the last three years I've read Eleanor dozens of books I remember from my own childhood.  Why, then, does reading her C.S. Lewis bring me such intense joy?  I think part of it is that I remember my own introduction to Narnia.  Because I was so young when they were read to me, my memories of picture books are of re-readings, but I have a vivid emotional memory of my father first reading to me about Aslan's death: sadness, discomfort and even embarrassment with the ways the White Witch and her cronies abuse him, confusion over his coming back to life.  (It was much, much later that I realized Narnia was a Christian allegory.)  Over the course of several years, my father read me all seven of the books, and we returned to them again and again.

I know Eleanor is too young to understand a lot of what is going on in this book.  But I was pleased to find that Lewis's sentences are smooth and clear and easy to read; except for the children's kingly and queenly language at the end, the language is never obtuse.  Edmund is cringingly real and human, Lucy is plucky and forthright, and Susan and Peter are sort of parental (does any child ever actually relate to them?).  As we read, Eleanor kept stopping me to insert herself into the narrative, not as a character, but as herself: "But that's when I came in, and I saved Mr. Tumnus and told him the Witch was coming, and we had dinner together."  She untied Aslan, too, before the girls and the field mice got to it.  Her attention certainly wandered at points, but she has also asked that we bring this book on our plane trip this weekend, so we can read it again.

Eleanor's interest was piqued partly by the gorgeous Michael Hague illustrations in our copy (which I'm pretty sure I've found here, through Alibris, though the cover image is wrong).  These are the pictures I've used in this post (we finally have a working scanner, hoorah!).  In terms of holding her attention and giving her something to focus on as I read, the pictures were vital.

And so we begin!

Love, Annie