Audio on the road

Dear Annie,

I hope you all are feeling more settled in your house, into the routines of school, and well-partied from Isabel's fifth birthday.  What a lot has been happening!

You sent me a lovely query from your friends Eunice and Ryan about audio books on a car trip, a topic near and dear to my personal and professional hearts.

Ryan is taking two boys, in first and third grade, "on an epic southwest road trip (Yosemite, Mammoth, Death Valley, Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, Yellowstone, Tahoe). "  Says Eunice:

There's a lot of car time coming up for Ryan and the boys. I tried convincing him that an audio download of Harry Potter would be the perfect fit, but Ryan is dead set on sticking with only "western" themed children's books.

As a family, we spent large amounts of time listening to audio books, both on long road trips, and going from place to place in town.  They're a fantastic way to enjoy a trip while still being able to look out the windows.

With audio books, even more than when a parent reads, delivery trumps content.  A good or average book read by an average (or bad) reader won't hold anyone's attention.  As we used to counsel our children in college: pick the elective course by the professor, someone who can excite you about a topic you didn't know you wanted to know about.  Going for the topic alone -- with professors or audio books -- can condemn you to boredom.  I think that's Eunice's motivation with the Harry Potter suggestion.  They're fantastic audio, but I'd suggest waiting a couple of years for the kids to get more out of them, and to avoid the really scary bits.

So I've come up with a list which includes some western themes, some vaguely western themes (does Portland, Oregon count?), books about trips and quests, and just good books.

I'll start with Jim Weiss, who's a storyteller.  His recordings sound like someone who's telling a story -- a little chattier -- not like someone who's reading you a book.  Lizzie was hooked on his King Arthur recording for years.  He's got a few western themes:
American Tall Tales: Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, "Fastest Draw in the West."
His Gone West includes Lewis and Clark, the Oregon Trail, and Indian wars.
A CD called Tales from Cultures Far and Near has what's described as a funny Lakota Sioux legend, then other stories from around the world.

Robin Williams' Pecos Bill

The best storytelling audios ever, in my opinion, are the Rabbit Ears recordings.  They paired famous actors and actresses reading with background by major musical talent.  So you've got:
Robin Williams reading Pecos Bill with music by Ry Cooder,
Keith Carradine telling the story of Annie Oakley with music by Los Lobos,
Jonathan Winters doing Paul Bunyan with Leo Kottke.
There are lots more: check out the Rabbit Ears site.

All of these storytelling recordings, although entertaining, are not as long as book audios.  Most of them are 30 to 60 minutes.  Most books will run you much longer.

On themes of the west and wildlife and a great story, you can't go wrong with
The Trumpet of the Swan, written and read by E.B. White. He has a wonderful old Mainer voice.  The story of Louis, the mute trumpeter swan, starts in western Canada, spends a good deal of time in Montana, and eventually makes it cross country to the Boston Public Garden.  It's full of nature and boy/swan friendship, and just great storytelling.

On to Portland, Oregon and two wildly different genres.  Beverly Cleary, as you know, is one of my favorite authors.  Stockard Channing did an excellent job of recording the Ramona books: they follow a younger sister from her pre-school days through fourth grade.  I don't know how these guys feel about books whose central characters are female (sigh), but I'd recommend two different Ramona books with boys as major secondary characters.  Cleary writes very empathetically about the experience of whatever age she's describing.  Ramona the Pest, about her kindergarten year, includes a rivalry with Howie, the boy next door.  And in Ramona Quimby, Age 8 she has a constant teasing friendship with the boy she refers to as "Yard Ape."  That book also features Ramona throwing up in school, and breaking a raw egg on her head.

Cleary also did a series about a boy named Henry Huggins.  Those books feel a little more dated than the Ramonas, but they're still entertaining.  The reader isn't up to Channing's high quality.  The first book, Henry Huggins, includes the story of Henry finding Ribsy, a stray dog, and coming very close to losing him again.  Great for dog loving kids.

And one other Portland book:
Wildwood, by Colin Meloy (lead singer of the Decembrists), read by Amanda Plummer.  I'm surprised I haven't blogged about this book.  It's a Narnia-like fantasy: two kids enter a magical forest in Portland, trying to find a baby who's been stolen by crows.  They enter into a world of talking animals, bandits, and shifting alliances.  It's an intricate and well-written tale which will last for many hours.  I haven't heard the audio, but we get good reviews of it from customers.

I'll end with two great completely different books about travel/quests.  We know how much we all like Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.  The recording, I'm told, is also excellent.  It's about running away from home and going on a quest to find the Man in the Moon.  Will entertain in a car for quite a while.

I've saved the weirdest for last:  Jim Copp's and Ed Brown's  children's stories, recorded mostly in the 1960s.  We came upon them by chance, following up on a brief mention of them in The Atlantic, of all places.  Lunatic, hilarious, wacky and weird are words which come up in descriptions of them.  The recording we loved -- and the whole family can still quote from -- is A Journey to San Francisco with the Glups.  Think of it as The Stupids Go on a Road Trip.  The Glups are a completely clueless family, traveling with their cow Bossy from Maine to San Francisco to claim an inheritance.  There are songs and great sound effects and many different accents -- and of course some mooing. 

So there's an array of audio.  I envy those three guys the trip.   How about a guest blog when they get back about what they listened to?

Love,

Deborah

E.B. White: some writer

Dear Annie,

Charlotte's Web: wonderful book,  intense family experience.

You quoted the book's vivid opening lines.  I offer the closing ones:

Wilbur never forgot Charlotte.  Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart.  She was in a class by herself.  It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.  Charlotte was both.

 We often think of Charlotte's Web when we're in Maine, where large spiders are frequent residents in our big old house and barn.  As you may recall, we tend to refrain from banishing all of Charlotte's descendants from our screen porch -- some years they're inside the screen, some years outside.

screen spider at sunset.

I wonder what Eleanor will think of the spiders the next time you guys visit.

I love the way White draws the reader into the world of the farm and the wonderfully individual personalities of the animals.  Even as we the adult readers can see the inevitability of death (and what are they raising those geese for?), lives are lived to their fullest.  There's Templeton's unapologetic selfishness, the dithering of the geese, Charlotte's intelligence and caring.  And Fern and Wilbur, both growing up before our eyes.  And the names!  Fern and Avery Arable, the Zuckermans, Henry Fussy.

White, like Charlotte, cared deeply about language.  I first became aware of
The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and White when I was in high school.  I have no idea if it's a book teenagers still know about.  Do your students?  Strunk had been a professor of White's; he had written a small book laying out rules and guidelines for writers.  In 1957, five years after the publication of Charlotte's Web and a decade after Strunk's death, White revised the book, adding a few essays of his own, and it's been in print ever since.  In the introduction, White uses not a lot of words to create a sense of his professor, and to put the reader there in the lecture hall in a way that feels not unlike sitting on Fern's stool watching the conversation:

"Omit needless words!" cries the author on page 17, and into that imperative Will Strunk really put his heart and soul.  In the days when I was sitting in his class, he omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed in the position of having short-changed himself, a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill, a radio prophet who had outdistanced the clock.  Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times.  When he delivered his oration on brevity to the class, he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his coat lapels in his hands, and in a husky, conspiratorial voice said, "Rule thirteen.  Omit needless words!  Omit needless words!  Omit needless words!"

We're all so glad that White kept the needed words in.

Love,

Deborah

Pigs, spiders, and mortality

Dear Aunt Debbie,

This past Saturday afternoon, we took the girls to a local elementary school (one of the places we're looking at for Eleanor's kindergarten next year) to see a production of Charlotte's Web, as acted by 4th and 5th graders.  School plays are a big hit in our family these days, even when we don't know the kids acting in them -- inspiring, especially for our theater-loving Eleanor.

But I wanted Eleanor's first interaction with Charlotte's Web to be with the book itself -- E.B. White's words, Garth Williams's pictures.  We started last week, and finished on Saturday morning.

Without the impetus of the play, I think we would have waited -- I wasn't at all sure how Eleanor would react to Charlotte's death, and all of the other questions of mortality the book raises.  My father reminded me of my own reaction: we were on a bus coming back from somewhere, and he says they didn't prepare me well enough, and I fell into hysterical, inconsolable sobbing in public.  I think I was about Eleanor's age, maybe a little younger.

With this in mind, but feeling from past experience that Eleanor could probably handle it, we embarked.  Jeff did most of the reading: we've been taking turns reading chapter books to Eleanor, so that each of us gets the full experience of one book with her, rather than a few chapters here or there.  Because Jeff often works late, and Isabel doesn't yet have the patience for chapter books, this means that some weeks, our chapter book reading is pretty slow.  I ceded my claim to Charlotte's Web, listening out of the corner of my ear as I read Gingerbread Girl and The Philharmonic Gets Dressed and Niccolini's Song over and over to Isabel.  Jeff had never read the book himself, and I knew that I wouldn't be able to get through parts of it without completely breaking down.

It's a brilliant book.  E.B. White's language is clear and firm, and he sets a tone of straightforward discussion of tough issues from the first paragraph:

"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

"Out to the hoghouse," replied Mrs. Arable.  "Some pigs were born last night."

"I don't see why he needs an ax," continued Fern, who was only eight.

"Well," said her mother, "one of the pigs is a runt.  It's very small and weak, and it will never amount to anything.  So your father has decided to do away with it."

"Do away with it?" shrieked Fern.  "You mean kill it?  Just because it's smaller than the others?"

Death, and the desire to escape it, are there right from the beginning.  White is both empathetic and unsentimental: you feel for Wilbur, and for Fern and Charlotte (each of whom saves Wilbur's life at one point in the book), but White never lets you forget that death is a necessary and everyday part of life.  Wilbur's first interaction with Charlotte involves him learning about the way she sucks the blood from flies and other insects; he's appalled by her bloodthirsty nature, even as he admires her cleverness and wants to be able to be her friend.

If you're looking for it, foreshadowing of Charlotte's death comes early.  In Chapter 15, "The Crickets," White writes about the sad intimations of the crickets' song:

Everybody heard the song of the crickets.  Avery and Fern Arable heard it as they walked the dusty road.  They knew that school would soon begin again.  The young geese heard it and knew that they would never be little goslings again.  Charlotte heard it and knew that she hadn't much time left.

That's where Jeff paused in his Thursday night reading to ask Eleanor, "What do you think that means?"  We talked about the lifespan of spiders, how they don't live through the winter, and Eleanor said, "But Charlotte will!  She's a magic spider, because she can talk!" And I said that, in the world of this book, even though the animals can talk, it doesn't mean that they're magic -- that animals and people in this book are capable of dying.  And Eleanor teared up, and resisted, and then seemed to take it in a little, and they went on reading.

So on Saturday morning, when Charlotte died, we were at least somewhat prepared.  Eleanor cried.  I cried.  Jeff teared up.  Isabel sat on the loveseat making one Barbie doll dance on another one's head, and singing to herself.  Eleanor said, "But I love Charlotte!  She's one of my favorite characters!" and we all hugged, and sniffled, and wiped our eyes, and after a couple of minutes, Jeff read the last chapter.

It was a good first real death.

Love, Annie

Guest blogger: former self

Dear Annie,

I've just returned from my 40th (!) college reunion, which was wonderful in many ways.  I had occasion to revisit a lot of what I wrote as a college journalist, and came upon a review of
The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White's third and last children's book.  Both the book and the review were published in 1970 (the hardcover cost $4.50).  I still agree with the opinion, although I would be more enthusiastic about the book now, comparing it quite favorably to all of children's literature.  This review focuses more on the comparison to the rest of the White oeuvre.

Here it is, slightly condensed.  Watch out for spoilers.

E. B. WHITE has a rather strange mind. To a normal eight-year-old, he's just an exceptionally good author. But to someone older, who has never experienced the joy of Charlotte's Web or Stuart Little, he is, as a friend of mine said recently, "very weird." True, spiders don't usually weave slogans such as "Some Pig" into their webs to save pigs from being slaughtered; and human parents don't usually give birth to a son who looks exactly like a mouse. But none of that matters, because they're all very real, endearing characters with real problems-of survival or identity or whatever. So when Charlotte (a spider) dies, even though her babies will be hatched in the pigsty the next spring, of course you cry -- even my mother always cries over that passage.

   White's third children's book, The Trumpet of the Swan, although filled with prose as great as the first two, is slightly disappointing. At first I thought that the fact that I'm 20 instead of eight had something to do with my let-down. But I reread the other two, and if anything they seemed better than they did 12 years ago.

     One great deficiency of Trumpet is its illustrations. The association of Garth Williams' concise, delicate ink drawings with White's prose is too strong to break. ... Even going beyond illustrations, there is a bigger let-down: it is a happy book, with a happy ending and few disappointments along the way.

    Trumpet is, in White's words, the story of "a young swan who had a speech defect and conquered it." Louis, a trumpeter swan, is born without a voice. ...

   As in White's other books, the line between human and animal is very faint. Louis befriends a small boy, Sam, who takes the swan to his school in Montana to learn how to read and write. ("If I can teach a bird to write," says Mrs. Hammerbotham, first grade teacher, "it'll be big news all over the Sweet Grass country. I'll get my picture in Life magazine. I'll be famous.")

    But writing on a small slate he carries around his neck does Louis no good -- when he returns home none of the other swans can read. He falls in love with Serena, a lovely young swan, who ignores him.... Louis's father sacrifices his honor, stealing a trumpet from a music store in Billings, Montana. Before winning Serena, Louis resolves to repay his father's debt by working as a trumpeter. One of his jobs is as a trumpeter playing "Row, Row Your Boat" while swimming in front of the swan boats in the Public Garden in Boston ("Boston, which . . . is famous for its baked beans, its codfish, its tea parties, its Cabots, its Lowells, its Saltonstalls, and its Swan Boats.") He earns fame in Boston, and gets a ten-week engagement at a night club in Philadelphia. By this time, he is a great musician, giving Sunday afternoon classical concerts at the Philadelphia Zoo, where he lives.

     Serena comes into the Zoo on a gale one night -- blown from Montana to Philly -- and falls madly in love with Louis, who wakens her with "Beautiful Dreamer" on his trumpet. They return to Montana to give his father Louis's accumulated earnings (minus expenses) of $4420.78 with which to repay the music store. Louis and Serena live happily ever after, migrating between Canada and Montana with yearly cross-country tours to show the kids where Louis spent his youth, overcoming his speech defect and restoring grandpa's honor. And every year the swanboatman treats the parent swans to a night at the Ritz Hotel.

Serena dearly loved the Ritz. She ate dozens of watercress sandwiches and gazed at herself in the mirror and swam in the bathtub. And while Louis stood and looked out of the window at the Public Garden down below, Serena would walk round and around, turning lights on and off for the fun of it. Then they would both get into the bathtub and go to sleep.

It's a lovely book, but somehow it seems more like any kids' book, and less moving than White's others. Perhaps the question of Wilbur's survival or of what Stuart, who is only four inches tall, will do with his life, are more important than Louis's falling in love and restoring his father's imagined honor. They seem more real, more unusual than the usual children's fare. Or maybe I'm just getting old. . . .

Well, eventually I got older.

Love,

Deborah

Grandma: a reading recollection

Dear Annie,

This past Monday was your grandma's 90th birthday, and although she's no longer with us, I've been thinking about her and how much she read to us.  My memories of my father reading out loud have to do with bedtime, but with Mom, the reading was all in the kitchen.

Our father commuted to The City (in those days I believed there was only one), and always came home  on a train that arrived at 7:12 pm -- a time considered too late for our dinner.  So the three of us ate earlier, and Mom, sitting on the other side of the kitchen counter, read to us.  Your mother (my sister) remembers being told that reading was a way to keep us from fighting.  I just thought of it as What Happened at Kids' Dinner.

My most vivid single image from all those years was of Grandma taking off her glasses and wiping away her tears over the death of
Charlotte. That may have been the first time I saw my mother cry.  She read us Stuart Little, too.

She had to find books that would appeal to children across a range of six years.  I was eleven when your mom went off to college, so we're talking about keeping the interest of kids ranging from maybe six to twelve on up to eleven to seventeen.

There was a lot of Thurber.  Ogden Nash: I don't know if it was specifically child-oriented poetry, or just a collection of all his poems.

One of the striking things about the list that Judy, Al and I have put together over the past few days is the large percentage of books written for adults, many of them written from the 1920s to 1940s, often by people affiliated with the New Yorker or the New York literary establishment.

After fifty years, one of the first titles both my siblings remembered was
The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N by Leo Rosten (under the pseudonym Leonard Q. Ross).  Hyman Kaplan is an eastern European immigrant in what we would now call an ESL class who mangles English syntax and meaning constantly while maintaining his lovely and frustrating personality.  While trying to define vast, used to describe America's deserts, Kaplan says, "Ven I'm buyink a suit clothes, I'm gattink de cawt, de pents, an' de vast!"   "Mom read his accent perfectly," says your mother.

There was a Fireside Collection of American Humor, which gave us Twain's The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.  Link is to full text, as is this one to one of our other  favorite short stories, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  The latter is not in the humor category, but a wonderful story of the world's richest family, which lives on top of a mountain-sized diamond in Montana.  I remember loving The Dog Who Wouldn't Be by Farley Mowat: a memoir of his Canadian childhood with a dog of pronounced personality.


archy and mehitabel, which you introduced to my Lizzie, was a favorite in our kitchen. It started as a newspaper column by Don Marquis, who said he found the writing of a cockroach with a human soul in his typewriter every morning. Archy jumped on each typewriter key and couldn't manage the shift for capitals, so it was all lower case. Mehitabel the alley cat was a friend of archy's; she claimed to have been Cleopatra in an earlier life. This site is a great introduction to archy and mehitabel. Here is part of her Song of Mehitabel: imagine Grandma reading it:

i once was an innocent kit

wotthehell wotthehell

with a ribbon my neck to fit

and bells tied onto it

o wotthehell wotthehell

but a maltese cat came by

with a come hither look in his eye

and a song that soared to the sky

and wotthehell wotthehell

and i followed adown the street

the pad of his rhythmical feet

o permit me again to repeat

wotthehell wotthehell

my youth i shall never forget

but there s nothing i really regret

wotthehell wotthehell

there s a dance in the old dame yet

toujours gai toujours gai

So much of what she read us had real style, good writing, and a certain esprit.  My ten year-old self enjoyed archy and mehitabel without understanding a lot of it, but it was a wonderful thing to be immersed in.  There's family lore about Grandma's father (your great-grandfather) holding your infant mother on his lap, reading her the phone book in warm and loving tones.  He undoubtedly read many things beyond phone books (did they exist in the '20s?) with his own daughter when she was little too.  Generations of our family have instilled the love of  reading from a very early age.

We're all grateful to all of them.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

Love,

Deborah

Death in picture books and chapter books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

In answer to KPK's comment of a few days ago, I've been trying to think of books which address the issue of death for younger readers.  The only picture book of this kind I remember from my own childhood is another by Tomie dePaola (who is starting to seem a little morbid): Nana Upstairs and Nana Downstairs.  Nana downstairs is 4-year-old Tommy's grandmother, and Nana Upstairs is her mother, and in the book, Nana Upstairs dies.  I haven't read it in a long while, but I remember it being sweet and sad.

Patricia Polacco would also be a good author to check out on this subject -- in many of her books, while death is not the main subject at hand, she takes her adult-role-model main characters all the way to death on the last page.  This is true in Chicken Sunday and  In Our Mothers' House, and The Keeping Quilt has death threaded through it, along with births and marriages.  I've written more about these particular books here.

KPK mentioned The Fall of Freddie the Leaf, which I've never read, but in a conversation on this topic today, my friend Emily cited it as one of the main books about death in her childhood.  She says it's a lovely, gentle story -- Freddie is a leaf, and he grows and then falls and dies, and becomes part of the earth and helps other things grow.

The books I read as a kid which made me think most deeply about death are all chapter books, only one of which would be appropriate to read to fairly young kids.

The first is actually referenced in your previous post as one of the books Doug reads to the kids he babysits (what a wonderful, reference-filled scene!): E.B. White's Charlotte's Web.  I still remember my father reading me the scene where Charlotte dies; I still remember sobbing.  Such a great book, and such a bittersweet ending -- all those baby spiders taking off and leaving Wilbur alone, but the promise of the one who stays, the generations to come.  That's one we should break out fairly soon, I think.

The other two both have protagonists who are about ten years old, and I think that's probably the right age to read them: Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson, and Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt.  I know I read both of them on my own (and then re-read, and re-read them, sobbing every time).  Bridge to Terabithia is the story of the friendship between Jess Aaron, a fifth-grade boy, and a neighbor girl named Leslie.  They create an imaginative world together in the woods near their houses (Terabithia, of course), and it's intense and wonderful, and then one morning while Jess is away -- I think at an art museum with his teacher -- Leslie tries to go to Terabithia in bad weather, has an accident, and dies.  There is so much in the book about friendship and guilt and loss; it feels horrible and preventable but altogether real.  I get choked up just writing about it.  I heard Paterson once on NPR talking about how she wrote the book after her son's best friend, an eight-year-old girl, was killed by lightning.  The book has that feel of truth to it -- she's trying to make sense of absolute tragedy.

In Tuck Everlasting, a ten-year-old girl named Winnie Foster meets the Tuck family, including one very attractive son a little older than she is.  She learns fairly quickly that he's actually a lot older -- he and his family have drunk from a spring of immortality.  Winnie is offered the chance to drink from the spring herself, and has to decide whether or not she wants eternal life and eternal youth.  I suppose with all the vampire fiction around these days, there are other places kids are puzzling over the pluses and minuses of eternal life, but for me, this was the first time I'd really pondered it.  It's hard to understand at age ten that people might want to grow old and even to die, when the time comes.  I suppose it's hard to understand on some level at any age.

Love, Annie