Hunger mania

Dear Annie,

I would like to report that I have my ticket to the opening  midnight show of The Hunger Games movie this Thursday night -- will be going with some of my co-workers.  The movie has been fueling an across-the board popularity for the book that at times reminds me of the Twilight years.

I've been getting lots of questions from parents who are uncomfortable with the idea of their children reading
The Hunger Games and sequels.  This week, a mom whose 11 year-old wants to read the book asked me about it, and before I could say much, her 9 year-old fourth grader gave us a detailed, fairly accurate summary of the book.  She hadn't read it -- but it's so popular that even 9 year-olds know the plot.  The day before, a regular customer had stopped me on the street to ask about its appropriateness for his ten year-old grandson.

My first reaction is to say, this is your child, you need to go by whatever fits your family's standards.  The people who ask about the book are always ones who haven't read it, and the basic description, as I've mentioned before, is one which makes many parents of preteens recoil.  Most of the book takes place in a reality TV show in which the teenage contestants kill each other off: the last one standing is the winner.  But, as you know, it's not a book about how to kill people: it's about repressive government, members of the oppressed class figuring out how to resist that government, strategy, psychological manipulation, integrity -- and hope.

What's the right age to read disturbing books?  What kind of disturbing is something to worry about?  What is a parent worried about -- bad dreams? bad values? bad behavior? warped view of human interaction?  I am writing here as a parent who read both Treasure Island and
The Hobbit to Lizzie when she was Eleanor's age -- yes, five years old. Within the world of books in our household, those choices made sense.   She craved stories of adventure.  Despite the fact The Hobbit contained a scene combining two of Lizzie's biggest fears -- wolves and fire -- she loved the book.  We re-read it with her multiple times.  In my 13 years of bookselling I've probably recommended The Hobbit for a five or six year old only a handful of times. 

Both those books have scary scenes, but not horrifying ones.  The protagonists maintain one's faith in human (or hobbit) nature.  But a book which presents institutionalized cruelty, as in The Hunger Games -- at what age is a child ready to process that?  And once it becomes a part of playground conversation -- does that inoculate kids against its more disturbing elements?  Is it just another action plot, not to be taken too seriously?  I think of The Hunger Games as process-able by most sixth graders. And I think of most fourth graders as not being there yet.  But it's a book about resisting cruelty, about trying to hold onto the important values in life as one is being devalued.  When is one's child ready for those themes?

One of the things I say to those parents who want guidance on The Hunger Games is that it's a good book, one they might want to read themselves -- for their own interest, and to make a more informed judgement than I can offer about their children. 

And pretty soon, I'll be able to add the movie  to those conversations.

Love,

Deborah

Family listening

Dear Annie,

Ah, so well said.  And so full of cross-generational memories!  It's wonderful to know that my father read you all the R.L. Stevenson adventures that he read with such relish to me.  No wonder we all love reading with kids so much.  Our imaginations were formed by the voracious reading habits of a quiet Ohio boy of the 1920s whose parents didn't read to him.

There's one reading experience that I discovered with my kids that wasn't a part of my childhood: audio books.  We got into them as a form of entertainment on long trips, then the girls and I would listen in the car when we were running around town, and ultimately the girls would listen to much-loved books over and over again in their rooms.  For reasons I don't quite understand, the audio book experience is different from a parent reading a book.  Sure, there's the obvious difference of having a skilled professional performing the book.  But it also puts parents and kids together on the same side of the experience: we all listen together. 

I never read the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary as a child, and was thrilled to read them to the girls, but the best discovery of all was the
Stockard Channing recordings.  Cleary is so empathetic to Ramona, whatever age she is.  And Channing captures that real understanding of what it's like to be in kindergarten and angry at the injustice of school rules, or in third grade and throwing up in public, or participating in a wedding with too-tight shoes.  Channing adds dimension to the books, without distorting them.

The summer Mona turned 10 and Lizzie was 11 we drove across the country, listening to books on tape all the way.  There was something very odd about listening to P.G. Wodehouse, a wildly witty British author (and inventor of Jeeves the butler) while driving across Wyoming, but it worked!


And of course the ultimate voice/book combination, embedding itself in the brains of an entire generation since 1999, is
Jim Dale reading Harry Potter.  He did all seven books, creating voices for hundreds of characters.  I've already written about his "Sorr-eee, Harr-eee,"
an inflection that's positively contagious.

We wondered at times if the girls' love of some audio books was keeping them from reading on their own.  They always read to themselves, but sometimes audio books trumped reading.  During those in-between years of knowing how to read, but not being able to read everything one wanted to fluently, I think the audios sometimes snuck in as a welcome escape.  And the well-loved ones were welcome background noise: it used to drive me crazy that Lizzie would do math homework while listening to a book.  The homework got done, though, and she's been a committed read-to-herself reader for a long time.  But it was a stage in the process of becoming fluent. 

Love,

Deborah

December First

Dear Annie,

Today at work was many things: the last day before the first night of Hanukkah, the deadline for buying advent calendars, and the first nutty-December holiday day of crowds and chaos.  The crowds have been building, but today felt like the store does only about two weeks of the year.  People come in clutching lists -- some of them handwritten by kids, others printouts of e-mails -- with a determined, sometimes grim look in their eyes.  They accumulate armloads of books and piles of toys before checking out.  The line at the gift wrapping table grows.

There's lots of pressure this time of year -- I'm going to be up late tonight doing a lot of book ordering.  Things get chaotic, we start running out of things people want (Lego Advent Calendar: sold out three days ago: oh no!  And I'm down to my last Grumpy Bird, although more are coming.). But it's fun too -- if one is going to work in retail, one has to see this time of year as an adventure, not a burden.  One of the enjoyable aspects of all this for me is talking fairly intensely about books with a higher percentage of customers whom I haven't met before.  The regular customers are great, but it's fun to find out about new kids.

So this month I may check in from time to time with dispatches from the front -- leading up to the story of The Customer from Hell, who appeared in the store two days before Christmas a few years ago and traumatized us all (although the story has a happy ending).  I was going through some of my notes from previous years, and thought I'd share the story of one fascinating kid whom I never met.

It started with a call from his grandmother, asking if we had a 19th century naval uniform costume that would fit a five year-old.  We've got lots of costumes, but not that many. She and I chatted briefly.  Then she came in the following day, looking for books.  She and her husband had given this five year-old boy Treasure Island and he liked it. (That's how old Lizzie was when we read it to her: it's a great book, with lots of fascinatingly scary characters and the very likable Jim Hawkins to identify with.)  This boy wanted to know more about pirates, and especially about the people who fought them.  We have books about pirates, but this was a new question.  I offered books on Sir Francis Drake, a pirate sanctioned by his queen to attack the Spanish: not quite right.  Books about Queen Elizabeth -- also not quite there.  At that time, we had a lovely book about
Old Ironsides, the USS Constitution, which chased pirates through the Mediterranean by the shores of Tripoli.  I think that struck the grandma as too much about the ship, and not plot-driven enough.  The winner in all this was a small biography of Lord Nelson, from a British-based publisher which, alas, is now out of print (link is to Alibris).

The following year, both grandparents were back because their grandson's interests/obsession/intellectual meandering had brought him to Waterloo.  Yes!  I had a book on that, too. 

So out of the tumult and confusion of the season, the shining stars of interesting kids who will grow up to be interesting grown-ups cheer us all.

Love,

Deborah