Last month I wrote a post about how my father shaped me as a reader — so I thought today it would be appropriate to talk about my mum.¹  That’s her in the photo, reading to my cousins … but it’s a pretty accurate picture of my own childhood.

I come from a family of serious readers.  When my mother was growing up in the middle of South Dakota farmland, she read every book in her local library.  My parents didn’t have much money growing up, but they did have stacks upon stacks of books.  In fact, it wasn’t until I got to college that I learned that reading at the dinner table was considered rude.  Auxiers were readers — end of story.

Or at least that’s how I remembered it.  But recently, I learned something from my mother that made me take a second look at my upbringing … and made me love her all the more:

It happened right before I entered second grade.  It was the end of summer, just before class would start, and my parents sat me down to explain that I would not be going back to my elementary school.  Instead I would take a year off for something called “home schooling”.  At the time, my mother was completing an MA in Gifted Education, and I suspected at once that this whole home schooling thing was something she had made up.  Not that I objected.  As I recall it, my home school year consisted of playing Construx and memorizing lists of random facts she fed me — art history, prepositions, the presidents, and other things no seven year-old had any business knowing.²   At the end of the year, I went back to regular school.  Only I didn’t go into third grade with my former classmates … instead I was put into a second-grade class with kids that were younger.  It was only then that I realized the truth:

I had been held back.

I remember being confused at why my parents might have thought me unfit for the rigors of second grade.  I mean, it’s second grade.  It wasn’t like I couldn’t handle the workload.  So why hold me back?  Whenever I asked my mother, she would just shrug and say that she had wanted to spend some more time with me.

My second try at second grade was a blast.  The big thing I remember was a year-long reading competition.  Students were required to fill out little book reports, and the kid with the most book reports at the end of the year got an awesome plastic trophy.³  My parents, who are some of the least competitive people I’ve ever known, were uncharacteristically invested in the event — there were constant trips to the library, and a gentle-but-unmistakable pressure to make sure I handed in those reports.  All told, I read 88 books that year.  Even better than that trophy (which I totally won), were all the great authors I had discovered!  Over those months, I had transitioned from stupid formulaic mysteries to Roald Dahl, Shel Silverstein, John Fitzgerald, and Lloyd Alexander.

It wasn’t until almost 20 years later that I made the connection between these two memories.  It came while I was teasing my mother for taking me out of school just so I could learn to say all my prepositions in a single breath (which I can still do).  To this she replied: “I couldn’t care less about prepositions … I took you out of school because you didn’t like reading.”

Huh?  I loved reading!  What was she talking about?!

My mother explained that even though I knew how to read as a kid, my teacher had warned her that I didn’t seem to enjoy it very much.  And so she made an executive decision:  pull me out of school and FORCE me to love reading.  Every single day she would sit down and read a book to me, and then she would make me read a book myself.  After that, I was allowed to do whatever I wanted (Construx!).

To this day, I have no memory of this home school reading regiment.  But when I think about the year that followed, about all the wonderful books that I devoured, I start to see that it may have worked.  Thanks, mum.

A recent NYT or-ed piece by Christy Wampole entitled “How to Live Without Irony” has been making the rounds online.¹  The piece is a lament for the millennial generation’s fixation on irony:

The hipster haunts every city street and university town. Manifesting a nostalgia for times he never lived himself, this contemporary urban harlequin appropriates outmoded fashions (the mustache, the tiny shorts), mechanisms (fixed-gear bicycles, portable record players) and hobbies (home brewing, playing trombone). He harvests awkwardness and self-consciousness. Before he makes any choice, he has proceeded through several stages of self-scrutiny. The hipster is a scholar of social forms, a student of cool. [...] He is a walking citation; his clothes refer to much more than themselves. He tries to negotiate the age-old problem of individuality, not with concepts, but with material things.

I feel like a piece like this crops up every year or so, and the consistent factor in all these articles is that the author feels left out of a culture that he/she does not belong to.  This article feels about as accurate as those that came out of 9/11 declaring that irony was “dead.”  If anything, the hipsters I have known have been excessively earnest people … the only way you might think otherwise is if you were extrapolating their entire person from their clothes, facial hair, and twitter feeds.  Lady Gaga may wear a meat dress, but she also gives speeches about bullying.  Those same smirking “harlequins” were the ones who started the Occupy movement.

More importantly, I disagree with the premise that earnestness is inherently superior to irony.  Since when has the ability to laugh — especially at oneself — been a bad thing?²  The author points to 4 year-old children and animals as exemplars of earnest behavior.  From where I stand, those are not necessarily things for adults to aspire to.  To celebrate humanity is to celebrate the ways we are different from animals — irony is one of the ways we can do that.

Sure, there’s a possible danger to too much detachment.  And, as I’ve discussed before, it can be used to hurt people.  But none of these things are unique to one generation.

This weekend, I had the pleasure of hanging out with thousands of English teachers at the NCTE Annual Convention.¹  I’m not a fan of Vegas, but I am a fan of English teachers, and it was a fun time packed with parties and luncheons and various meet-and-greets.  I was able to reconnect with authors like Shannon Hale, Cecil Castellucci, and Jennifer Holm.  I may or may not have teared up when I finally got to meet Jon Szieszka.

Abrams also had me at their booth signing copies of Peter Nimble, which they were selling at cost.  In a convention hall awash in free ARCs, even discounted books are a tough sell — I felt like I needed to find a way to draw passers-by, which led to this:

I had a stack of 11×17″ paper and a pretty steady line of people eager to receive crappy portraits — so much fun!

The highlight of the weekend was getting to finally meet the geniuses behind the Nerdy Book Club! Colby, Donalyn, and Cindy threw a party on Friday, and it was a blast.  The NBC blog has a convention wrap-up, including a video of me doing an impromptu yo-yo show:

Death is never a terribly fun thing, but without it, I’m not sure life would seem quite so wonderful. All last week, I couldn’t help but remember two scenes from different plays. The first is Thorton Wilder’s Our Town in which Emily has passed away in childbirth, but has been given one last to look at her old life before disappearing to her grave:

EMILY: It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. [...] I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover’s Corners. … Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking … and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths … and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

The second is Vladmir’s speech near the end of Waiting for Godot:

VLADMIR: Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries.

I would like to think that the gravedigger also enjoys coffee and new-ironed dresses.

The educational needs of creative writers are slightly different from those of straight academics.  The questions/vocabulary/theories that serve scholarship aren’t necessarily the ones that help a writer become better at their craft.¹ The goal of this course will be to combine the reading list of an English Lit class with the vocabulary of a creative writing workshop. 

I’ll be writing pieces on this blog about each of the books that we’ll be discussing in class.² Here’s the first half of our reading list.  You’re welcome to follow along!

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum (1900)

I’m not actually the biggest Baum fan.  His books often feel like rambling journeys where each chapter has no relation to the larger story.  The first book in his series, however, is a welcome exception.  Even better, Baum’s famous introduction to that book is a great way to start a course on the genre — it’s the Declaration of Independence of Children’s Literature.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)

One of the recurring tropes in Children’s Literature is the creation of enchanted spaces — especially ones that are controlled by children.  What better example of this than a book that manages to create such spaces without needing to resort to magic?³

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1885)

Now that last year’s Huck Finn debacle seems to have blown over, it seemed like it might be fun to explore this book — one of the rare children’s literature titles that has gained full acceptance in the larger canon.  From a writing perspective, it will also provide a chance to examine the quest narrative in greater detail.

Peter and Wendy by JM Barrie (1911)

My love of this book is well documented.

 Charlotte’s Web by EB White (1952)

I’m actually more of a Stuart Little guy myself, but with this book recently topping the School Library Journal’s list of Top 100 Children’s Books, I thought it would be worth looking at.  One of the things I love about Charlotte’s Web is how (seemingly) effortlessly it manages to combine prosaic American farm life and talking-animal magic — with Charlotte being the nexus between those two worlds.

And now, here’s the real deal!  This is Penelope Fern Auxier.  Not quite as many fangs as I’d imagined …

If you don’t live in Pittsburgh, you should know that it is an incredibly livable city — some people (ahem, Forbes Magazine, The Economist) would even say it is the most livable in the United States. Also, it is home to Mr. Rodgers.  Try and tell me you don’t want to come to work in a place that looks like this:

Just to sweeten the pot: I’ll take whoever gets the job to D’s Six Pack and Dogs for dinner — you have not lived until you’ve eaten a salad with french fries on top.

You can find all the info about the position here.  Tell your friends!

“But if you spend time in the literary Twitter- or blogospheres, you’ll be positively besieged by amiability, by a relentless enthusiasm that might have you believing that all new books are wonderful and that every writer is every other writer’s biggest fan. It’s not only shallow, it’s untrue, and it’s having a chilling effect on literary culture, creating an environment where writers are vaunted for their personal biographies or their online followings rather than for their work on the page.” Jacob Silverman, Slate

For me, reading is too often an experience of discovering that the emperor has no clothes. When that happens, I feel betrayed by my community (Somebody should have warned me!).  And yet, when I read an openly negative book review, it turns me off.  While I agree to the importance of quality criticism, quality criticism is no fun.³

There is, however, one safe place where negative reviews thrive: the celebrated book

While I  bite my tongue about contemporary books I dislike, I am more than comfortable speaking out against boring old books.  I am not alone here; the internet is awash in snarky takedowns of overrated classics.  For more contemporary targets, one only need look at the upper echelons.  For every hundred glowing reviews of Freedom, you can be sure there will be a BR Meyer review attacking it. 

Sometimes these dissenting voices come off as prophets, other times they come off as attention-hungry trolls (Armond White, anyone?).  I think there is a sense that a successful work can afford to be taken down a few notches.  Perhaps this is true, but since when has that been the purpose of criticism?

In Edinger’s comments, she mentions that SLJ’s Heavy Medal blog stands out as a place where honest criticism is alive and well.  I agree with her, and I think the blog gets away with that because of its conceit:  any book mentioned there is already a contender for the Newbery.  There is no such thing as a bad book on that blog, only varying levels of good.

I think the success of Heavy Medal speaks to a larger point.  Perhaps the reason bad books do not get panned is because we subconsciously know they are undeserving of critical engagement?  And perhaps this is the way it should be?  What is the value of our greatest literary minds attacking Fifty Shades of Grey, a book that has no literary aspirations? 

Let us save our very best criticism for our very best books — because those are the books whose flaws are worth discussing, and those are the authors who we want to see grow. 

I’m a fan of the science-fiction blog Io9.  A few weeks ago, they posted a pretty nifty piece of forgotten versions of famous movies.  Among the list were several children’s literature adaptations, all of which are free watch on YouTube.  (Hooray for the public domain!)  Highlights include silent versions of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan as well as a saxiphone-laced Finnish adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.  Click any of the below images to read the whole list: 

I’ve recently been reading a lot of short stories by Edwardian master Saki (the pen name of HH Munro).  The stories are largely wonderful — a combination of funny and macabre that I haven’t seen since Roald Dahl.  Speaking of Dahl, he was a huge fan of Saki.  Here’s his blurb on the back of the Complete Works:

“In all literature, he was the first to employ successfully a wildly outrageous premise in order to make a serious point. I love that. And today the best of his stories are still better than the best of just about every other writer around.” – Roald Dahl on Saki

Why is this interesting?  Well, I have recently been thinking about Betsy Bird’s SLJ poll of the top 100 children’s books — in her piece on Matilda, Betsy mentions a rumor that the character of Matilda was originally conceived to be “a nasty little girl, somewhat in the same vein of Belloc’s Matilda Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death.  Revision after revision turned her instead into the sweet little thing we all know and love today.”

This seems like a good comparison, but for the fact that Belloc’s Matilda is not terribly smart.¹  So imagine my surprise and delight when a few weeks ago, while reading Saki’s short story “The Boar-Pig“, I encounter a shrewd little girl named Matilda Cuvering whose sole mission in life is to terrorize stupid adults.  In the story, Matilda humiliates and extorts a pair of social climbers trying to crash a garden party.  And she doesn’t limit her wrath to adults:

“I was told to imitate Claude, that’s my young cousin, who never does anything wrong … It seems [My aunts] thought I ate too much raspberry trifle at lunch, and they said Claude never eats too much raspberry trifle. Well, Claude always goes to sleep for half an hour after lunch, because he’s told to, and I waited till he was asleep, and tied his hands and started forcible feeding with a whole bucketful of raspberry trifle … Lots of it went on to his sailor-suit and some of it on to the bed, but a good deal went down Claude’s throat, and they can’t say again that he has never been known to eat too much raspberry trifle.”

Of course, we’ll never know for certain whether Dahl had this character in mind when he created Matilda Wormwood, but I can’t help but wonder.²