I deeply hate the series where everybody is a cat (Warriors) and they have stupid cat names for everything and it's all about how cats have to serve the clan. The knock-offs where everyone is a dog is worse. Fortunately, I never experience the bear one.
The Spirit Animal series is annoying, but not as bad. Rick Riordan is not half bad, especially considering the options.
Oh man. Hawaii is all about Spirit Animals. I'm just glad she's finally reading something on her level instead of sandbagging it with Junie B Jones or Magic Treehouse.
Suspicious how? As in, they only (like to) read books when they've already read something in the series, or they're less likely to read a novel standalone book than even the first book in a series? The latter I don't get at all, even though looking back I certainly read a fair few series as a child. But I didn't prefer, say, an arbitrary Famous Five/Three Investigators book over, say, The Phantom Tollbooth.
This is why short story compilations are not my favorite. Sometimes they're really well done, but they're definitely more work than just a novel.
This is almost the diametric opposite of my experience, but that may be a function of the novels/short stories I read. Short story-wise, I find Calvino, Dick, Wolffe and McLeod very easygoing (maybe the last of those a bit less so), whereas I can struggle with some of your classic novelists like Thackeray or Tolstoy or Dickens.
I hated Magic Treehouse too. I kept waiting for Jack and Annie to get killed in fire.
Wolfe: easy to read, hard to spell.
Actually, speaking of Wolfe - couldn't get through Book of the New Sun, had no problem finishing The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories.
I have other, easy methods of disposing of Thackeray, Tolstoy, and Dickens.
My kids were doing 39 clues and we got one of them as an audiobook and somehow it made its way into my music library and onto my phone so when I shuffle all songs I'll randomly get chapter 6 of book 20 or whatever. Hate that goddamn series.
Second MTH hate as well. I only vaguely know the series plot arc, but Merlin was an evil mastermind until he... just wasn't?
Suspicious how? As in, they only (like to) read books when they've already read something in the series, or they're less likely to read a novel standalone book than even the first book in a series?
The latter. They are reluctant to invest in time in a book if there's no sequel.
I don't actually hate MTH because I didn't read it alongside Hawaii. I could just tell by how quickly she zipped through them that she was phoning it in (and possibly a little scared to pick up something more challenging.)
Try reading one aloud for more than five minutes.
I got a little weird about series as a kid. Like, was it OK to read Nancy Drew #26 after I'd read #44? Why was 83 always checked out at the library? What if I never got to read 83?! I'd have failed at Nancy Drew! (This explains a lot of Adult Me's more obnoxious personality quirks.)
Maybe the kids figure that if the original were a good/popular enoug book, the author would have written more.
A friend is very impressed that her almost 6 year old is reading at 3/4 grade level. She keeps mentioning how it's hard to find age-appropriate books for him. I haven't rolled my eyes yet; I just keep suggesting good books for him to devour.
I really dig the yearly compilations of the best short speculative fiction. I agree with Heebie generally, but have the exact opposite reaction to short stories: they can't lean on previous character development and due to format, they have to sketch memorable characters succinctly.
Reading this post, I am just realizing for the first time that I read huge amounts of stuff in series when I was a kid. I remember when I was probably seven years old or so, trying to check out something like 10 Dr. Doolittle books from the library, and being told that maybe it would be better if I just took some of them for now.
I wonder if anyone reads Dr. Doolittle any more. I wonder how much ridiculous racism and sexism are in those books.
6 year old is reading at 3/4 grade level
That's not very impressive. At six, the kid should be at least into whole number grades.
14.2: I didn't even know it was a series.
On the sliding scale of racism, last night Pokey had his first karate class, and he did not know what sitting Indian-style meant. ("Oh, criss-cross-applesauce.") So score one for norms sliding in a progressive direction.
Poetry is really awful. I sometimes wonder if people who didn't like LOTR actually tried to read all of the poems in it instead of skipping over them like normal people.
I wonder how much ridiculous racism and sexism are in those books.
Plenty, if you read the original version. I don't know about Dr Doolittle, but Enid Blyton's books are periodically updated to remove the more egregious racism. Not sure what you can do about the sexism in the Famous Five, which I remember as being pretty much baked in.
Poetry is mostly opaque to me. Lots of what are supposed to be poems look to me just like whimsical prose with funny line breaks but I have a sense I'm missing something interesting. One of the things I plan to do if I retire (which just became somewhat more plausible this week thanks to getting some stock in the company I work for) is take a course on poetry. Also on drawing, because the one I took as an undergrad was the single most useless and disappointing course of my academic career. Also Arabic, Econ, Music, and a bunch more humanities survey type courses.
periodically updated to remove the more egregious racism
That should be a the state motto for somewhere.
Rambly because high on back pain meds. Wrong thread?
I read a bunch of Dr Doolittle books. Also a bunch of Wizard of Oz books. Maybe I was a little older when I read lots Hercule Poirot mysteries. At some point my reading habits changed, and I became much more pretentious and adventurous.
I think somebody should novelize episodes of The Rockford Files to give kids something uplifting to read.
27: When I was a kid, I probably read a dozen Man from Uncle books.
22: The first couple of Doctor Dolittle books at least have been reissued in bowdlerized form, edited by the author's son. Instead of releasing the doctor and his animals in return for having his face turned white, Bumpo is hypnotized into releasing them by Polynesia. It's strangely jarring, after having grown up on the originals. I read the first one to my kids when they were small and was all prepared to criticize/discuss the racist elements, only to find they'd almost all been removed.
28: Uplifting, but not uplifting enough.
I find, rather to my disappointment, that as I grow older and older, and totter towards the tomb, I care less and less about Serious Fiction. When I was younger I used to consume the Books that Everybody was Talking About fairly regularly, but now I read a shitload of non-fiction, but my fiction intake is largely restricted to Whodunnits and SF. The only remnant of my youthful pretensions is that I do like my Whodunnits and SF to be competently written, and there's a shocking amount that isn't.
They say that nobody on their death bed ever wishes they spent more time reading Jonathan Franzen.
Though, in fairness to him, I bet hardly anybody ever puts the question directly to them.
I read a lot of series when I was a kid, but mostly they were episodic, not actually serialized, and I read lots of standalones and non-fiction too. Today I'm sworn off series, just for want of time. That started with epic fantasy, but I'll extend it to everything else too.
13 is true, and is even more true of short poems (that aren't garbage), but my swing is toward non-fiction only.
Poetry is inherently sexist because all the good poems start with "There once was a man from...."
35. It's more complicated than that, because while places with two syllable names are entirely populated by men, places with monosyllabic names are entirely populated by women (occasionally ladies).
I guess I should have paid more attention in my literature classes.
36: But "There one was a woman from..." (two syllable place) poems don't measure up to Moby's high standards.
In fact, all the best poems begin, "Sing, goddess..."
I think that I shall never see,
a poem as lovely as a tree.
But no bark-decked foliage spree,
ever made royalties for me.
35/36
I do know a poetic masterpiece that begins, "there once was a girl from Berlin..."
So exceptions exist to every rule.
I read the Dr Dolittle books as a kid in the early 90s, and I don't remember any egregious racism. I think they were probably bowdlerized by then, although it's possible but not super likely it just went over my head.
Sometime in the 90s, Dr. Dolittle turned into a black man.
Like pretty much all girls born in the 80s, my sister and I were obsessed with the Little House on the Prairie books. My parents hated them because the racism was pretty egregious at times and the politics were awful. (My mother especially hated Ma, who spoke only in preachy aphorisms and expressed genocidal sentiments towards Indians.) My sister and I probably spent a full year doing pioneer cos-play.
My grandmother LOVED Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, which is possibly the dullest children's book ever written. I blame early exposure to that text for my residual dislike of Dutch people.
My almost-6-year-old is still refusing to sit down and read a book by herself, ever, therefore we are still keeping up the regimen of spending hours reading books at a 5th grade reading level to her, most recently the second of the "Enola Holmes, sister to Sherlock" mysteries, from which even I am picking up arcane vocabulary. I imagine she'll just continue with the delay until she spontaneously switches to reading college-level texts sometime in fourth grade?
I don't know if there's any point in pushing her to pick up books herself, or offer a matching challenge (if she reads one small book each day, we'll read a longer book per established practice). I don't quite understand her aversion. Still occasionally suspect learning disabilities or visual processing issues or something.
Don't know. But our son was really unwilling to pick up a book on his own until we started reading appalling stupid serialized novels that nobody would read aloud to him for more than ten minutes at a stretch out of sheer annoyance.
Now, I need to find a good app to teach a sixth grader how to touch-type because I can't stand to watch him use the computer now.
"Enola Holmes, sister to Sherlock"
The Holmeses were real assholes, weren't they?
That reminds me. I keep meaning to read The Beekeeper's Apprentice.
I haven't read Anne of Green Gables, but I just picked up some of Montgomery's novels for adults. Man, one of 'em (A Tangled Web) was good, fun until the last paragraph, on the last page, when a character completely gratuitously drops the worst racial slur. Boy did that end the book on a bad note.
If your kids insist on a series why not read them the Flashman novels?
The serialized books I read as a kid were Encyclopedia Brown, Oz, and The Great Brain. Oh, and Edward Eager and E. Nesbit. And Pinkwater. And Narnia and Tolkien and L'Engle. I guess all of them,then.
I was never happy without our local library because they had like four Encyclopedia Brown books, never got any new ones, and they were nearly always out.
54: The Sorrows of the Young Intellectual in Nebraska.
Based on my nieces and nephews, it seems like kids only read serials anymore. I guess kids really like repetition and the security of know what's going to happen (when my nieces/nephews were younger, they mostly wanted to be read the same books, which they had already memorized, over and over), and series are the next step up from that? I still think it's weird that they don't read *any* standalone novels.
The most avid reader among my nieces/nephews is the one who is obsessed with a series about cats who go on video-game-style adventures. Is this Warriors? She and her friends write fanfic about the characters, complete with illustrations of creepy, sexed-up anthropomorphic cats. Like, with long eyelashes, come-hither-side eye, and cocked hips. It's disturbing.
54 is such a nice "...and such small portions!" complaint.
No. I really like them. "The food was great, but such small portions" is a perfectly reasonable complaint.
Yeah, I guess it's more "Such small portions, and half the time none at all."
To 57, where do you draw the line between series and "stand-alone novels"? There are branded series like the Magic Treehouse, but also trilogies and books with sequels. In general kids always want to know what happened next, and publishers can cajole a sequel or two out of most authors. Also the school-driven focus on reading at home probably rewards quantity over quality. My kid's kindergarten had a chart for pages read (by parents or by the kids themselves, no distinction made, which is pretty weird) over the course of the year. For us, sometimes it was her reading a page of I Can Read Pinkalicious, and sometimes it was us reading a page of The Silver Chair: two pages total.
53: Oh man, I read The Great Brain series over and over again.
I read the Great Brain books religiously as well. Other series:
Narnia, LOTR/Hobbit, little house, Bagthorpes, Dark is Rising, Prydain, Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, Allingham, and of course, the CAB Colby non-fiction war and weapons books. So yeah, I am sure having familiar characters was probably a big part of it, but I think for me it was more about being a completist.
releasing the doctor and his animals in return for having his face turned white
!!!!!!!
57: I'm guilty of this as an adult. I read mysteries and I hate when the protagonist/detective dies so I don't read stand-alones. Also I don't want to be sad about the deaths of any character (murder victim early in book doesn't make me sad) and I can't trust stand-alones to not kill partners/parents/children.
Basically, my life is stressful and I'm always on the edge of freaking out and I want nice non-stressful books to slip into.
When I was a kid, I loved series because I got to spend way more time in the world of the books. Fanfic might have scratched that itch but, ugh, I need good writing.
Megan, have you tried Blue Castle by Montgomery?
64: They now edit that out, along with the request that it be just the face so he stays "black where it counts."
VERY, very quietly, making sure that no one should see her, Polynesia then slipped out at the back of the tree and flew across to the prison.
She found Gub-Gub poking his nose through the bars of the window, trying to sniff the cooking-smells that came from the palace-kitchen. She told the pig to bring the Doctor to the window because she wanted to speak to him. So Gub-Gub went and woke the Doctor who was taking a nap.
"Listen," whispered the parrot, when John Dolittle's face appeared: "Prince Bumpo is coming here to-night to see you. And you've got to find some way to turn him white. But be sure to make him promise you first that he will open the prison-door and find a ship for you to cross the sea in."
"This is all very well," said the Doctor. "But it isn't so easy to turn a black man white. You speak as though he were a dress to be re-dyed. It's not so simple. `Shall the leopard change his spots, or the Ethiopian his skin,' you know?"
"I don't know anything about that," said Polynesia impatiently. "But you MUST turn this man white. Think of a way--think hard. You've got plenty of medicines left in the bag. He'll do anything for you if you change his color. It is your only chance to get out of prison."
"Well, I suppose it MIGHT be possible," said the Doctor. "Let me see--," and he went over to his medicine-bag, murmuring something about "liberated chlorine on animal-pigment-- perhaps zinc-ointment, as a temporary measure, spread thick--"
Well, that night Prince Bumpo came secretly to the Doctor in prison and said to him,
"White Man, I am an unhappy prince. Years ago I went in search of The Sleeping Beauty, whom I had read of in a book. And having traveled through the world many days, I at last found her and kissed the lady very gently to awaken her--as the book said I should. 'Tis true indeed that she awoke. But when she saw my face she cried out, `Oh, he's black!' And she ran away and wouldn't marry me--but went to sleep again somewhere else. So I came back, full of sadness, to my father's kingdom. Now I hear that you are a wonderful magician and have many powerful potions. So I come to you for help. If you will turn me white, so that I may go back to The Sleeping Beauty, I will give you half my kingdom and anything besides you ask."
"Prince Bumpo," said the Doctor, looking thoughtfully at the bottles in his medicine-bag, "supposing I made your hair a nice blonde color--would not that do instead to make you happy?"
"No," said Bumpo. "Nothing else will satisfy me. I must be a white prince."
"You know it is very hard to change the color of a prince," said the Doctor--"one of the hardest things a magician can do. You only want your face white, do you not?"
"Yes, that is all," said Bumpo. "Because I shall wear shining armor and gauntlets of steel, like the other white princes, and ride on a horse."
"Must your face be white all over?" asked the Doctor.
"Yes, all over," said Bumpo--"and I would like my eyes blue too, but I suppose that would be very hard to do."
You only want your face white, do you not?"
"Yes, that is all," said Bumpo
And I thought Moby was making that part up.
To be fair, I was in fact making it up.
Mara can't handle narrative tension, though she also tends to fall asleep as I read. She's still mad at me for the scene in Gone-Away Lake where the kids think they may hear a ghost but it's (spoiler alert) a squirrel on the piano in the abandoned house. All-of-a-Kind Family and its first few sequels were a big hit. We've done all the Melendy books too and are now on my favorite Betsy-Tacy. Nia is still not a fluent reader but these books are all available in the app she uses at school so she can read along with an audio book and is definitely picking up on more than she did the first time around. Our Mary Poppins had the racism removed plus a note about it at the start of he chapter. I had to do my own in The Treasure-Seekers, but it was minor.
Megan, have you tried Blue Castle by Montgomery?
Yes! Read it first, liked it a lot. I went looking for her other stand-alone books on the strength of that one. When Steadfast is old enough, I'll read the Anne books with him.
67
Wow, definitely not in the Dr Dolittle I read.
I did read Pippi, and I'm wondering how Pippi in the South Seas holds up. I'm a little nervous about the exoticism/fantastical imagination of "cannibals" in the South Seas.
What was the family of overachievers who wanted "one more stating to my bow"? Were those the Bagthorpes?
Do multi-stringed bows work very well?
Pippi in the South Seas was surprisingly inoffensive, if not actually up to today's standards. It helps to have a central character who is all about disrupting hierarchies and norms, and stands out in any crowd. The make-the-rando-white-guy-king plot sucks, obvs -- but of course the kids on the island are impressed by Pippi. She beats up a shark. It's not like they're simply awestruck by the nobility of her golden curls and sea-blue peepers.
I'm actually shocked by all the people who don't read poetry and don't read it to their children, who are of the age when they get it in their bones. Not the stuff that gets written and printed today, but poetry made to be read out loud and learned by heart in an environment free of distraction.
It is such a resource for later life. My mother, at 100, and with no short term memory and suffering horribly from boredom and depression will still come out with accurately remembered fragments of poetry even in hospital. Some of it is horrible kitsch. Some of it is Wordsworth and some Shakespeare. But it's there, and its the most tremendous comfort and scaffolding for her life.
I find that good, mostly old, poems are the only adequate response to the truly shitty bits of life. The way the words fit together so that nothing could be changed or move without damage makes it feel there are some things in the world that step out of time and escape decay.
I like poetry, but I never read it to my children. I guess I don't know what to read them, since I never read it as a kid myself.
On the other hand, I'm raising my children to be philosophical nihilists, so the idea that something escapes decay violates the values I'm inculcating in them.
As NW can testify, I've been sadly remiss about reading poetry to my boys, and indeed of inculcating a love of reading in them at all. But one of the ways my parents used to communicate with their grandsons when we were living on a different continent was to send recordings of themselves reading books to the boys. My mother favoured Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton, but my father would send us poetry - Kipling, Lear, Blake, How Horatius Held the Bridge. He died a few years ago, and I really treasure the recordings of him reading If, Macavity, and Tiger, Tiger that are still in my iTunes library.
The only poetry we ever read to our son is Doctor Suess and we had a couple of Shel Silverstein anthologies. I think that's good enough.
My parents didn't read poetry to me but they did store their Iliad in my bedroom, which was better.
I had an old-fashioned French teacher in high school who made us memorize poems. And while I remember almost no French (when I was in Paris I couldn't even remember how to ask for water), I do remember "A quoi bon entendre les oiseaux du bois" and "O vrai maratre nature q'un telle fleur ne dure..."
You just say "Loo". It's the same word the English use for the bathroom, I guess because they drink out of the bathroom sink.
Yay Bagthorpes! I have been thinking about reading those too. And someday we'll get to the point where reading goes on even when I'm not the one doing it. It's so much slower than I'd hoped.
I was also a series reader--particularly as a kid. I think that a series signaled quality to me, as a kid--oh, that's probably not a very good book, since there's no more.
Some of it is the building up of strange universes; fantasy and SF can involve a lot of expectation setting and explanation. Getting that once and moving forward does mean that you get more plot/action in later books, particularly if they rely on the initial descriptions instead of rephrasing the world elements in each book. (Some authors try to make asides about the way the world works in each book so you can start the series anywhere -- but it's fraught. Reexplaining your warp drive all the time is annoying, but not explaining it can make suspension of disbelief harder for those who drop in the middle of a series.)
I think that's good enough.
So long as you play Sylvia's Mother regularly as well. A Boy Named Sue is optional.
I'm actually shocked by all the people who don't read poetry and don't read it to their children, who are of the age when they get it in their bones.
Okay, I feel like a bad parent, because while I do read poetry myself, I've never really read it much to my son. And he's never been asked to read much poetry in school, either. Almost none, really. When I was a kid, I had a Puffin book of poetry by Walter de la Mare. Twinkum, twankum, twirlum and twitch/My great grandam -- she was a witch. I still remember the shivery little thrill those lines used to give me. It does stay with you.
I read loads of series as a child: Anne of Green Gables; Little House; All-of-a-Kind Family (oh, how I wanted a white pinafore!); Betsy-Tacy; The Moffatts; Ramona; Henry Huggins; The Great Brain; Encyclopedia Brown. I also read a bunch of Enid Blytons, though her English boarding-school world sort of terrified me (reminded me of playing field hockey with the mean girls in my gym class). Also What Katy Did, and its sequels. And The Littles. And a series about a girl named Katie John? And Little Women and its sequels.
It seems that adults are binge watchers, but kids are binge readers. I wonder if one leads to the other.