Kiddy lit (No, not kitty litter!)
Aug. 25th, 2006 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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adventurat because it's just too tempting to pass up...
1. What book or books were special to you in your childhood?
Most of what I read before I started high school was good old Stratemeyer syndicate stuff---The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames---and other young-adult detective series: Trixie Belden was my favorite, and I liked the Three Investigators and the Happy Hollisters as well. And anything with horses! Mary O'Hara---technically not children's books at all, but I never noticed that at the time---the Black Stallion books, and anything from the Scholastic book club that mentioned horses in the summary.
2. What was particularly special or memorable about those books?
They got to go to exotic places and have adventures! All I ever did was go to school and other boring stuff. The adults in those stories were background noise, they weren't always telling the protagonists what to do. Life was never too complicated; the mystery was always solved in 120 pages. Or the kid got the horse despite the odds and it became a champion (race horse, show jumper, rodeo star, etc.).
3. Have you re-read any of them as an adult?
I've never stopped reading "kids" books. Not necessarily the ones mentioned above, although I still have the whole run of the Trixie Belden series (up until #16 or so, and a few of the more recent ones). But if it's a well-written book, I think of it that way---as a good book that just happens to have young people as its focus. In high school, I encounted some lovely books by Margot Benary-Isbert, that deal with post WWII Germany, and I've tracked down more of them since. The characters are so sympathetically written that I don't care whether I'm supposed to be "too old" for their stories. I reread them, and Mary O'Hara, and others when the spirit moves me.
4. If so, were the books as good as you remembered them?
Sometimes it's a real hoot to reread them. A couple years ago, I almost peed my pants when I read an edition of an old Nancy Drew book that predated politically correct rewrites and came across "Nancy's gay ways made her very popular with the fraternity." Uh...yeah. What's interesting about reading childhood classics in adulthood is the perspective of distance. When I look at the copyright dates, I know what was going on in the world in 1950-something and I know that it's going to have a subtly different outlook from someone writing about the 1950s in the year 2000. One of my favorite juvenile authors is Elizabeth Enright. Many of her books are still in print fifty years later---I have a few of them with contemporary covers---and although there may be a few things that stand out today as awkward, like mentioning a "TV tree" on the roof, they hold up because the situations are interesting and the characters are well drawn. It's all about the writing. Always.
5. What do you think about movies being made out of children's classics (like the Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of The Rings, etc.)?
(I've never been into either of those. I saw each of the LotR films exactly once. Well done, just not my cup of tea. Harry Potter, on the other hand--I know, not a classic in the sense of having been around for generations, but still popular with all ages and nicely executed.) I understand someone's recently done a remake of "My Friend Flicka" that sounds like complete and total crap---they kept the title, and that's about it. I adored Mary O'Hara's books---I'm not going anywhere near that movie! It's really a question of how faithful the movie people are to the original material, which is the bottom line for any book-to-film adaptation. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it's drek.
adventurat because it's just too tempting to pass up...1. What book or books were special to you in your childhood?
Most of what I read before I started high school was good old Stratemeyer syndicate stuff---The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames---and other young-adult detective series: Trixie Belden was my favorite, and I liked the Three Investigators and the Happy Hollisters as well. And anything with horses! Mary O'Hara---technically not children's books at all, but I never noticed that at the time---the Black Stallion books, and anything from the Scholastic book club that mentioned horses in the summary.
2. What was particularly special or memorable about those books?
They got to go to exotic places and have adventures! All I ever did was go to school and other boring stuff. The adults in those stories were background noise, they weren't always telling the protagonists what to do. Life was never too complicated; the mystery was always solved in 120 pages. Or the kid got the horse despite the odds and it became a champion (race horse, show jumper, rodeo star, etc.).
3. Have you re-read any of them as an adult?
I've never stopped reading "kids" books. Not necessarily the ones mentioned above, although I still have the whole run of the Trixie Belden series (up until #16 or so, and a few of the more recent ones). But if it's a well-written book, I think of it that way---as a good book that just happens to have young people as its focus. In high school, I encounted some lovely books by Margot Benary-Isbert, that deal with post WWII Germany, and I've tracked down more of them since. The characters are so sympathetically written that I don't care whether I'm supposed to be "too old" for their stories. I reread them, and Mary O'Hara, and others when the spirit moves me.
4. If so, were the books as good as you remembered them?
Sometimes it's a real hoot to reread them. A couple years ago, I almost peed my pants when I read an edition of an old Nancy Drew book that predated politically correct rewrites and came across "Nancy's gay ways made her very popular with the fraternity." Uh...yeah. What's interesting about reading childhood classics in adulthood is the perspective of distance. When I look at the copyright dates, I know what was going on in the world in 1950-something and I know that it's going to have a subtly different outlook from someone writing about the 1950s in the year 2000. One of my favorite juvenile authors is Elizabeth Enright. Many of her books are still in print fifty years later---I have a few of them with contemporary covers---and although there may be a few things that stand out today as awkward, like mentioning a "TV tree" on the roof, they hold up because the situations are interesting and the characters are well drawn. It's all about the writing. Always.
5. What do you think about movies being made out of children's classics (like the Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of The Rings, etc.)?
(I've never been into either of those. I saw each of the LotR films exactly once. Well done, just not my cup of tea. Harry Potter, on the other hand--I know, not a classic in the sense of having been around for generations, but still popular with all ages and nicely executed.) I understand someone's recently done a remake of "My Friend Flicka" that sounds like complete and total crap---they kept the title, and that's about it. I adored Mary O'Hara's books---I'm not going anywhere near that movie! It's really a question of how faithful the movie people are to the original material, which is the bottom line for any book-to-film adaptation. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it's drek.