rolanni | Anything Can Happen Day

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Anything Can Happen Day

Thanks to everyone for sharing your thoughts on yesterday's Teapot Tempest. Still considering, here.

While I consider, the red squirrel is performing Daring Acrobatic Feats between the seed-feeder and the woodpecker block. Honestly, you think he'd run away and join the circus, rather than hiding his light up here in Central Maine.

I may have forgotten to mention here that, in and among the various packages and deliveries making their way to the Confusion Factory, was a copy of The Abandoned by Paul Gallico. This was originally published in 1950 and has now been reprinted by The New York Review Children's Collection, which is apparently trying to single-handedly bring back into print many books that were, arguably, written for children, including Daniel Pinkwater's Lizard Music, E. Nesbit's The House of Arden, James Thurber's 13 Clocks and Eric Linklater's The Wind on the Moon.

Clearly. . .people used to expect. . .different things. . .from children's books, though I would dispute 13 Clocks -- I don't think it was written specifically for children, though children may of course appreciate it.

In fact, I would say that The Abandoned isn't a kid's book (despite that it's about a little boy who is "changed into" a cat). Granted, I read it as a child, but I read a lot of what would now be called "age-inappropriate" stuff when I was a kid. In the Paul Gallico ouvre alone, I read, in addition to The Abandoned, all the Mrs. 'arris books, The Snow Goose, The Foolish Immortals, Snowflake, Thomasina, The Silent Miaow, The Hand of Mary Constable, Too Many Ghosts, The Man Who was Magic, Love, Let Me Not Hunger, For Love of Seven Dolls. . . and so on. . .

For Love of Seven Dolls was made into the movie Lili, which I suppose my mother saw when it was new, and remembered fondly. Based on the film, she basically gave me a pass on Everything Gallico. In fact, the film is (as is often the case), Nothing At All like the source material. Lili, which I saw, I guess, on one of the Nights at the Movies that was popular when I was a kid (Monday Night at the Movies, Wednesday Night at the Movies, Friday Night at the Movies) is. . .the slightly confused, but basically harmless, story of a girl who falls in loves with a puppet show, and joins it, and through the puppets comes to love the puppeteer, who is crusty and bitter, but has basically been trying to look out for her.

For Love of Seven Dolls is also the story of a girl who falls in loves with a puppet show, and joins it, but the puppeteer, who is VERY bitter, abuses her and beats her, and her only solace is the puppets, who are kind and loving. She finally realizes that the puppets are given life by the puppeteer, and she makes the philosophical leap that their characters must lie hidden inside of him; that he is, therefore, not a Bad Man after all, and on the brink of leaving him, she returns, to forgive him, and perhaps to redeem him, though it's hard to see how that's going to work out.

Not a kid's book.

The Abandoned, while not as. . .rugged. . .does contain some material that would nowadays be considered inappropriate for children, including a love affair and the hero's murderous duel for his mating rights. Also, the scene where he learns how to kill a rat is pretty harrowing. The hero, Peter, is, let me reiterate, seven years old. And yes, a seven-year-old cat is an adult -- even, on the street, a very old cat. But I can't imagine any of the arbiters of current children's literature forgetting for one moment that this is a story about a seven-year-old boy.

So, what books did you read as a kid which wouldn't pass the "child" test today?

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Grimm's Fairy Tales and Island of the Blue Dolphins. Not awake yet but will think more when I am.

And Island of the Blue Dolphins was a Newberry winner. So was, I think, Johnny Tremaine, and The Witch of Blackbird Pond -- all faintly harrowing. We may need to make an exception, or a Special Category, for Newberry Winners...

Yes, The Witch of Blackbird Pond is one that wouldn't pass. The Trumpeter of Krakow wouldn't either.

I remember when I was quite young (probably 2nd or 3rd grade), my babysitter's older daughter had V.C. Andrews' /Flowers in the Attic/ sitting on her dresser. Having already pretty much read through the entirety of the school library, I asked my babysitter if she could please ask her daughter if I could borrow the books.

In retrospect, she almost certainly had to have paled at the thought of an 8 year old girl reading these books, but I remember her putting out a very credible "Well, I think you are a little young, so you should ask your mom and dad first." My parents agreed with that assessment, and told me that I would need to wait until I was a little older, "perhaps when I was 13 or so."

While they might have been hoping that I'd forget about the books in the meantime, I did end up devouring the series in middle school. Having recently re-read the books...well, I think they are of questionable quality for even adults to read...let alone newly-minted teenagers.

I read Flowers in the Attic when I was...I don't know, maybe 8 or 9 years old? I think it was my cousin's book or something, at least I found it at my grandparents' house. My grandmother "suggested" to my mother that it wasn't something I should read--my mother said that she trusted my judgment about what I read and somehow it failed to scar me for life, so I suspect she was right. I read a lot of grown-up books as a kid and bleeped over the sex because it was *boring*. Otherwise the family relationships in Flowers weren't any more (or less) messed up by Cinderella or Harry Potter.

Are we talking about "children's books" or just books we read as children?

I read Clan of the Cave Bear as a 10-year-old and, being thoroughly fascinated, went straight into ~~Valley of Sex Addicts~~ Valley of the Horses in 6th grade. Auel kept putting smut in the middle of my cave lions and horses. I was not happy about it.

Around that same time, I also read Flowers in the Attic and A Handmaid's Tale, and being too immature to "get it," was mostly bored by both of them. On the other hand, Ender's Game was fascinating, and wholly inappropriate for immature audiences, what with the whole beating another six year old to death...

Are we talking about "children's books" or just books we read as children?

I think there's an overlap, which is being highlighted by what's being reprinted as children's or YA books. I give you back Ender's Game, which is now being marketed as YA. Er, no. Not every book with a kid for a protagonist is automatically YA.

I don't expect them to be repackaged as YA anytime soon, but I read through the existing James Bond books sometime between 10 and 12. I was also busy devouring Perry Mason, Agatha Christie and Nero Wolfe, and my mother didn't make a distinction between "detectives" and "spies".

Hrm. While Ender's Game is not a children's book, I think that it is definitely a "young adult" novel because it really hits on the themes of choosing friends with whom to grow and on picking a ... if you'll pardon the term... moral pathway from which to go from innocence to knowledge.

In case you have a moment and are interested, a while ago I wrote a little essay called "Children's books that disturb me, and why that's a good thing"

Edited 2013-04-17 16:28 (UTC)

I was also a big L'Amour fan in grade school. I probably read 20-30 westerns back to back to back by both him and Max Brand (Frederick Faust). That somehow led me into the horrible pulp western section for Lone Star and Longarm, which were full of formulaic situations and,oh, a lot of sex.

Sheri S. Tepper's The Song of Mavin Manyshaped was one of the treasured books of my childhood, a gift from an adult who hadn't looked past the cover illustration of the heroine dancing with a crowd of muppety-looking furry creatures.

To be fair, I don't believe any publisher has ever suggested it was an appropriate book for children.

I took the question to be books that were when published considered children's books. The Newberry Award winners I cited earlier, for example. We all picked up books that may have not been the best for the age we read them.

I agree with Rolanni that there are many children's books that I read as a child that I don't think would be considered for children today. We are of an age so that may be a factor.

Having limited (almost no) access to children's books, I read my Mom's.
This included, Taylor Caldwell's The Earth is the Lords ( very sexy life of Genghis Khan), and Frenchman's Creek (which I adored, and still do).
Also a lot of other totally too "adult" for understanding novels. Before I was 12. Didn't do me a bit of harm and I don't see what all the kerfuffle is all about. Life has violence, sex, grief, loss and also joy, love, and some peace some of the time. Seldom any justice. I was also reading Bruce Catton's histories of the Civil war. I did become a cynic. Children's books should not be bland pablum, and lies about how wonderful everything is (not)...

I was a voracious reader, and never paid much attention to whether something was age appropriate.

At about age seven, I distinctly remember being most of the way through Rosemary's Baby at a friends house when my folks found me reading it. Since I was almost done they let me finish it, and as my mother said they would, most of the "bad" parts went over my head.

At maybe eight, I remember saving up my allowance and riding my bike to (my memory insists Sears) to buy my very first book, a paperback copy of Dragonflight.

As a kid from the library.... well Germany has a different idea of what kids can handle than the US from all I can see anyway: so we get Karl May's version of Indians and adventures in the US or alternatively among the bedouins in Arabia, which he invented whole cloth before becoming so successful that he could afford actually visiting there.

Grimm's Fairytales - my mother started me on my interest in books by telling me one fairy tale as a nightcap per day, dancing in red hot shoes and cut-off toes and all (although even the Grimm brothers had stuff like Sleeping Beauty more harmless than the original Perrault where SB gets raped in her sleep). Then the Greek myths and the Germanic myths, which is the horrid things Greek gods do to people and the horrid things Norse gods can do to people but also Germanic people can do to each other, like Siegfried or Gutrun and stuff - I do remember a whole cycle of Germanic hero stories NOT centered around Charlemagne, although of course the Song of Roland was also something I read and all the Arthurian myths, adultery and marrying the wrong girl (Lancelot) and all, but about Dietrich von Bern - which *I* thought was about a king in Switzerland, but later found out seems to be about Theoderich, the West Gothic king who finally overthrew Rome... there was a special tale about one of his knights (was it Hildebrand?) getting into trouble with the king of dwarves, Alberich, in his country... so when I later got into the stories behind Wagner's Ring der Nibelungen I had already met my idea of dwarves...

I think a lot of stuff went past me or was "that's how it is in sagas"

Edited 2013-04-17 20:13 (UTC)

I know a lot of stuff went past me as well ...

I, too, was one of those who read everything I could reach. Roots, Clan of the Cave Bear ...(I still find *all that prehistoric* sex boring) .... and one book, it had to have been a fictionalised life of Leaf Ericsson, that I think could be classified as soft-core porn.

I read the Auel when I had read Angelique which was probably the book (that or Shanna) where I lost my knowledge innocence about sex ^^ - my parents bought monthly offers from a bookclub for decades (Bertelsmann probably rings a bell ^^ - that's how they started out after the war, I believe). And most of them were on the shelves in the living-room (all hardcovers) - well, and some were for some reason in their wardrobes in the bedroom behind the towels, I discovered.

Of course I had to read that. I did wonder, especially after reading Valley of the Horses, if the one quality a man had to make a woman fulfilled was a big dick *grin*.

Things are being republished as YA today that I wouldn't have expected--Emma Bull's Bone Dance, for one. I think if anything that standards for children's books have gotten more...more real, more "gritty," more realistic about sex and consequences, more honest about violence and its consequences. Ironically I tend to read more children's and YA novels now than I ever did as a child, because I frequently find them more honest and thoughtful than novels meant for adults.

I read Wuthering Heights when I was thirteen and I'm *convinced* that that is a book that should solely be read by moody teenagers. I loved it at thirteen, couldn't finish it at twenty or since. My mother tried to discourage me from reading it when I was younger, but only because she thought it was an awful book, not because she thought it was "inappropriate." I read Marion Zimmer Bradley's Catch Trap at about the same time, with the active encouragement of my parents.

Andre Norton. Absolutely devoured everything of hers I could find. I was a "tween" at the time. Not inappropriate except perhaps it wasn't the stuff girls were supposed to read. Victorian 'children's books' became my passion, the Alice books, the Pooh books, Kenneth Grahame, read at an inappropriate age because perhaps I was too old? Kipling's Just So Stories The Jungle Book, and Riki-Ticki-Tavi, which I adored, inappropriate only in as much as a girl wasn't supposed to like them as much as I did. I read Johnny Tremaine, and The Witch of Blackbird Pond. I was a little young for Poe (and especially the glorious Harry Clarke illustrations in the edition I had to hand), but read him anyway and had nightmares. Again as a "tween", my dad and I bonded over Walt Kelly's Pogo, which was a newspaper comic, and a year's worth of comics would be gathered into a book and published -- Kelly's the one who started that. Great artwork (Kelly worked at Disney as an animator on Dumbo), and absolutely razor sharp political satire. About 18 miles deep, too. I swear every time I re-read them I catch another joke I missed. I invariable found most of the "age appropriate" books, especially the ones aimed at girls, were a combination of drivel and pablum. You can lay many things at the Victorians' door but one thing they didn't do was dumb down the language in their children's books. Kipling's books, the Alice books, etc., made use of a vocabulary and language complexity that is far beyond the same age group of our modern children. Our dumbing down of the language and vocabulary for children accomplishes nothing but insulting the child's intelligence, causing them to tune out, crippling a child's desire to try something "too hard" and conquer it and smothering a sense of wonder. A good children's book lets a child "grow into" it. It doesn't matter if they don't know all the words, they're hearing the pattern and complexity of language doing what it does; their curiosity is whetted, and they will "grow into" the language, along the trellises you lay out for them.

Hum... One of the earliest picture books that I remember in detail was a German reader, which means I was about eight. Strumplwesser? Something like that. The story was about a child who insists on letting his hair, fingernails, and toenails grow long. So, the final picture showed us, they cut off his hands, feet, and head. Complete with blood. Pretty sure most people would not consider that appropriate for children now. Although the moral of the story was certainly easy to understand.

Struwwelpeter

Oh right, yup. I think my grandmum might have read to me from that. My mum mostly Grimm fairytales, as far as I remember. And the version of the 1001 Arabian nights edited for kids where there's none of the tales with sex, but everything else.

My Dad started me on Heinlein's early stuff when I was 9 or 10 (that would have been the early '70's), but I remember - vividly - how appalled he was when he discovered I was reading "Stranger in a Strange Land". I think by today's standards it's pretty tame, but back then.... To me, it was 1) just the next book by Heinlein on the shelf and 2) the sex was boring.
Certainly standards have changed radically.

Strumpelpeter? I rememb er that one. Don't remember the ending though. Grimm's Fairy Tales? I could never figure out why such gory stories could be for children. I didn't like them as a child. My faves were the nice ones like the Oz books and such. In the old days it seems like people thought that children should be entertained with awful gory and nasty stories of death and destruction. I just don't understand that at all.

I was a voracious reader, like many of you. I know I must have read inappropriate books, but I only know of one book that my parents refused to let me read until I was older. I don't remember the title, it was something like The Secret War. I read it later and it involved torture and sex during and after WW2. Quite dark. I know I read the full Count of Monte Cristo, which is probably inappropriate considering it involves sex, madness, drug use and the joys of extreme revenge. I also read Alister Crowley and Sybil Leek (which probably would have horrified my priest) along with the usual Cherry Ames series and the classics like The Water Babies and Little Princess before I entered high school. I think that, like most respondants, any inappropriate bits just went over my head. There was one time the librarian actually refused to let me check out a book. The funny thing is that while I had checked out much more "adult" themed books, she stopped me from taking home a christian romance. No inappropriate anything! I guess she was going by the picture, which showed an embrace.

The only one I remember was Green Mansions at about 11. My mother was astonished I wanted to read it, but did not prevent me in any way.

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Anything Can Happen Day

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Does explicit gore count?

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