Literary Safari

It’s Children’s Book Week, and the Sunday’s NYT Book Review marked the event with a special children’s section. As I was thumbing through it, I was struck by a few things:

1) Out of the list of best illustrated books of 2007 [see slideshow, thanks Chicken Spaghetti!] , three were graphic novels: The Invention of Hugo Cabret (RB) by Brian Selznick, The Arrival (RB) by Shaun Tan, and The Wall (RB) by Peter Sis, and two of the three are Arthur A. Levine titles. All three were high up on my personal favorites list this past year so I was thrilled to see them acknowledged.

2) Christopher Myers’s fresh illustrated version of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky (HB) joins the company of the Visions in Poetry (RB) illustrated edition from Kids Can Press. Both have such different sensibilities, but they’re definitely worth a happy pairing. I was intrigued to learn in Patrick Lewis’s NYT review that:

“Myers’s prodigious research on the history of “Jabberwocky” led him to Lewis Carroll’s diaries, where, as he explains in an endnote, he discoverd the world “ollamalitzli,” written in the margin. Its Mesoamerican religious and ritual significance, he tellsus, involves a ‘rubber ball and a stone hoop affixed high on a wall.’ So it’s not much of a stretch to arrive at Myers’s conceit that a precursor of a basketball court is what Lewis Carroll had in mind as a setting for his mock epic poem.” [update: check out the correction about the validity of this in the comments section from a member of the Lewis Carroll society.]

3) The Dangerous Book for Boys (RB) did not make it onto any of the top 2007 lists, but it’s definitely been a force to be reckoned with this past year. One of my colleagues told me that his 9 year old son received 3-4 copies of the book for his birthday!

When I was going through the NYT Review section, I came across the ad for Scholastic’s plug for its copycat series The Boys’ Book and The Girls’ Book (on) How to Be the Best At Everything (SB). I’ve given both these books flip tests at the bookstore and have nothing good to say about them except that they sure came off the press quickly, just 4 months after Dangerous Book hit the US market. The resemblance in cover art is obvious and the attempt to replicate a successful formula …. well, there’s no attempt to even hide that.

I still remain a fan of Hal and Conn Iggulden’s original, which my husband and I have enjoyed reading together … and if I might say, is perfectly suitable for girls and boys, adults and kids … maybe that’s its charm.

When I was in London, I came across the following spawn:

The Dangerous Booklet for Girls (HB). Puke.
The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls (HB). Puke some more.

There has got to be something original and innovative out there for girls, which doesn’t make me sick. I have to find it.

On the other hand, I was kind of excited to find these extensions of the Dangerous Book: the pocket editions (HB) and the yearbook (HB). It’s an empire all right.

4) Finally, in this Sunday’s NYT, there were two separate reviews of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (HB) which is mostly what I’ve been doing above with all my yap-yap about books for boys and girls! The first was in the Styles section, the second in the Book Review. Over the past few months, I’ve read several more pieces about this book in the Times here and here.

One thing I’ve taken away from all these pieces is Bayard’s code, which I intend to start applying to my reading life or my, shall I say, scale of cultural literacy:

UB: book unknown to me
SB: book I have skimmed
HB: book I have heard about
FB: book I have forgotten
RB: book I have actually read

That said, I’m going to go back up and add this scale to all the books I’ve discussed today! This will explain all the parenthetical notes throughout this post.