Maniac Magee, by Jerry Spinelli

I was recently telling my boyfriend that I think I was probably most rational when I was a kid, and he said, immediately, “Sure. Everyone was. And becoming an adult is getting that back again.” Which is something that I’d never thought about in those terms, but I think that may be a true statement–and why, again and again, I’ll read or reread a book that’s won the Newbery Medal and feel like nothing better has ever been written. And although I’m not quite a reference book for mature behavior, I think that children’s books are incredibly mature and honest about the world in a way that books about adults can’t be. Maybe it’s because these stories are aimed at a group that hasn’t ever read a book review or taken a class on literature—kids’ tastes are more completely their own than they’ll ever be again—or the fact that kids are, if not forced, at least regularly urged to read, which might make them the best audience of all—but when these books are good they’re good. I spent last evening eating cinnamon toast for dinner and reading Maniac Magee (which won its Newbery in 1991) and I’m not sure if wine and Don Delillo could have possibly made me happier. And I really miss wine.

There’s Jerry Spinelli’s style, which is exuberant and sandlotty: “It was a hot day in August. So hot, if you were packing candy, you had soup in your pocket by two o’clock. So hot, the dogs were tripping on their own tongues.” He tells stories exactly how you want to hear them, with a child or a wacky-grandpa’s touch of gleeful exaggeration. But the story of Maniac Magee is really the thing.

It’s about this kid whose parents die, whose uncle and aunt neglect him, and one day he rips out of the school play and runs “out the side door and into the starry, sweet, onion-grass-smelling night.” He comes to this town in Pennsylvania that’s divided into the black East End and the white West End and, living with the deer in the town zoo, begins to turn into a legend. He runs all day on the rail (the rail) of the train tracks. He shows up everywhere, intercepting a varsity touchdown pass with one hand, striding nonchalantly into Old Man Finsterwald’s backyard, untying the legendary Cobble’s Knot—and when a black family takes him in, he starts ruffling feathers around town. People start harassing his family, so he leaves, and, homeless again, makes friends with a burned-out ex-pitcher named Grayson. Grayson teaches him how to play baseball, and Maniac teaches him how to read, and Grayson moves into the baseball equipment room where Maniac’s been crashing and they make a home, with a hot plate and a Christmas tree and all that—and then Grayson dies, and Maniac takes off running again. And so on. Eventually he forces the town to somewhat of a racial reconciliation.

The story is lightly drawn enough so that you don’t realize why this story is so affecting. You don’t think about the fact that Maniac’s heart is more extraordinary than his kid-legendary feats, or that the reason why Maniac is so curiously free is that he has such strange, wonderful priorities: to not burden anyone, to help people who need it, to eat Butterscotch Krimpets, to refuse to care about anything that doesn’t make sense to him. I really, really love this book. If you still have it around, reread it.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith

I’m not sure if I have shared the degree to which I reread books. It’s embarrassing. I think I’ve read all the Harry Potters about, I don’t know, two hundred times. I think I’ve read The Namesake even more times than that. This is mainly due to the fact that I read obscenely and incorrectly fast and thus have somewhat of a need to reread things as well as a desire to—there are always details I missed the first time. Naturally, the books that I have reread the most are the ones whose details I have loved the most.

And no book’s details can compare to those in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I devoured this book the first time I read it. Telling the story of a poor Irish family in turn-of-the-century New York, it is plainly and wonderfully rich; published in the forties and written earlier than that, it’s demure and totally frank in that Cheaper by the Dozen, All-of-a-Kind Family way. I missed this book so much that I got my mother to send it to me in Kyrgyzstan, and it’s weirdly been a comfort. The main character Francie is an oldest child who loves to read, tries to write, and has to grow up to meet the circumstances of her life, and I might not have realized until typing that last sentence how much I used to identify with her as a kid. There’s just a lot of straightforward strength in the characters in this book, and I guess it makes sense that I still love it; I wrote my college thesis on contemporary immigrant literature and this book is just a decades-old version of that, with that good old whitewash factor that draws me to watch The Christmas Story for half a day every Christmas when it comes on TBS.

“She walked back home down Graham Avenue, the Ghetto street. She was excited by the filled pushcarts—each a little store in itself—the bargaining, emotional Jews and the peculiar smells of the neighborhood; baked stuffed fish, sour rye bread fresh from the oven, and something that smelled like honey boiling. She stared at the bearded men in their alpaca skull caps and silkolene coats and wondered what made their eyes so small and fierce. She looked into tiny hole-in-the-wall shops and smelled the dress fabrics arranged in disorder on the tables. She noticed the feather beds bellying out of windows, clothes of Oriental-bright colors drying on the fire-escapes and the half-naked children playing in the gutters.”

It’s just so nice to read! I really am not into “wholesome” as a value, but I really can’t think of a book that’s so rich as well as so purely, honestly wholesome. If you have by chance never read this book, I’d do it.

Wayside School is Falling Down, by Louis Sachar

Wayside School. The Brechtian funhouse that haunts my dreams, featuring the ever-patient groundskeeper Louis, the daft, loving Mrs. Jewls, cows on the roof, millions of dollars in paper bags, hoboes, mistaken identities, nascent sexual fascination with pigtails, and so much more. There are three books in the Sideways Stories from Wayside School series; this one is my favorite, but all three are magnificent, frank, blandly terrifying constructions of 30 loosely linked stories, in which the 19th chapter is about the 19th floor that doesn’t exist, and the 17th chapter runs backwards, and so on and so on.

There’s some fearful, opaque symmetry about the Wayside stories, and this strangely consistent illogic: I would bet that the kids who really liked these books grew up to be either LOST fans or, I don’t know, illiterate savants, like Charlie on It’s Always Sunny. Seriously, these books are legitimate theater. Everything happens under a kind of inevitable, non sequitur rule. Like, in one story in Wayside School is Falling Down, the kids are playing a prank on a substitute teacher named Mrs. Franklin by pretending that they’re all named Benjamin, and Mrs. Franklin complacently calls everyone Benjamin until the end of the story, when she says that they’re such good friends that they can call her by her first name: Benjamin. There’s another running story where this kid whose name is actually Benjamin (Nushmutt) ends up going by Mark Miller the entire year because Mrs. Jewls made a mistake the first day, and the one time he gets the courage to correct everyone, it’s during a music lesson. Mrs. Jewls keeps asking him to speak up louder, but all the kids hear is “Louder!” and they bang even harder on their tambourines and xylophones and no one ever hears his real name.

Here’s another example, cribbed directly from Wikipedia. Chapter 7, Freedom: Myron observes a bird outside the window, and thinks about how his desk is like a cage, and how the bird must see him in his desk and think that he is caged, and the bird is free. So one day, he walks down into the basement where he is discovered by bald men with attaché cases, asking him whether he would like freedom or safety. He chooses freedom, but ends up going back to class. During all this, he loses one of his shoes, which is then found by Mrs. Jewls in the Teachers Lounge refrigerator.

Seriously? That is crazy.

The BFG, by Roald Dahl

I am a huge, huge, huge Roald Dahl fan. Lemony Snicket, Harry Potter, movies like UP–the children’s stuff that is filled with old-fashioned delight rather than of-the-moment brattiness, the stuff whose subtext is “The world is interesting and fantastic, if a bit uncontrollable” and not “The world is no larger than you/your princess fantasy/your vampire lover/your lunch-table grievance of the day”–all of that stuff is in debt to Roald Dahl. I think my favorite will always be Danny, the Champion of the World, but The BFG (big fucking grundle) runs a close second in terms of making a simple wish (justice in the former, freedom in the latter) into a delicate, real-life, completely un-precious fantasy.

A few things. The Big Friendly Giant, the way he talks: “‘Wales is whales,’ the Giant said. ‘Don’t gobblefunk around with words. I will now give you another example. Human beans from Jersey has a most disgustable woolly tickle on the tongue.’” While I marvel at the way Jersey Shore is retrofitting great books with hilarious associations, I also marvel at how the BFG speaks like Dobby the house-elf/Jar-Jar Binks/that huge yellow thing on Gullah Gullah Island (did he talk? what was that thing?) but still manages to be awesome and not annoying at all. He also says many delightful words like “hippodumplings” and “hipswitch.”

Another thing. As a writer I think about Roald Dahl whenever I think about perfect description. I don’t know if it’s a thing about kids’ books, where you’re so familiar with the descriptions that they begin to seem pre-established and real, but Roald Dahl’s words are so perfect. Pared-down and clear while still being lush and friendly, it’s like this: “Sophie, still peering out from the blanket, saw suddenly ahead of her a great craggy mountain. The mountain was dark blue and all around it the sky was gushing and glistening with light. Bits of pale gold were flying among delicate frosty-white flakes of cloud, and over to one side the rim of the morning sun was coming up red as blood.”

Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls

I can’t think of the last time I cried because I was sad. The other day I shed a couple of violent tears when I realized that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are playing London the day I leave, but aside from anger, happiness, and gratitude, in general I am totally devoid of strong emotions. But–I love crying. I love to be sad. I love to pretend my heart is not a hamster running in a cold, metallic wheel. The thing is, crying for me is like sneezing or other unmentionable actions, in that you have to be so overcome that your mind totally vacates. Any level of sophistication or complexity instantly stops my tear ducts, and all that energy just goes rushing back into my head.

That’s why I, like you, loved and will always love Where the Red Fern Grows. It is the simplest, purest, most uncomplicated story ever–innocent and old-fashioned and brilliant when today, puppy stories have degenerated into Jennifer Aniston box office and bulldogs rolling around on YouTube. Wilson Rawls, you make it hurt so good.

Let me remind you! Billy, lovable twelve-year-old country boy, wants dogs more than anything in the world. He saves his money in a baking powder can for two years and can finally buy two coonhounds. He gets made fun of when he goes to town because he’s such a hick, but Billy is a better person than any of us will ever be, and he is humbly and happily in love with his doggies, who he names Dan and Ann after two names he sees carved into a heart on a tree. Treeing coon after coon, Old Dan and Little Ann prove to be the finest hounds in the Ozarks, and when evil bully Rubin tries to kill them, he falls on his own axe. On a crucial championship hunt, the two hounds are lost in a snowstorm, but later found with a layer of ice coating their bodies, still pacing around a tree: they get the coon and win. After that hunt, a mountain lion attacks Billy. The dogs fight it off, saving Billy’s life, and Old Dan is fatally wounded. When he dies, Little Ann dies of sorrow a week later. And a red fern grows on their graves.

From when Billy sees the dogs for the first time: “I knew the pups were mine, all mine, yet I couldn’t move. My heart started aching like a drunk grasshopper. I tried to swallow and couldn’t. My Adam’s apple wouldn’t work. One pup started my way. I held my breath. On he came until I felt a scratchy little foot on mine. The other pup followed. I heard the stationmaster say, ‘They already know you.’ I knelt down and gathered them in my arms. I buried my face between their wiggling bodies and cried.”

The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin

Oh fuck yeah The Westing Game. Another one of the unsurpassable Newbery Medal winners, this book is perfect adventure. It’s a spoofy, fractalized, good-hearted, Clue-esque mystery–but unlike Clue, it has a real plot, studded with exciting things such as a dead millionaire, a haunted mansion, the stock market, blackouts, bombs, and a set of word puzzles that seem to come from the lyrics of “America the Beautiful.” Considering that the book features no less than sixteen main characters, the plot is surprisingly inwardly expansive, and all the characters are clearly drawn and memorable without being caricatures. And what’s awesome is that Raskin’s set of characters (who are like chess-pieces more than anything else) are diverse for the sake of being interesting, not for the sake of being diverse–and together they cover more bases than any other book of this length I can think of. There’s Sydelle Pulaski, the fat secretary who gets bored and decides to become “a cripple,” and paints her crutches to match her colorful cat-lady glasses; James Hoo, the failed inventor-turned-angry-restauranteur; Christos Theodorakis, the disabled, birdwatching young savant; Grace Wexler, the cold, social-climbing blonde matron; J.J. Ford, the unsmiling, black maid’s-daughter-turned-judge; the nearly mute, intensely religious cleaning woman named Crow.

And then, of course, there’s Turtle. Turtle, my idol. She is a defiant, awesome thirteen-year-old, who begins the book by taking a dare that she won’t sneak into the Westing mansion–she then finds the dead body of Sam Westing and sets the whole plot in motion. She kicks people for no reason, hates her sister for passively agreeing to marry the handsome (possibly gay?) Dr. Deere, and becomes extremely angry when anyone pulls her braid. She is in the great tradition of plucky female young-adult protagonists (anyone remember The Girl Who Owned A City?) and I love her.

The book is a true mystery, beginning with all sixteen characters being mysteriously persuaded to move into Sunset Towers, continuing through the death of Sam Westing, through the reading of his riddle-like will, through all the characters’ intersecting alliances and attempts to win Westing’s fortune, and through the logical but entirely surprising ending. Reviewing it after The Lost Symbol, it is sadly obvious that the puzzle in the Westing Game is a thousand times more complex but every bit as neat. This book, so much about independence and ingenuity and money and family and games and making things happen for yourself, is a better definition of America than most anything else.

Best American Short Stories of 2005, edited by Michael Chabon

More people should read these, because the anthology format aligns perfectly with our giant cultural case of ADD. Short stories are the shit, and if the good ones were taught more, then people would read them for pleasure way more often. And it’s definitely true that it gets a little tedious to read an entire collection by one author: unless you’re reading one of the geniuses, you start seeing the author’s tricks, and the rhythmical, slightly askew magic that hits you at the end of a good short story is diminished after seeing it done again and again. But with collections like this, the editor has already taken care of these issues for you. It’s basically like watching awesome movie trailers for an hour. And although the stories in the Best American series are rarely unconventional and usually prominent re-runs (a third of the stories in this edition were first published in the New Yorker), they are just really good.

And this one in particular has some incredible heavy hitters. First of all, there is one of my favorite short stories of all time: “Until Gwen,” by Dennis Lehane (the author of Mystic River), which begins “Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat” and continues through this depraved Greek-tragedy tale involving motels and corpses and this disgustingly romantic undercurrent of decayed, pulsing Americana. Lehane structures his stories like poetry: as this couple is gunned down by the police, he writes the line “She was tuned to you like a radio tower out on the edge of the unbroken fields of wheat, blinking red under a dark-blue sky” and then a few lines later, “And her voice broke in the middle of her laughter and her fear and her guilt, and she took your face in her hands and you saw all those siren lights washing across the back window like Fourth of July ice cream,” and with the colors and the rhythm it’s so good.

Other standouts: this awesome one by Kelly Link called “Stone Animals,” which to me epitomizes the genre of slipstream fiction (a surrealist-sci-fi-realist hybrid defined by its emphasis on cognitive dissonance); a beautiful and unnerving story called “Eight Pieces for the Left Hand” by J. Robert Lennon; a baseball story from Tom Perrotta; a dingy, sexual story called “Natasha” by David Bezmozgis; and reliably great stories from Joy Williams, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, and Edward P. Jones. All of this in one book!

The Giver, by Lois Lowry

Just making sure we all remember that this book exists, is awesome, and should be reread as soon as possible. The other night I picked it up and couldn’t stop reading once I started, and that’s what I like about all these Newbery books: they are both short and brilliant, and meant to be reread all at once, in a 3 to 5 AM burst of gratitude that something so simple can be so interesting.

The Giver, though, has had a surprisingly controversial history. Which sucks because it’s not controversial. To refresh, it’s set in a utopian/dystopian world, where there is no pain, emotional or physical; kids are born to Birthmothers and then distributed to perfect nuclear family units, which are arranged by some mysteriously perfect algorithm; your career is chosen for you at the age of 12, and from then on it’s this blank, smiley, anesthetized version of The Busy World of Richard Scarry. If you do anything wrong, you are “released,” which is to say killed by lethal injection. The story is about Jonas, who is chosen to be the Receiver–the one person in the society who is given the memories of what the real world is like. So he’s the only one who gets to see color, hear music, or feel anything at all. And of course the shit hits the fan, because like any good child-protagonist, Jonas is brave enough to realize that this is ridiculous, and he takes some action.

But for some reason, a lot of people think that the book’s message–it shows you very simply that experience is good, that it’s better to know things than to suppress them–is bad for children. For example, everyone in the society takes a pill every day to suppress their “Stirrings,” which is the Giver-world word for sexuality, and Jonas, as he learns more about what life was like before, stops taking his pills. One does not have to be stupid to recognize that this is a great message to have in a children’s book. But all those mommas, who wish their little boys and girls would indeed just be able to take a pill and live a creepy, numb, sheltered life: they’ve got The Giver on the watch list.

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle

Whoever did the cover art for Madeleine L’Engle books must have had an awesome (terrifying) time of it, this book included. How best to capture a children’s novel about the fifth dimension, ultimate evil, and an alien planet called Camazotz? Oh, of course: three faceless children riding a floating bald marble centaur with a rainbow emanating from his shoulderblades. Wait, too weird? Best balance it out by adding a nice big flower at the bottom of the illustration.

But what would you have done? This book, revolving around travel both in time and outer space, kind of defies any sort of literal visualization. A lot of teachers at my school were incredibly skeptical of Madeleine L’Engle–displaying the unfortunately common Christian aversion to science, or at the very least, refusing to believe that a book that asks this many questions could have any root in faith–and it’s upsetting to me that anyone would ever be discouraged from reading this book. It’s so good. Twelve years after first reading A Wrinkle in Time, I am still scared by the thunderstorm that begins the book, still freaked out by the bodiless brain called IT which controls all the Stepfordy people on Camazotz, still chilled by the scene where Meg saves her brother. And I still have a big crush on Calvin O’Keefe.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer

Despite the fact that this is one of my favorite books ever, I never talk about it, and thus far I’ve deliberately avoided Safran Foer and his wife Nicole Krauss (The History of Love) in this blog. Because the thing about the two of them is that they make their books so twee and lovable and perfectly engineered to fit the tastes of ponderous young readers and writers that it’s just like: there is nothing left to say. It’s like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Garden State when it first came out. Everyone loves these books and if they don’t, the reason is usually that they think the books are too precious and lovable. And yes, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close may get a little precious–the main character is a tambourine-playing, liberal, thoughtful, vegan Manhattan boy named Oskar who speaks several languages and whose father was killed in 9/11–but throughout, it is legitimately creative and innovative and easy and fun. And hey, if someone didn’t like me because I was too precious and lovable, I’d be happy as shit.

Basically what distinguishes Safran Foer’s (and his wife’s) books for me is an earnest excess of feeling. There’s a part where a character thinks, “I worried about her [his mother], putting all of her life into her story, no, I was so happy for her, I remembered the feeling she was feeling, the exhilaration of building the world anew.” This is the adorable vulnerability that runs through this book. More restrained than with Dave Eggers, but kind of the same thing. It’s impossible to resist the charm.