Redwall, by Brian Jacques

During Peace Corps, I used the Internet a lot more than I thought I’d be able to. But because of the brisk 56k connection on my cell phone modem, I still wasn’t able to dick around online very much, and as a result so many things of and about the Internet–the celebrity fixation, the way it allows you to process a lot of information without having to think for yourself, the intensely detailed information about stuff that doesn’t matter at all–were completely absent from my last year.

I enjoyed living this way to a point. The Internet is often an intrusion on the life of the mind, and being in the Peace Corps necessitated a constant mental dissection of stupidly large issues: poverty, aid, whatever. You’re constantly trying to understand your situation without judging the people around you–and then you do, and then you judge yourself. I hated how almost every conversation I had with locals was simplistic and banal, but then I’d remind myself that critical thinking is a privilege. The capacity for serious analysis is largely off-limits to subsistence farmers. And, when the most popular article on Slate is an etymological analysis of Charlie Sheen’s verbal diarrhea, who’s to say that these high-level skills are so very important?

In a great example of analyzing things beyond all reason, here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on Redwall, the bestselling children’s fantasy (but non-magical) series about small, nice woodland creatures who live in an abbey and fight larger, evil woodland creatures. I read a couple of these when I was little and loved them, although I don’t remember much beyond their constant feasts on twinky little meat pies and elderflower wine drunk out of thimbles or whatever.

“The books have been criticized in some quarters for allegedly promoting an overly simplistic view of race and ethnicity… The characteristics of the animals in the novels are fixed by their species, making them quite predictable. Critics point out that the good and bad characters are drawn almost exclusively along species lines, with a few rare exceptions. These criticisms have been advanced as a concern, as the books are primarily read by children and young adults. There is also a class element involved in these criticisms, with the denizens of Redwall being either educated, aristocratic animals such as badgers, or rustic, simple creatures such as moles.”

What the hell is wrong with people? There is no child on earth (and these books have been translated in all sorts of languages, including Swedish and Hebrew) who has ever read Redwall and thought “When I grow up, everything about life will be exactly like this imaginary society of Old English mice and badgers.” And who cares if all the creatures of the same species act similar? That’s what species do. I’m more offended at the idea that someone’s drawing a connective line between species and race, period.

Also, Redwall isn’t real. There is that to keep in mind.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle

Do you hear that? Do you? That crunch, that rattling, those explosions–kind of sounds like a thousand books in 8 suitcases being transported from Houston to New York to Moscow to Bishkek to my ghetto-ass village and blowing my children’s minds! In no small part thanks to you guys, the Village Library Project is funded, the hard work completed, and the fun has begun.

 I’m waiting to open it until our bookshelves are built, and my inner librarian will not be content until I have a Kyrgie Decimal System up and running in this bitch, but rest assured there will be a fancy ribbon-cutting ceremony and a communal reading of The Giving Tree and fifty kids screaming “THANKYOUVARYMACH” in a video made for your viewing pleasure. It’s all in the works. However, my kids have been anxious for the unveiling, and so today I had my very first Reading Club, featuring, as our first book, the beloved Eric Carle tome The Very Hungry Caterpillar. They fell in love instantly, a bunch of teenagers experiencing the awe of a four-year-old reading this book for the first time.

 Remember the story? It’s pretty simple. The caterpillar is born in the moonlight, is super hungry, eats through a symphony of beautifully painted foodstuffs. On Saturday he eats a piece of chocolate cake (which my students obviously pronounced “chocolate cock”), one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, salami, a lollipop, cherry pie, a sausage, a cupcake, and a slice of watermelon. Then he has a stomachache, eats a green leaf to flush all that shit out, goes into a cocoon, and emerges as a butterfly.

 Reading this I noticed that the Very Hungry Caterpillar probably embodies my life’s ethos better than any other “literary character.” Glut yourself to death and then go into an ascetic cocoon assuming that after you emerge something positive will have happened. Really, if you broaden the analogy farther than my six-year-running personal routine of bourbon overdoses leading to volunteer trips, the Very Hungry Caterpillar may be a great universal advocate for the hackneyed but lovely work-hard-play-hard way of life. Except I suppose he wasn’t so much working as sleeping in a cocoon, and also I guess he played rather than worked first, so maybe the message I really should be seeing here is “Eat so much that you fall asleep for two weeks and when you wake up you’ll be pretty.”

The Witches, by Roald Dahl

So, in choosing which books to bring for the library, I have optimistically included several classics of the 4th-7th grade reading level: lots of Roald Dahl, Lois Lowry, E.L. Konigsberg, and Louis Sachar. I intended to distribute them among English teachers so that they can sharpen their language skills. However, this word-for-word transcript of a conversation from a winter teaching conference should show you why this intention is, to put it mildly, flawed. Keep in mind that teachers who work with Peace Corps volunteers are inherently more motivated than the rest. To set the scene, it’s a session on feedback, with me, my friends Ian and Lola, and 3 Kyrgyz teachers (one of whom, no joke, is named DILDOCON) in a small group. The question on the board: “Were the goal of the session achieved?”

Ian: I think it were.
Lola: So the goal was to give direct feedback and encourage it on a regular basis by creating a comfortable forum between each counterpart-volunteer pair.
Me: (to Kyrgyz teachers) What do you think? Was the goal achieved?
Teacher 1: Much time.
Teacher 2: Higher education, yes?
Me: Yes. What?
Everyone: (Silence).
Teacher 3: Challenges.
Teachers 1 and 2: (Nodding).
Me: What… were… the… goals… of… the… session?
Teachers: (Nodding).
Lola: I think we’re done here.

 So whatever. Eventually some driven, self-studying teacher like my counterpart will read The Witches and renew her love for the English language. Until then, I have tons of awesome shit to reread.

 The Witches is not my favorite Roald Dahl book. However, I like that it gives a little cultural background to Dahl’s ever-present macabre tone–his parents were Norwegian, and aside from the fact that Scandinavian folklore is incredibly chilling and violent, “the Norwegians know all about witches, for Norway, with its black forests and icy mountains, is where the first witches came from.” The story involves a boy being turned into a mouse by a hotel convention of child-killing witches and then him plotting revenge with his cigar-smoking grandma (the quintessential Roald Dahl sentence of “‘What an idea!’ she cried. ‘It’s fantastic! It’s tremendous! You’re a genius, my darling!’” appears unsatisfyingly late in the book, a little more than 2/3 through). Eventually they destroy the witches of England and plot to destroy the witches of the world.

 I think my post-America emotions were making me extremely sappy during this reread, but still, the part of the book I liked best was at the very end. “My darling,” the grandma says, “are you sure you don’t mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?”

 ”‘I don’t mind at all,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.’”

Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White

There are frequent periods when I feel extremely embarrassed about the entire idea of reviewing books, because–there is no other way to put it–it’s just such a bullshitty thing to do. Just reading this sentence on Wikipedia in the Charlotte’s Web entry made me angry: “Seth Lerer, in his book Children’s Literature, finds that Charlotte represents female authorship and creativity, and compares her to other female characters in children’s literature such as Jo March in Little Women and Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden.” Right. And it doesn’t stop. I laughed out loud reading this next sentence: “Nancy Larrick brings to attention the ‘startling note of realism’ in the opening line, ‘Where’s Papa going with that Ax?’”

 Yes, and it’s a secondary level of ridiculous that I’m writing on a blog about other critics and criticizing them for their over-criticism. But I mean, why ruin Charlotte’s Web by analyzing it like you’re in a freshman literature seminar called “On Bullshit”? The book takes place in a barnyard. Charlotte is a spider. Her “female authorship” consists of weaving messages in her web that the rat finds in the dump on ad copy for detergent (“With new radiant action!”). If there’s anything that can be left out of the endlessly reflexive and paranoid critical world, this book should qualify.

 The Web is good just for its own sake, simple and pure, with an illogical and off-kilter sweetness that never gets cloying. Sure, it’s way more sophisticated than I remembered (I just reread it–thanks, library donors) and Wilbur the pig, like all the characters, is delightfully human (“One day just like another,” he groaned)–but really, who cares? I can hear some douchebag voice in my head saying, “Charlotte’s Web is a treatise on the power of words as well as a defense of the sociological predetermination of contemporary American gender relations” and it would be legitimately defensible in the aforesaid freshman seminar, but it would most importantly be a massive waste of time in comparison to just reading the book like a child would… just enjoying it.

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.

The Golden Apples of the Sun, by Ray Bradbury

One of Ray Bradbury’s most famous short stories, “All Summer in a Day,” is about a classroom of nine-year-old children who live on Venus. Brought there by “rocket men and women,” these children can’t remember the sun; it rains on Venus for seven years at a time, thousands of days of drumlike rainfall that crushes a thousand forests at a time. They were two the last time they saw the sun, but their classmate Margot was four. She was brought to Venus later than the rest of them, and her classmates hate her; she misses things, she dreams about the sun, she’s weird. One day they lock her in the closet because she annoys them, and then all of a sudden the rain stops–”it was as if, in the midst of a film concerning an avalanche, a tornado, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption… something had gone wrong with the sound apparatus, and then ripped the film from the projector and inserted in its place a beautiful tropical slide that did not move or tremor”–and the sun comes out. The children play in the sun like wild things, shouting, running, and at the end of two hours the sky darkens to midnight and the rain falls in tons once again. They remember–Margot is still in the closet.

 I recently picked up The Golden Apples of the Sun, an old collection of Ray Bradbury stories, and found that nearly every story in it is this good. Like Kurt Vonnegut, Bradbury writes science fiction about nothing more complicated than the little ironic, bittersweet, horrible aspects of human nature. The stories in this book, which were all written in the forties and fifties, all seem to touch on the relationship between domesticity and wonder; the possibility of establishing security and comfort amidst total unknowns, the fact that new worlds don’t mean new desires. While reading I was reminded of the extremely obvious fact that America at that time was so different than it is today–and the book’s combination of innocence, straightforward inventiveness, aggression, fear and hope is a really wonderful reflection of this state of things.

 Here are some of the stories. One where a company pioneers time-travel tourism and allows you to go back and kill dinosaurs, but only the ones that were determined to have died no more than ten minutes later, and only if you stay on the hover path, or else you might set a chain in motion that would ruin the world. One where a girl is exposed to radiation and doesn’t die, but finds sex and religion and happiness in her blood for the first time. A dozen different ones about people building suburbs on Mars, building rockets in their garages, loving people who are far away and might never come back.

 It’s a great book.

Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh

As far as Shitty Reinterpretations go, this one might take the cake. Let me draw your attention first to the cover on the right. Whimsical, light, and personal, it suggests exactly what Harriet the Spy is about: a little kid in New York City traipsing off to make adventures for herself. Let me now draw your attention to this nasty thing on the left. Behold Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars, a Disney Channel movie due to be released later this year. Harriet the Spy fucking Blog Wars. What. The. Fuck.

What is wrong with the people making these decisions? Even the combination of the phrases “Disney Channel” and “Blog Wars” is enough to suggest how miserable this production will be, but it gets worse: Harriet is supposed to be 11, but in this thing she’s a 16-year-old engaging in a Gossip Girl-type battle for control of her school via blog. Instead of (like Old Harriet) recording entries about The Boy with Purple Socks (so boring that no one can remember his name) and smushing herself in her co-op’s dumbwaiter to spy on Harrison Withers, a bachelor with 26 cats, New Bloggy Harriet will be relentlessly stalking a Jonas Bro-type pop star named Skander Hill. At least in the Michelle Trachtenberg/Rosie O’Donnell adaptation–which was made 14 years ago, yeesh–shit was age-appropriate. Whereas 2010 Harriet will probably look like Ke$ha. Awesome!

I mean, as originally written in 1964, Harriet is a real kid, in that glorious stage of kid-life where you can actually engage in gender-neutral activities. Her two best friends are a boy named Sport and a girl named Janie who wants to be a scientist. Living in New York City, she very early comes to understand that the everyday activities of ordinary people are fascinating. It upsets me that such a character is very unlikely to be written today, especially if the setting is 2010–the children’s books of this sort that are still being written (like When You Reach Me) are almost necessarily set in pre-paparazzi times. I hope that there are still Harriet types running around today, girls who daydream about things other than turquoise push-up bras and putting out their own pop album, and I’m sure there totally are. But the decade’s media decisions strongly suggest otherwise.

You Cannot Hate Twilight Like I Hate Twilight

I was planning to write about Twilight at some point. First of all, it’s stupid as shit. Second, it’s about time; people have been going nuts over it for a couple of years, and the fuss is even dying down (thank God). But the reason I haven’t reviewed the book is–a reason that is probably already obvious–is that I hate Twilight so much that I can’t think about it without getting into Evil Grandpa levels of cranky. I know plenty of people I like have a fondness for Twilight but it’s just: why this of all things? Why a vampire romance? Why why why?

But I’m running low on ideas for books that most people have read (send me some!) so today I thought I would just take the plunge. I searched “twilight” on my computer because I knew I had gotten high and written a rant about Twilight at some point fourth year. Instead, I found this gem, which I had completely forgotten about and don’t remember writing. The reason for this is as follows: I turned in my thesis on March 31st and after that, I had not a thing due until May 3rd, when I had a ten-page criticism paper due. And so, in accordance with the way that I spent the whole intervening month, it turns out I did get high and write a rant about Twilight. Rereading it I was half angry that this is what I ended up doing in college, and half totally jealous of myself for taking classes that permitted me to get on my high horse like this.

The paper is called “Edward Cullen and To-Be-Looked-At-Ness: Reversal of the Cinematic Gaze in Twilight.” A) Ridiculous and B) I remember telling my dear friend Walt about it, and he said, “That sounds interesting but what is the reversal of the gays?” Generally it is a thick, silly essay, dripping with formal indignation and feminist rage and the writing of a person who has been drunk and wearing a bathing suit for two weeks. I feel like I have about ten friends who would think it’s funny so I’m posting it.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to Twilight after all, it’s just so irritating to me. Here are my views in a nutshell: Bella is boring and sucks. Girls only like her because Edward likes her and they want to be her, which is a harmful way to think, because Edward sucks too. Twilight, like a Taylor Swift song but to a much larger degree, seems innocuous and perfectly contemporary but is really passive/objectifying/repressive and most importantly, lame. It’s the same hundred words recycled over and over again (Bella said Edward stared glitter vampire brooding attraction flying werewolf gaze rain silent powerful etc), which again, is just like Taylor Swift (fifteen boy date car eyes window dream love princess etc). And I heard that in the last book Bella has some sort of alien baby that tries to eat her. Yeah, America. This one’s on you.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

Holy balls this book is awesome. Holy balls I want to mail you a copy right now. There is a select set of things that are awesome enough to be both mainstream and endlessly fascinating–the things that you’re like “I’m not going to bother explaining, just watch it/read it/eat it.” Like, I don’t know, Arrested Development and the margarita from Chili’s where you get the take-home shaker. The Hunger Games is like that. It’s so satisfying. It’s like late-night. Holy balls.

I will pause the party in my pants for a second to say, to be honest, this is pretty much my ideal book. Badass tough-girl protagonist, check. Post-apocalypse, check. American government gone amazingly psychotic, check. An annual nationally televised event starring twenty-four children who are trained for combat and then forced to kill each other in an elaborate rigged arena, fucking check. I knew that much about the book from reading reviews before I read it, and although my expectations were high, the book was all like, “Pssh Jia you think you know me?” and turned out to be better than I could have imagined. I mean, after I picked it up this weekend I could not put it down. As in, I’ve been skiing all day, I’m snowed into a comfy bed, I just ate a bacon cheeseburger and took three Tylenol PMs and still could not put the book down despite all other signs pointing to coma.

But don’t take my word for it. Read this book. It will take you two terrifically enjoyable hours. Don’t wait for the inevitable, slightly mishandled movie version starring Dakota Fanning with dirt on her face. It’s not perfect, but that’s because it’s too busy being perfect in other ways, do you know what I mean? Like, there’s no room to expand on the sociopolitical richness of the idea of post-collapse America divided into 12 economic “districts” and ruled by a pathological Capitol anchored securely within the Rocky Mountains–there’s no room to work those implications out while you’re guiding a dozen children through a Triwizard Tournament on serious acid. Sorry, I take that back, this book is perfect. Just read it.

The Baby-Sitters Club, by Ann M. Martin

So I know I sometimes partake in the irritating phenomenon that I call grandpa syndrome: the young people’s tendency to say things like “In my day, we didn’t have iPhones, we only had regular cell phones” and join Facebook groups like “I used to have to blow on my video games to make them work” and all the other vaguely kitschy, soapbox navel-gazing that makes me think that this high-pace nostalgia both A) has no place in a world of lightspeed technology and B) is an inevitable byproduct of it as well.

But I am still not okay with these books being edited to fit “contemporary interests” and re-released. There is no need to trade analog for digital here. But better an edited re-release than none at all, because like I said in the Ballet Shoes review, it might greatly benefit today’s thong-wearing, Twilight-guzzling tween ladies to read books in which bake sales, self-employment and wearing your boyfriend’s letter jacket are as exciting as anything needs to be. Even bitchy Lila from Sweet Valley High pales in comparison to little freshman Jenny from Gossip Girl and the sex-capade adventures that she gets up to at boarding school. The framework is identical, almost–it’s just that where Ann M. Martin opened every book by describing Kristy’s baseball cap and Mary Anne’s braided pigtails, Cecily von Ziegesar opens every book talking about the glitzy New York skyline and Jenny’s huge tits.

So while there are a ton of great children’s and young adult books still being written, there’s nothing like The Baby-Sitters Club, a series very grounded in reality. In these books, the families are real and complicated (remember how strict Mary-Anne’s dad was, and how Kristy’s parents were getting divorced, and how Stacey had diabetes–an unglamorous but very real and fantastic detail that would never make it into a book today). The BSC girls had strong personalities and political interests even in middle school–Dawn was an anti-gun vegetarian–a stark contrast to blank-slate, passive Bella of the Twilight books. And it’s important that, while the Baby-Sitters Club is not a fantasy of privilege or a fantasy at all, it was still totally exciting. It showed us that after-school activities and (kill me) good clean fun can still be girly and fascinating. I mean, last year my roommate and I got home from bars and tried to order a dozen copies of #15 – Little Miss Stoneybrook and Dawn off eBay. This shit was good.