January 19, 2024 On Children's Books Caps for Sale By B.J. Novak Photograph courtesy of B.J. Novak. I’ve noticed that a striking number of the best children’s books have been written by people who had no children: Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight Moon). H. A. and Margret Rey (Curious George). Maurice Sendak. Dr. Seuss. I have a theory as to why. If you don’t have kids, you can only really experience the book from the child’s point of view. Parents can’t help but have all kinds of agendas when they read a book to their child. And who can blame them? As long as the child is a captive audience, why not teach them about something? Like patience, or the alphabet, or Who Simone Biles Is? The best children’s books teach none of that. They aren’t advertisements for anything—not even the important things. They’re an advertisement for reading itself; for the entertainment value of the world itself. Read More
November 22, 2023 On Children's Books In the Beginning By J. D. Daniels Photograph by J.D. Daniels. I don’t remember learning to read. There is a story in my family: I am still a small child, my mother carries me in her arms as she stands in line at the bank, the bank teller sees my long golden hair and says, “What a pretty little girl.” I say “I am a boy, Janice,” and Janice screams and faints. This was in the seventies in Kentucky, the years of The Exorcist and The Omen, the era of demonic children on-screen. Janice, primed by horror movies to see the supernatural in everything, was unable to imagine a less exciting explanation. It was impossible that a child so small could have read her name tag. It is not lost on me that this myth of learning to read frighteningly early is, at the same time, about my indignant insistence that I am a boy. Nor is its brimstone whiff of my family’s demonic flavor lost on me. When my mother’s brother Charles Edward died, she told me, “He was the devil, John David, and you are just like him.” Read More
November 7, 2023 On Children's Books Child Reading By Timmy Straw Photograph by Timmy Straw. In childhood, books have a smell. Not an actual smell: I’m not talking about the sweet mustiness of a Knopf hardcover circa 1977, or the creaking sawdust odor of a Bantam paperback. I mean that, in childhood, books have the hunch of a smell: the way, later in life, you might suspect that each thing has a noumenon, a reality independent of our apprehension of it. In childhood, a given book’s particular smell—though it might actually smell, like snow, of absolutely nothing—emits a kind of hovering mysterious message: here is something you can give yourself up to, it seems to say; here is something you can give yourself over to, and at the same time never quite reach. In this sense, in childhood, books are more serious than they’ll ever be again. Read More
October 2, 2023 On Children's Books On Peter Pan By Laurie Stone Scene from Mabou Mines Peter and Wendy with Karen Kandel. Photograph taken by Richard Termine. I remember reading Peter Pan as a kid, a version based on the 1953 Disney movie—based on J. M. Barrie’s story. It turned me on. I’m six or seven, and I’m flipping through the pages, and there’s a picture of Peter with his arms crossed and his back to Wendy. He’s angry with her for some reason, and it turned me on. The words, the image, the anger? All of it, some kind of thrill-ball a kid has no words for. All kinds of people become aroused, in one way or another—when we’re children and when we’re old. It doesn’t start or stop. Aliveness is erotic, the senses awakened. Everyone knows kids get turned on by this thing or that thing without instruction by adults. If you want to know why people lie about this fact and pretend that children—and often female humans along with them—start out sexually “innocent,” I can refer you to Nietzsche, who blames Christianity. Sexual feeling is anarchic, sudden, and sometimes inconvenient. It can’t really be contained. What to call the feelings you don’t have words for? A kind of fainty, oh my God what is this sensation I wouldn’t have spoken about. It wasn’t because I was masturbating. I didn’t learn to masturbate, so I could come, until after I’d had sex. I’m twenty, maybe, when one day I say to myself, “If he can do that, so, probably can you.” Read More
September 19, 2023 On Children's Books The Cat Book By James Frankie Thomas Cat Playing by Oliver Herford. Public Domain, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. What’s your favorite Dawn Powell book? I’m beginning this way because critical essays on Dawn Powell always emphasize her obscurity, her failure to achieve fame or fortune in her lifetime (1896–1965) despite her enormous output. Just once, I want to skip that part. Let’s pretend I’m writing this from a parallel universe where Dawn Powell is the literary legend she deserves to be, where everyone knows the story of the Ohio-born New Yorker whose sparkling, lacerating fiction distilled the spirit of the city. And maybe you really do have a favorite Dawn Powell book. Mine is A Time to Be Born (1942), no question—the other day I was rereading it in the park and attracting stares because I kept laughing at its farcical scenes and snappy one-liners (“They couldn’t have disliked each other more if they’d been brothers”). But you might instead be partial to The Locusts Have No King (1948), or to her luminous short-story collection, Sunday, Monday, and Always (1952). Or maybe you prefer The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965, which weren’t even written for publication (they weren’t printed until 1995) but rank among her funniest work. If you love those diaries and have a trollish sense of humor (which, if you love Dawn, you probably do), you might give me a joke answer: Your favorite Dawn Powell book is Yow. Yow was Dawn Powell’s first and only children’s book project—as she put it in her diary, “a story to be read aloud.” All its characters were cats; the conceit was “a complete cat-world with humans as pets.” She wrote it in 1950. No, 1952. Actually, 1954. Make that 1955. Okay, 1956. Just kidding. Yow doesn’t exist. Or, rather, it exists only in the diaries, as a project that Powell is constantly on the verge of starting. She spent the final sixteen years of her life resolving over and over—for real this time!—to write “the cat book.” Even on her deathbed, Powell refused to give up on Yow. “Drying up, weak, no appetite,” she wrote in one of her last entries ever. “Will take liquid opium plus pills I guess. God how wonderful if I could get some writing done—if, for instance, I could knock off the cat book just for fun.” Read More