KIDDY LIT DISSED — PULLMAN DISTRESSED

From: YaleBooks

“‘We love great literature,’ it said. ‘We are excited by writing that changes the reader, and ultimately – even if it is in a very small way – the world. We love writing that is full of ideas, but that is also playful, funny and affecting. You won't write mass-market thrillers or children's fiction on our programmes. You'll be encouraged to look deep inside yourself for your own truth and your own experiences, and also outside yourself at the contemporary world around you. Then you'll work out how to turn what you find into writing that has depth, risk and originality but is always compelling and readable.’
     By the time I saw this, a number of children's writers including Philip Reeve had already protested. At first, the University couldn't see the problem. I tweeted the screenshot so everyone could see it and judge for themselves. It was picked up by the Guardian Children's Books feed, then by writers such as Patrick Ness and Michael Rosen, and is still being retweeted every few minutes, often accompanied by expressions of outrage and dismay.”

Earthsea, by Ursula LeGuin, is
considered one of the best books ever
written for young adults.

— Philip Pullman, The Guardian (Books Blog)
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Here’s a list of classic children’s literature…

Buy all or any of them here...

Food, Shelter, Clothing, Kindness

"FALLS CHURCH, Va. — E.L. Konigsburg [February 10, 1930 – April 19, 2013], an author who twice won one of the top honors for children's literature, has died. She was 83.

     Her son Paul Konigsburg says the longtime Florida resident died Friday at a hospital in Falls Church, Va., where she'd been living for the past few years with another son. She had suffered a stroke a week before she died.
     She won the John Newbery Medal in 1997 for her book The View from Saturday and in 1968 for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The Newbery is one of the top honors for children's literature. Her family says she wrote 16 children's novels and illustrated 3 picture books.
     Her first book, Jennifer, Hecate, MacBeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth was also a Newbery honor book in 1968, making her the only author to be a winner and runner-up in the same year.
     In 1997, the Newbery committee called her story of a sixth grade Academic Bowl team and their coach 'a unique, jubilant tour de force characterized by good humor, positive relationships, distinctive personalities and brilliant story telling.'"
— Huffington Post Read more…

"[Scholastic Books:] Why is it important to do random acts of kindness?

I think it's important to experience kindness, so that you can experience it more in the future. I believe that patterns of emotional behavior are set down before adolescence. And I think that if you have not observed kindness, you will not recognize it. You have to experience kindness in order to be kind. And you have to lay down those emotional pathways.
     For example, they're finding that kids coming out of those awful orphanages in Romania have never experienced kindness. When they're adopted, they cannot bond with people and experience kindness, because the pathway has never been laid down inside their heads. I think that as our population grows, it becomes increasingly important to be kind."
— E.L. Konigsburg (From an interview with Scholastic Books)
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You can get all of E.L. Konigsburg's books here...

Caveat Lector

"[G.P.] Taylor [bestselling children's author of the Vampyre Labyrinth series] believes it is necessary to establish an age-ranging system for children's literature – despite the fact that the idea was mooted by children's publishers four years ago to widespread protests by authors. 'We've got Dickens with Oliver Twist who was abandoned by his parents and went off on a journey. We've got the Famous Five whose parents were quite neglectful and who went off on a journey. There was always safety. They never went as far as they did today. I think the way forward is a certification system for books, the same way we have in films,' said Taylor. 'For children, we've got to be really careful. [And] we've got to have a guide for parents.' [...]
     His views were roundly rebutted on BBC Breakfast by the writer Patrick Ness, who earlier this summer won the Carnegie medal for the second year running for his novel A Monster Calls, about a boy whose mother has cancer and who is visited by a monster.

     Ness welcomed the darkness in the literature written for teenagers today, and rejected the idea of age-ranging children's books. 'All you have to really do is read what teenagers write themselves, and I've judged competitions for teenagers writing and it's darkness beyond anything I would come up with,' said Ness. 'Teenagers look at this darkness all the time, and I always think if you're not addressing it in your fiction then you're abandoning them to face it themselves.'"
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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Get books by G.P. Taylor and Patrick Ness here...

The Fictive Dream

"The first Blyton book I remember reading, as a child of Sri Lankan immigrants growing up in small-town Canada, was Five on a Treasure Island. In it, four kids and a dog search for a cache of gold while avoiding grown-ups, dungeons, and other dark forces. I read other Famous Fives and Adventure books before coming to a disorienting realization. The kids in these stories were supposed to be white. I had assumed they were brown. These were, after all, stories my mother had read while she was growing up in Sri Lanka. I naturally assumed they were set there, and I populated them accordingly.[...]
     [David Rudd, a professor of Children’s Literature at Bolton University in the UK] told me that 'Most adults look on Blyton as someone they loved, but when they go back and try to read her they find her reprehensible in many ways,' which include simplistic, repetitive stories and bland characters. Formal weaknesses aside, I asked him if he also thought she represented British children’s holiday adventures as the impossible-to-have ideal of childhood experience itself, particularly for young readers in the colonies. He allowed that the books are based on 'a British middle-class sort of place from the 1950s and 1960s,' but the colonial readers he interviewed 'didn’t see England as such' in them.
     Instead, many tended to 'supply their own local vegetation, etc.' When I told him that I once thought Blyton’s books were full of brown kids like me, he wasn’t surprised. 'Everyone sort of inhabits the hero’s role.' "
— Randy Boyagoda, The Paris Review
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Buy all of Enid Blyton's books here...