Kidding Ourselves
Posted by: Neil Hollands
The staff book group at Williamsburg Regional Library dedicated last week’s meeting to the classics of children’s literature. It was a great topic for a sun-distracted summer month. Normally, I recap each book that our librarians present at these meetings for Book Group Buzz readers, but this time we all read multiple books, so I’ll just list our choices. But you know many of these–see what kind of nostalgia this list creates for you:
Lloyd Alexander The Chronicles of Prydaine
J. M. Barrie Peter Pan
L. Frank Baum The Patchwork Girl of Oz
Lina & Adelia Beard The American Girls Handy Book
Judy Blume Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
Lewis Carroll The Annotated Alice (annotations by Martin Gardner)
Hergé
Eva Ibbotson The Secret of Platform 13
Madeleine L’Engle A Wrinkle in Time
Hugh Lofting The Doctor Doolittle series
Maud Hart Lovelace The Betsy-Tacy series
A. A. Milne The Complete Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
L. M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables
Beatrix Potter The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck (and others)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince
Robert Louis Stevenson Kidnapped
Jules Verne Around the World in 80 Days
The discussion was spirited and illustrations make these books fun to pass around. Discussion topics ranged from the value of annotations to the joy of bringing home multiple versions of the same book so as to compare the illustrations; from accusations of racism against historical children’s titles to a reclassification of Winnie the Pooh as a gifted lateral thinker instead of silly and stupid.
The most intense discussion was about where many of these books should be shelved. Where do the Verne and the Stevenson live in your local libraries? What do you do with rather adult life philosophies like those of The Little Prince when they are disguised as a gentle children’s fable? Do these classics live in the same space as current children’s titles, or since adults may read them even more often, do they belong in a special nostalgia corner?
Everyone agreed that children’s classics made rewarding reading for us still as adults, whether we were returning to an old friend or discovering a classic for the first time.
June 17th, 2010 at 7:44 pm
I am re-reading the Chronicles of Prydain for the second time and I am 20 years old. I still loves the books. They just suck you in and leave you wanting more so that you never leave the world of Prydain.