Children's Literature: Wrapup and Post-1960 Bonus

By -
It's the end of January and sadly, the end of our celebration of classic children's literature.  I hope you read The Princess and the Goblin, or read some other children's classic and blogged about it, or maybe put some titles on your TBR list.  I've had a lot of fun digging through my memory for favorite books and authors, and I've learned a lot about those authors while I was researching. 

 
Our rules stated that we would keep to books pre-1960, but I do want to include two   three  four last authors for you to make sure to read.  They are a little more recent, but not by much!


Joan Aiken--well, everybody's read The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but there are 12 books in the series and they're all pretty fantastic (in both senses of the word).  Aiken's alternate history for Britain includes Jacobean kings and Hanoverian plotters who want to take over the throne with improbable schemes.  (I often have to think hard to remember that there was no English king called James III--or Jamie Three as his friends call him).

But my very favorite Aiken books are about Arabel and Mortimer, and I always seem to be the only person who knows them (well, not now that I've given the books to half my kids' friends as birthday presents), so I'm going to tell you too.  Arabel is a lovely sweet little girl who deeply loves her horrible pet raven, Mortimer.  Mortimer's adventures are enormously funny and guaranteed to tickle children in just the right spot.


Jane Langton--Langton has a great knowledge American history and philosophy, and her children's books blend those interests with magic.  The Diamond in the Window is about a brother and sister who start to follow a trail of magical dreams set up years ago...but a sinister power changed the dreams into traps that once caught another pair of children.  Langton continued the series with several other books, and they are both unusual and fun.



Edward Ardizzone--he was mostly an artist and illustrator, but also wrote lovely picture books.  Some of them are part of the Little Tim series, about Tim who wants nothing more than to be a sailor.  On his voyages, he makes friends with Ginger, Charlotte, and dog Towser, and is frequently shipwrecked.  Peter the Wanderer is a stand-alone title about Peter who meets a sailor, who then drops his most precious possession.  Peter pursues the sailor for weeks and months, barely staying ahead of the sinister men following him.



Jean Merrill--her book The Pushcart War is a favorite of my daughter's, and won a Horn Book prize too.  The truck companies in New York City have hatched a conspiracy to drive all other traffic off the streets, but the little pushcart owners fight back with a Pea-Shooter Campaign.  Merrill is also the author of my all-time favorite picture book, The Elephant Who Liked to Smash Small Cars.  Is that not the most perfect title anyone ever came up with?




And that is the end of our celebration.  I hope you liked it!  As you can see I've done little other blogging this month, and I have several books to tell you about.  I can also share the wonderful news that as of today, the Bookstore has reached its funding goal and will stay open! 

Comments

  1. S.January 31, 2013 at 1:46 PM

    Jean, you have done a *fantastic* job on all the children's authors posts! Bravo!

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanJanuary 31, 2013 at 4:46 PM

    Thanks so much! I hope they're useful to people. I liked putting them together and hoping that maybe I could help keep these books in people's minds for a little while.

    ReplyDelete
  3. amanda @ simplerpastimesJanuary 31, 2013 at 5:16 PM

    Four more authors I've never heard of! (No, not quite true--I've heard of The Pushcart War but not the author.) I've had so much fun reading all your posts this month and learning about new authors and books. I hope you had as much fun writing them!

    ReplyDelete
  4. JeanJanuary 31, 2013 at 5:34 PM

    Thank you Amanda! I did. :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more