2010 Wrap: Books, Part 3

As an adult reader, I go for relatively little new fiction, in favor of older writing. I figure the cream of the crop has had more time to rise to the top, and certainly there's no shortage of classics that my schooling and personal reading have still left untouched. Given my extremely limited reading time (I am a parent of young kids, after all), my chances of striking literary gold seem stronger with that stuff.

Yet with children's books, in terms of what’s available in print, the choice has generally been between the giants of years past (Sendak and Ingalls Wilder and Seuss and the like) or the brand-spanking-new. Almost all the middle ground is out of print, only to be found with the help of a good local librarian. (Or such is my perception.)

Things have been changing, though, largely thanks to the New York Review of Books Children's Collection, which continues to publish five or so of their trademark beautiful hardcover reissues of forgotten out-of-print kids' titles every year. It appears 2010 was an early-1960s year: We got E. K. Spykman's sparkling, offbeat 1960 chapter book Terrible, Horrible Edie; Marjorie Winslow and Erik Blegvad's infintely charming 1961 cookbook for dolls, Mud Pies and Other Recipes; a whimsical 1963 fable from Rhoda Levine and Edward Gorey, Three Ladies Beside the Sea; and Alastair Reid and Bob Gill’s 1960 picture-book paean to creative imagination, Supposing. Everything NYBRCC selects to republish is of such high quality, and the volumes are such gorgeous little gems of book production (just the right amount of old-fashioned), that I've come to anticipate every new reissue—if you’ll pardon the oxymoron—with only slightly less eagerness than readers of Dickens's serials must have awaited the continuation of his novels.

Other publishers seem to have caught on, at least with regard to their own backlists; the year saw a number of compilation volumes of greatest hits past. David Macaulay reached back to some of the books with which he first made his name—the classic architecture-for-kids titles Cathedral, Castle, and Mosque—dusted them off, and updated them for the marvelous Built to Last. Sara Pennypacker's neurotically hilarious Stuart books got a (remarkably affordable!) three-book compilation edition as well, The Amazing World Of Stuart.

I hope the trend continues and enlarges; there's still an awful lot of good material out there waiting to be rediscovered. (Not to harp on it, but I'd certainly be obliged if some helpful publisher would reprint the personal childhood favorite I mentioned a post ago.) In the meantime, I'll go wait for the next scrumptious NYRBCC title.

Coming in part 4: Can gross-out books for boys be literary?

[Images: Courtesy of New York Review of Books Children's Collection (Supposing, Edie) and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Built)]

New Books: The Amazing World of Stuart

I can’t say I was all that focused on children’s books before our first child was born in 2004. So my knowledge of the field since my own childhood, but prior to that year, has been largely limited to what’s already made the canon—Mo Willems, and that Harry Potter guy, say. I often wonder what I (and thus my sons) have missed out of sheer ignorance.

Libraries are one solution to the problem, of course, and we’ve made many discoveries from those distant 1990s there. Another is recommendations and gifts from friends who have older kids or better research talents; favorites like Peter Sis’s Madlenka and the previously mentioned Who Needs Donuts? came via that route.

But publishers are doing their part to further my education as well, and a recent reissue just became the latest passion of my five-and-a-half-year-old. The Amazing World of Stuart is simply two short books in one volume: Stuart’s Cape and Stuart Goes to School. They came out in 2002 and 2005, respectively, and were written by Sara Pennypacker, an author I was in fact familiar with (via her sublime Pierre in Love). I was, however, completely unfamiliar with the Stuart books.

Each of these two short chapter books is, of course, about Stuart, a young grade-schooler who’s just moved to a new town and is about to start at a new school. He is a worrier, obsessing about all the things that could go wrong as a new kid in a new place. Luckily, he’s also imaginative, and he uses his powers of invention to both avoid and (kind of) face his troubles, real and imagined.

The trick of the books, beyond Pennypacker’s endearingly wry tone in general, is that there’s no change in the narrative when Stuart’s imagination takes over. When he designs a magic cape and is subsequently visited by three wild animals, who inform him that he’s been playing “wild animal” all wrong and then take a turn at playing Stuart themselves, it’s really happening, as far as this book is concerned. The noise in Stuart’s closet that his parents yell upstairs to complain about? It wasn’t Stuart—it was the bear. Honest.

Pennypacker weaves this kind of fantasy through the reality of Stuart’s first days in his new town (during which he also starts flying all of a sudden, and later finds that his pet cat has switched places with the local garbage man, all thanks to the magic cape) and first encounters at school (which include an adventure with portable holes that’s reminiscent of the late Heinz Edelmann’s work on the Yellow Submarine movie). In Stuart himself, she’s created a neurotic go-getter, a seeming oxymoron that’s actually a pretty realistic portrayal of a certain type of 10-year-old. It’s all delightful, and Dash was hooked immediately; this was one of those “let’s read it again” books from the start.

Not that this is the main criterion I use for kids’ books, but The Amazing World of Stuart is also stunningly inexpensive, even for a fairly thin paperback. I’m unused to paying less than $5 for just about anything that gives either of my children this much pleasure!

[Image courtesy of Scholastic]