The Inevitable What-This-Blog-Is-About Post

This blog came out of conversations I've had with a number of other parents at my kids' school, the Chicago Waldorf School, about how to find good books to read with our kids. Or maybe it comes out of a lifelong conviction that I enjoyed the fiction I read as a kid more than any fiction I've read since. Certainly I was more deeply involved in it, identified with and thrilled to it more intensely. Yet we hear today how hard it is to get kids to read. Part of that may be that most kids are taught to read in the wrong way and get discouraged. But it also may simply be that we're trying to get them to read the wrong books.

So the intention is to make this a resource for Waldorf parents-- or any other parents-- to help them find good books. Ah, but what's a good book? First off, it's simply a matter of pleasure. Every book should leave a child more willing to read the next one. Secondly, well, we know it when we see it as parents. A good book should be reasonably well written from a literary quality standpoint, present a view of the world that engages the imagination, and sketch multidimensional characters with whom your child can empathize. Pretty obvious stuff and, in the kids' book world at least, you can usually judge a book by its cover-- commercial series books and movie tie-ins almost invariably fail at the reasonably well written and multidimensional characters part, for instance. (They may scratch an itch for the kid who absolutely has to read every Babysitters' Club book or a Star Wars story this instant, but ultimately they don't engage deeply enough to encourage reading as a lifelong habit and joy.)

There's one other thing that I think is crucial to a book a child will love: an absence of adult didacticism. Needless to say the market for kids' books is strongly shaped by librarians, whose purchases are strongly shaped by attitudes toward the social value of reading. The result is that too many books for children, even (or maybe especially) award-winning ones, give off a strong whiff of social work-- they're about broken families, drugs, poverty, the Holocaust and Jim Crow, etc. (I summed them up on another site once as "books called things like Buster, the Holocaust Dog.") Now, there's a time and place for all that, and there's a certain very empathetic and concerned age in the teenage years when intense social concern is totally appropriate. But I absolutely reject the idea that we need to force this sort of thing on 8-year-olds.

And so does the Waldorf school movement, for all its frequent interest in social concerns. Waldorf, for those who don't know about it, is hard to describe as a methodology because it's different things at different ages. But that right there is its main characteristic: the teaching evolves to meet the needs of the child, who needs an ordered, black-and-white universe at some ages and a questioning, challenging one at other ages. It doesn't force more mature concerns on younger children before they're ready for them. First and second graders need stories about heroes, triumph, simple good and evil. That doesn't mean they'll see the world in those terms forever, but it's a stage in their development. So if we find ourselves with a society full of kids who don't read, one of the answers may well be that we have created a society full of kids who associate movies and video games with the action and adventure and heroism they crave-- and books with a drab, depressing realism too much like their own lives.

For these reasons, if there's one rule I've developed for finding good kid lit in a bookstore, it's this: Buy any children's novel written between 1925 and 1970 that's still in print. These years, I've come to believe, are the golden age of American and British kid lit. Not only do the obvious masters-- Roald Dahl, E.B. White, etc.-- fall within this time period, but nearly every author good enough to still be in print today wrote to a standard which guarantees pleasure. They were past the didacticism and faerie stories of the Victorian era, but before the didacticism and pseudo-hipness of the post-60s era. They turned out good, imaginative stories for the pleasure of the thing itself, and wrote with an assumption that the reader could be talked up to, not dumbed down to. Yet at the same time, coming from that "more innocent" time, the books can be counted on not to introduce violence or other adult themes to children not yet ready for them. In the best sense, these books let children be children and explore the world at their own pace and level of readiness, not have the adult world thrust on them too soon.

So back to the purpose of this blog-- to identify good books that will please kids, aged roughly kindergarten to middle school. The methodology for this is simple: I read books to my 8-year-old and 5-year-old, both boys, and when I've read one, I'll write about it. (Needless to say, I have a substantial backlog to start with of books we've already read.) The reviews will reflect not only how I feel about the book but how it was received by my own kids-- the more important audience, needless to say. And I will be happy to publish others' reviews as they are submitted-- send them to mikegebert-SYMBOL-gmail-SPOT-com. (Hopefully you, but not spambots, can figure out the email address from that.) Now on to books!