Children's Books to Read While Drunk...

...Yes, I realize that title is a bit of a desecration. But please, allow me to explain...

This past Saturday night, I was at a lovely party in Brooklyn with a handful of college friends, and as the night progressed, and the drinks flowed, we naturally became less and less adult. We giggled effusively at Mad Libs (where my contributions ranged from "duodenum" to "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed", leading to their use in extremely odd context), and around 12:30am, the host decided that it was time to pull out a few titles from her collection of children's books. (She works in children's publishing, but beyond that, she's just awesome.) Emptying our wine glasses, we proceeded to turn a previously fun evening into an utterly hilarious one--somehow diving into the simple, enthralling narratives of the picture books was the best possible entertainment we could have found. Even in an age where picture books are becoming less and less popular, they still are perfect models for the short-short story: usually 30 pages or less, with concise and evocative language, they are the petit fours of literature, and make for a ridiculously fun Saturday night.

Our selections for the night, and perhaps one we should've added to the list...


Miss Rumphius, story and pictures by Barbara Cooney: I think every girl has some kind of attachment to this book, and not just because it's the most lovely wistful portrait of an elderly single lady ever written. The central ideal being, you can travel the world, and build yourself a lovely home, but the final step is figuring out something you can do to make the world a more beautiful place. In this story, it's Miss Rumphius deciding to scatter lupine seeds throughout her little seaside town, and ultimately becoming known as "The Lupine Lady." Is there any more lovely expression of what it means to lead a joyous, generous life?

Whatever by William Bee: This is actually a rip-off of the very wonderful Maurice Sendak book, Pierre: A Cautionary Tale in Five Chapters and A Prologue, but I don't think you can ever have too many books about annoyingly indifferent children. The one qualm we had about this one is that the boy's enthusiastic pleasure seems to take his son's ultimate demise in stride. Even in children's books (which should be light with the tragic touches), this was a little disconcerting...

A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound, by John Irving, illustrated by Tatjana Hauptmann: Fans of John Irving will recognize this story's presence in his novel A Widow for One Year (and its movie adaptation, The Door in the Floor.) What Irving had to say about adult writers of children's stories in that book was quite ominous, and this story gave us all chills. It perfectly captures that frightful waking in the night when you hear a sound that you can't quite place running through the walls and around your room. Very haunting, powerful story, with equally haunting illustrations to boot.


Donald Has a Difficulty by Peter F. Neumeyer and Edward Gorey: Any evening that includes Edward Gorey is a win in my book. Poor Donald has a splinter in his foot, and his mother distracts him as she removes it with a needle, urging him to think of markets, strings, and battles. The splinter is removed without a care, yet when his mother daubs the wound with alcohol, Donald lets out a shriek of pain. A classically dark and twisted (yet utterly benign) Gorey tale.

The Story about Ping, by Marjorie Flack and Kurt Wiese: This is when we knew that the drinks had kicked in, because it was impossible for us to get through this without additional giggles. The story of a little duck chasing his family's home boat down the Yangtze River caused us to wonder if this lovely little picture book wasn't in fact a pro-Communism missive designed to enchant impressionable children.
Tadpole's Promise by Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross: Believe it or not, this is actually a book about mature adult romantic relationships. A tadpole and a caterpillar fall in love, and promise each other that they will never change. Yet one day, the tadpole sprouts two legs, then two more, and his caterpillar breaks up with him and goes off to cry in her cocoon. The tadpole sits on his rock, bemoaning the loss of his "beautiful rainbow", even after enjoying a snack of a tasty butterfly. Gorgeously illustrated, this is a lovely yet sobering story about the inevitability of change.

As we left the party, I wondered how all these children's stories had come to move us so deeply. Was it the wine, or was it a deeper desire to go back to the days of storytime? Then I thought of a final children's book that has never lost its resonance for me, and knew that it would have to be included in the next party's reading...


Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst, illustrated by Ray Cruz: Is there any children's book that has ever been so spot-on about the trials of everyday life as this one has? Poor Alexander suffers a wide range of disappointments--he wakes up with gum in his hair, there's no dessert in his lunch, he doesn't get the striped sneakers he wants, and he has to watch kissing on TV. He briefly considers moving to Australia. But as his mother reminds him, everyone has bad days, even the Aussies. And Alexander is a reminder to us all that sometimes, you just have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, and tomorrow may be better.

T is for Tuesday so dark and so bleak

Last night, as part of a birthday present from my boyfriend, I saw Natalie Merchant perform at the Wellmont Theatre in Montclair, New Jersey.

There are a lot of things you could say about this concert, and a lot of reasons that New Yorkers should go to see her at the end of the week in Town Hall. Merchant’s dancing is completely unexpected, and incredible. She has a surprising number of redneck fans, whose behavior during the concert made me feel like I was among the groundlings at Shakespeare’s Globe. (Okay, not a reason to see her perform, but definitely an observation of the night.) And Merchant acts like everyone’s mom onstage, clearing clutter, chastising the band, asking them how her food was during rehearsal. By the end of the concert, I wasn’t sure if Merchant’s band members have the best jobs in the world or the worst.

And since I also attended the free She & Him concert on Governor’s Island a week ago, I found myself dreaming of an M. Ward/Merchant collaboration. Merchant, who maintains more presence and energy twitching a single hand than Zooey Deschanel does in leaping across the stage, and Ward would be well-suited in their penchant for punishingly long concerts (last night clocked in just under three hours of Merchant and only Merchant).

Anyway, none of these things has much to do with literature. What is relevant to this blog is that Merchant’s set (pre-encore) consisted entirely of songs from her newest album, Leave Your Sleep, which are all children’s poems that she set to music. You can see the full track list here; I thought there were some bland entries, including this e.e. cummings poem. Since, as my boyfriend noted, Merchant mutters most her lyrics, rendering them largely indecipherable, why make them, for the most part, so gentle? Why not pick a few more controversial ones?

Here are the poems (about, not for, children) that I imagine still wouldn’t make the cut.

5) “The Author to Her Book,” Anne Bradstreet

“At thy return my blushing was not small,

My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
The visage was so irksome in my sight.”

4) “Ave Maria,” Frank O’Hara

“they will know where candy bars come from

and gratuitous bags of popcorn

as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it's over

with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg

near the Williamsburg Bridge”

3) “Stillborn,” Sylvia Plath

“O I cannot explain what happened to them!

They are proper in shape and number and every part.

They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!

They smile and smile and smile at me.

And still the lungs won't fill and the heart won't start.”

2) “Out, Out--,” Robert Frost
“The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then -- the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little -- less -- nothing! -- and that ended it.”

1) “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” Edward Gorey
“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs
B is for Basil assaulted by bears
C is for Clara who wasted away
D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh”

Note: Gorey's poem is made much more horrifying by this film.

Enjoy the poems, and happy Tuesday!

Breed to Read: How Children's Books Make us Readers

A few weeks ago, I was bemoaning the state of reading today: too few readers, too much competing for our attention, too little enthusiasm about great books. "The people who love to read are starting to die off or age out of reading for pleasure," I said to my boyfriend, an avid reader himself though a scientist by trade. "Well," he said, "people just start having kids, so they can replenish the waning population of readers." I laughed. "True," I said. "It could be a government-sponsored program. Breed to Read: the best reason to give birth since the Italian government would pay you for each kid."

He was kidding, of course. And as was I . . . but as I thought about it, it started to make more and more sense. There's nothing that'll get a child-phobic 20-something talking about their future parenting plans than what they want to read to their kids. "Definitely The Lord of the Rings," one friend said. "And Anne of Green Gables," chimed in another. "Oh, and for everything Roald Dahl ever wrote. I'll be reading those out loud with my kids," chimed in twenty other currently childless people.

What we read as children influences our reading tastes as adults far more than we know. Before I learned to love Vladimir Nabokov's word play, I memorized most of Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends and Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky. Before I discovered the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, I was knee-deep in the folktale-inspired stories of Maurice Sendak and Tomie dePaola. It took the emotional acuity of Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary to set me up for the quiet introspective plotting of Ian McEwan and John Updike. Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet Welsch and Lois Lowry's Anastasia Krupnik were my heroines, and they primed me for the kind of strong female characters I would seek out in adult fiction (and rarely find).

As a child, I was easily influenced by what I read: the stories I encountered helped me form my own concept of how the world should work. Many critics have noted that the most influential and well-regarded children's books tend to expose adults as fallible and often cruel--several of Roald Dahl's works portray adults as tyrants, and imagine that children possess secret talents (Matilda's brilliance, James's bravery) that no ordinary adults will be able to perceive. These books made me feel powerful, and so reading them became addictive. Children who love to read will read almost anywhere —in the car, in the bath, while walking through crowded public places. (It was E.L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler that got me to stop resenting museums; why no one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has turned this into a children's tour, I will never know.)

Children who read are more than just readers, they are rabid readers. They are the ones who sustain traffic in bookstores, who clamor at free books on the sidewalk, who get hooked on audiobooks during long car rides. As Laura Miller at Salon notes, even having books around the house makes the kids in their vicinity smarter. If reading becomes a life-long obsession, they will remain committed to reading as they get older, and even after the required reading of college and graduate school fades into the distance, they will still see books as a means of entertainment and imagination, not as burdensome or time-consuming. Of course, the onus to make these children into readers falls first and foremost on their parents: if you read with your kids, and you get them to talk about what they're reading, their language skills will be stronger, their understanding of the world will be broader and more substantive, and their curiosity will only grow with age. And, inevitably, they will become far more interesting adults, and it will benefit everyone they come into contact with, including your future grandchildren. (Yes, we're thinking ahead.)

So for all the non-child-bearing readers of this blog, a nice thought to leave you on the weekend: breed to read. Raise your kids and any kids you meet to love books as much as you do, and keeping pay it forward.