is way too vast, too deep, too fluid, at least for me." by many smart readers," but that he declined to read it because he "feared it might overshadow own thoughts about Lewis." On the one hand, it seems irresponsible to avoid a big book on the exact area he covers in his chapter on Lewis, but on the other, it shows a kind of impressive allegiance to emotional integrity over comprehensiveness, a battle he admits to have lost from the outset: "the ocean of children's books. For instance, he mentions the critic Laura Miller's The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia to say it came to him "highly recommended. What magic: the letters, unherdable cats at first, suddenly lining up nose to tail to form decipherable words - wow!"
White, "who, in Charlotte's Web, crafted a masterly novel of ideas about what it means to lead a good life and how then to face death with grace." Chapters mix biography and analysis with the sweetly personal: "Dr Seuss wrote the first book I read by myself. Seuss, Sendak, Beatrix Potter, Beverly Cleary's Ramona books ("like Henry James with much shorter sentences"), CS Lewis, and others, ending finally with E.B. Wild Things begins with books for the youngest readers: Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon, moving on through Dr. His style is emotional and intuitive, with pleasant jolts of irreverence (" Portnoy's Complaint is the Runaway Bunny turned rancid."). One scholarly book about fairy tales I recently came across was full of sentences such as this one: "With oral, polyphonic folkloric forms serving as hypotext to multivocal, multimedia hypertextual versions of fairy tales, the cumulative and communal aspects of oral culture (granted an idealized one) can flourish." Well, thank goodness for that.īut Bruce Handy's generous, warm voice is just the kind you would want reading you bedtime stories. Academic books in particular often seem like surgeries, in which each pocket of joy or whimsy is carefully located and then drained. "I'm in the milk and the milk's in me," as Sendak's Mickey says in In the Night Kitchen.īecause of that special emotional resonance, bad writing about children's books can feel not just unhelpful but like a betrayal. That anecdote feels so right, so just, and so satisfying because it implies something true about the way children's books we have loved feel internal - cellular, almost - as if we've integrated them into our bodies.
I mean, that's how primal, that's how animalistic, that's how passionate we are as small people," Sendak said in a 1991 interview with Larry King. Wild Things, Bruce Handy's new book about "the joy of reading children's literature as an adult," recounts a famous Maurice Sendak anecdote: After sending a young fan a drawing, Sendak got a letter back from his mother saying that the child had loved it so much that he ate it.
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