CSM: Dickens anyone?

TheDad · January 17, 2007, 1:00am

Hindoo, I’m glad that I finally read DAVID COPPERFIELD. When I was a lot younger, I wouldn’t have had the patience for it or some of the other books I mentioned. Fwiw, I’m not a classics snob but I am a “well-written” snob according to my own standards. Will re-read the Harry Potters sometimes this year, etc. Otoh, I think ENDER’S GAME is one of the most manipulative & counterfeit works of SF its wide popularity notwithstanding.

I’m re-reading the Jasper Fforde (his real name) books right now, starting with THE EYRE AFFAIR…the main character is a detective named Thursday Next who winds up having to go into the Bronte novel, meeting Rochester when he’s not on the page, while in pursuit of the stolen original manuscript of MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. Fforde is both serious and Pythonesque at the same time…I commend them highly.

TheMom and I had a great sight gag last year if only someone had noticed. We were on a flight to a wedding and I was reading PRIDE & PREJUDICE and she was reading LONESOME DOVE…crossing up gender expectations.

mathmom · January 17, 2007, 7:54am

I read *Hard Times *for school - but it was a course in British history not English. The teacher was one of the best I’ve ever had.

fendrock · January 17, 2007, 8:15am

My 15 year old daughter has read ever teen chick lit volume ever published, Gossip Girls, The Clique, etc.

In her case, I can easily judge a book by its cover as something she will like.

I hope that she will expand her horizons one day.

Her 13 year old sister very seldom reads. I recently had in the house the autobiography “Stranger at the Gate: Being Christian and Homosexual in America” and she read that, though.

Go figure.

My 8th grade daughter is reading “Animal Farm” for her school reading group. My 10th grader is reading “Walden” for her American Lit class, they have already read “The Scarlet Letter,” among other things.

They assign Twain in our school system, not sure about Dickens though.

P.S. I am a voracious reader and we have tons of books in the house, but it has not rubbed off as I would have hoped.

JHS · January 17, 2007, 9:22am

Yes – Orson Scott Card was the author whose name I couldn’t remember yesterday.

So, for the 14 year-old boy, I second all the recommendations so far: Card, Pratchett (for smart wise-asses), Harry Potter, Stevenson. I’m glad that DSP’s son liked Tuck Everlasting, which is one of the most beautifully written children’s books ever, but I wouldn’t push it on a reluctant reader.

Some other suggestions, mixing sophisticated kid lit and kid-friendly adult lit:

Haroun and the Sea of Stories. See my post above. I think both of my children regard this as their favorite book from childhood. Written for Rushdie’s 13-year-old son at a time when Rushdie could not have any contact with him for well-known geopolitical reasons.

Any of the Edward Eager books: Half Magic, Knight’s Castle, Magic By The Lake. Very clever, and a good wick into other literature (see if you can avoid reading Ivanhoe after Knight’s Castle, although Knight’s Castle kind of presumes that you have read Ivanhoe first).

Tolkein. This was the gateway drug for reading for most of my friends. In retrospect, there are a lot of problems with the way the trilogy is written, but I didn’t notice them until I was in my 30s.

Kurt Vonnegut. Not so much Slaughterhouse Five, but Cat’s Cradle, Mr. Rosewater, Sirens of Titan . . .

Kage Baker. More philosophical, interlinked, world-creating science fiction/fantasy.

Phillip K. Dick. There’s a reason people keep making movies out of his (pretty short) books.

Ian Fleming (James Bond). This is what got me reading adult stuff, and my son still swears by it. Not so hot in the appropriate-attitude-towards-women department, but it hasn’t seemed to hurt him. (Avoid The Spy Who Loved Me and its clumsy, upsetting explicit sex scene.)

Tony Hillerman. Very good philosophical, multi-culti mysteries. Some of the early books, and all of the last few, are a little weak, but I recommend Dance Hall Of The Dead, Listening Woman, and then the progression from Skinwalkers to Coyote Waits and Sacred Clowns.

Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide etc. Similar to Pratchett, maybe more accessible.

William Goldman, Marathon Man and The Princess Bride. I would LOVE to teach Marathon Man to 9th graders – for a thriller by an A-list screenwriter, it is extremely literary (the whole fabulous first third of the book turns on an effect that could never be duplicated on film).

Ursula K. LeGuin. The Earthsea Trilogy-plus-one is excellent fantasy, and The Left Hand Of Darkness and The Dispossessed are two of the best (and best written) philosophical science fiction books ever. Always Coming Home is a stunning book, but too sophisticated in method for a beginner.

and . . . another gateway drug for lots of boys . . . much easier to get through than Lady Chatterley (thanks for reminding me, marite), and great for reconciling a kid to a little archaic language: The Memoirs of Fanny Hill. I don’t know if you want to GIVE it to your son, though, so much as leave it lying around the house the way my parents did.

FountainSiren · January 17, 2007, 10:09am

In what sense?

JHS · January 17, 2007, 10:15am

In the sense of having long, turgid passages that don’t actually make sense. It would be easy to do for Tolkein what Mark Twain did for James Fennimore Cooper – take a couple of paragraphs, read them phrase by phrase, and tee off on the logical inconsistencies and odd bending of space and time.

I’m not saying I don’t love Tolkein (or Cooper) – I do. It’s just that when I read The Lord of the Rings to my kids I realized that, page by page, it wasn’t all narrative gold.

Hanna · January 17, 2007, 10:17am

For the 14-year-old boy:

Last of the Mohicans is a great page-turning adventure. It’s packed with action and violence from page 2 onwards. Same with the Count of Monte Cristo.

He also might love two books I’d recommend to anyone, age 9 through senior citizens: Roald Dahl’s two volumes of autobiography, Boy and Going Solo. Again, they are action-packed, with great story-telling, and lots of the gross-out humor and darkness that turned up later in his fiction. Highlights include school beatings, black mamba snakes, and flying fighter planes in WWII.

Another great, unsentimental memoir is Richard Wright’s Black Boy.

If he likes mysteries, a collection of Arthur Conan Doyle’s best Sherlock Holmes stories should hold his attention.

Ain’t that the truth. I had to read Dreiser’s An American Tragedy in 11th grade, and I couldn’t believe that this guy is considered a giant among American authors. He takes 800 pages to tell a 100-page story. At the end of the class we watched the movie version (A Place in the Sun), and they easily fit the whole book into two hours without taking anything out. A picture’s worth 1000 words, and Dreiser used all 1000 to describe every picture in the damn film. My dad loves Sister Carrie, but I just think the man writes like he was getting paid by the word.

drb · January 17, 2007, 10:25am

Any recs on the girls side?

JHS · January 17, 2007, 10:27am

FS, you were probably waiting for me to say that there are no decent female characters (other than tranny tomboy Eowyn), and that there is an unpleasant association of evil with swarthy (or even darker) men from the south, some of whom have elephants. That, too, I guess, but that’s stuff you can talk about with kids, so it never bothered me much. The world of fantasy lit is chock full of plucky, intrepid girls, and Earthsea’s Ged is explicitly black, so LOTR’s misogyny and racism don’t mean as much as they once did.

(I’m not that big on political correctness in literature. I just admitted that I encouraged my kid to read James Bond and 19th Century porn.)

FountainSiren · January 17, 2007, 10:29am

Thanks JHS,

I have not read LOTR but my 8 year old brother is in the middle of reading it. I have, otoh, read Twain’s dismantling of Cooper; Pedantic but appropriate, I suppose and with Twain’s wit, even this pedantry is quite entertaining.

FountainSiren · January 17, 2007, 10:32am

You have, I believe, a low perception of your public persona ;)

The thought hadn’t crossed my mind.

coureur · January 17, 2007, 11:16am

Galadriel?

Also, Eowyn isn’t a tomboy (i.e. masculine) so much as she is a clever and motivated young woman who dresses up in men’s clothes to in order to enter the world of men and sort out the problems better than they do. We see women of this type over and over again in Shakespeare – Portia, Viola, etc.

Also from Shakespeare: Gollum = Caliban.

The part about the LOTR that hasn’t aged well is the portrayal of races – the good guys always have white skins and and bad guys (orcs and men of the south) have dark skins.

JHS · January 17, 2007, 11:42am

Galadriel isn’t so much a character as an ideal. She’s Tolkien’s BVM – not at all inconsistent with genteel misogyny.

And of course Eowyn is a tomboy. She knows how to use a soldier’s weapons; she wants to fight; she can pass as a man. Of course, too, there are echoes of Viola and Portia (and many other similar characters), but Viola and Portia didn’t actually do much slaying. Also, they used their wits to sort out problems. As I remember it, I’m not sure Eowyn has a lot of wits.

coureur · January 17, 2007, 12:01pm

You are right that Eowyn wants to fight, but she was apparently content for a long time to live a typical woman’s life. She took up secret practicing with weapons in response to the weakness and cowardice of men. As for slaying, she still fights “like a girl” when the real battle comes. The only reason she was able to kill the Nazgul was because it was laying prostrate at her feet, having been taken down by the hobbit. Prior to that it smashing her left and right, and she was unable to even get in single blow.

TheDad · January 17, 2007, 1:19pm

I’ve read the LOTR books many times and make it a practice to, among other things, skip over Tom Bombadil’s poetry. The movies intensified a reaction that I felt even reading the books: booo!! hisssss!!! to Aragorn for not taking up with a babe like Eowyn and sticking with a clingy, sappy too-precious elf-princess like Arwen who makes my teeth ache just to think of her. I mean, married to Arwen would be grounds for going off on seven-year quests. (And what happens in Mordor stays in Mordor.)

JHS · January 17, 2007, 1:30pm

Yeah, as I said, LOTR was an important book for lots of us ex-boys.

(I wouldn’t have kicked Eowyn out of bed, either. I know I just called her a witless tranny tomboy, but that’s just because girls are a little bit scary. I’m not sure whether she likes me.)

mathmom · January 17, 2007, 1:50pm

I’ve tried to read LotM several times and I have been unable to get past its turgid prose. I know many who feel the same way. Both the old PBS mini series and the more recent movie with Daniel Day Lewis were fun though!

I did enjoy Roald Dahl’s autobiography - I think they explain alot of his weirdness and most kids have read his books in elementary school.

For reluctant girl readers (middle schoolish in age) I recommend Tamora Pierce’s Alanna books about a girl who dresses as a boy in order to be trained as a knight in a fantasy kingdom.

FountainSiren · January 17, 2007, 1:56pm

Well, what has your previous experience been with “witless tranny tomboy’s”?

I do, however, believe you should refrain from this sort of description to have even a ghost of a chance with some “witless tranny tomboy” (as you describe the little vixen in LOTR) should such an wicked opportunity as this present itself to you.

StickerShock · January 17, 2007, 2:29pm

My 10th grade d read Great Expectations this year. Also Huck Finn, Death of a Salesman, and Pompei. But in thinking about what’s been assigned at her all-girl h.s., I’d have to clasify much of it as chick-lit of mixed quality, some wonderful, some lame: Jane Eyre, Glass Menagerie, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Rebecca, The Scarlet Letter, Joy Luck Club, Secret Life of Bees, Sister of My heart, Farewell to Manzanar. Less chick-litty: Raisin in the Sun, No Room at the Table, Profiles in Courage, The Color of Water.

garland · January 17, 2007, 2:47pm

I think we have a definition disagreement here:

That’s what I hear when someone says “chick lit.” Not “has primarily women characters.”

CSM: Dickens anyone?

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