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Tag Archives: Children’s literature

The Best Little Find In The Library Discard Pile

08 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

bargains, books, can lit, canadian authors, Canadian Literature, children's books, Children's literature, first edition, great finds, jean little, kate, library, library discards, mine for keeps, signatures, signed books, signed first editions

So, we were at the library, and on our way out we stopped to browse the discard pile because we can’t help ourselves. It’s a sickness.

Anyway, I made a couple of good finds, including another Indian In The Cupboard book that I never knew existed: The Key to the Indian. I had always thought the story ended with The Mystery of the Cupboard in 1992!

We were also horrified to find a book on “Healing Homosexuality,” which we decided to buy just so that no one else would.

And then, just as we were about to go to the cash, I spotted a Jean Little book.

I love Jean Little.

Her books are a little dated, in that her characters go to church and don’t use computers (somewhat ironically since she has used advanced voice recognition software to write all of her books since 1985), but the warmth and the heart in them is timeless.

If you’ve read any of her books, you probably know Mine For Keeps, a book about a girl with Cerebral Palsy who gets a dog and gains some self confidence in learning how to train it.

She wrote it because she was tired of books like The Secret Garden and Heidi, where the disabled character miraculously gets cured for no obvious reason.

She wanted to write a book about a kid with a real disability, who overcomes it without being cured.

That’s the kind of person she is.

I grew up on her books, as well as her autobiography, Little By Little, in which she describes what it was like growing up during World War II with severe vision impairment and a passion for books.

She talks frankly about the teasing she received and speaks honestly about her own personal flaws – hesitancy, fear of new experiences, a compulsive love of books despite being legally blind, and even occasional flights of fancy verging on dishonesty.

Jean as a child was someone you could love and bond with – someone fallible, but also someone deeply special. I always thought of Jean Little as a friend, growing up. I would love to meet her some day, but considering that she lives in Ontario, that opportunity has never arisen.

Anyway, this book was called Kate, and was the sequel to a book I already own. I remember Jean talking about it in her second autobiography, The Stars Come Out Within, in which she documents the loss of her remaining sight and the joy of getting a guide dog.

So of course I glommed onto that book in two seconds or less and handed it to PH.

Jean Little books aren’t always easy to find. I’m still trying to get my hands on a copy of Willow and Twig, one of her newer ones and also one of my favourites. Book stores rarely have it in.

“Uh…” PH said, flipping through the book. “Look.”

He held it out, open to the frontispiece, and I saw that someone had scribbled on it with marker, making a happy face and some barely legible words.

“That’s okay, it’s not on any of the other pages,” I said.

“No, look at it.”

I looked.

20130331-133632.jpg

Did the last two words say… Jean Little?

“I think this book is signed by the author,” said PH.

“I doubt it, that looks more like a kid’s scri… Oh. RIGHT.” I felt like an idiot. “She’s blind.”

We stared at the scribble and the happy face. Was this a kid scribbling about Jean Little and drawing a happy face?

Or was this signed by JEAN EFFING LITTLE, a woman who is now completely blind and can’t even see the paper she is writing on?

We bought the book and left clutching it possessively.

When we got home we did some googling.

We couldn’t find any pictures of recent signatures. I did find this picture:

20130331-133621.jpg

That is a signed first edition of Mine For Keeps, clearly signed when she still had some sight.

But compare the two signatures. Sure, mine is a lot messier, but the J is the same, and the L, and the words are written in cursive, which I don’t think kids even know how to do these days.

PH also made the following discovery:

“Keep reading a little,” is one of her preset phrases that she writes.

I JUST BOUGHT A SIGNED JEAN LITTLE BOOK FOR A DOLLAR TWENTY FIVE.

I mean, it isn’t definite.

People forge signatures on books all the time, it’s a problem.

But as much as I adore Jean Little, she’s no JK Rowling. Her signed books aren’t worth hundreds of dollars. Thirty dollars, forty maybe. Nothing worth forging. And the “keep reading a little” is a known catch phrase of Jean’s.

It’s signed by the author.

AND THE LIBRARY DISCARDED IT.

Oh, and here’s the kicker:

20130408-075837.jpg

That’s right. A FIRST EDITION book signed by the author.

…For a dollar twenty five.

20130408-075853.jpg

Life makes me happy, sometimes.

Rowling vs Meyer: As Requested

29 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by IfByYes in Shhh, I'm Reading, TwiBashing, Well, That's Just Stupid

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

book reviews, Children's literature, feminism, Harry Potter, literary criticism, literature, sexism, Twilight

   VS   

Much like the Bella Swan vs Jane Eyre post, this is one of those posts that seems (on the surface) to be completely unnecessary.

I might as well make a post about why Saturday is better than Monday, or why music is better than construction noises.

And yet, there IS a need (not the least because people seem interested in it).

Harry Potter and Twilight are often lumped into the same category by two groups of people: People Who Haven’t Read Harry Potter and Idiots.

The reasoning?

  1. JK Rowling and Stephenie Meyer are both thirty-something mothers who wrote a story and hit the jackpot.
  2. Neither of them was a professional writer before they hit it big, unlike authors like Stephen King, who carefully carved their way into the writing business short story by short story, edited paper by edited paper.
  3. Both of them got the idea for their story seemingly by divine inspiration: Rowling with a mental image of a boy wizard on a train, and Meyer with a dream about a horny vampire.
  4. Both series deal with fantasy.
  5. Both series are attractive to young readers, and were excellent at getting 12 year olds to turn off their Xboxes for a while.
  6. Both series have spawned a set of hardcore fans who are, quite frankly, a little odd and fanatical (although Harry Potter fans argue that they use much better grammar than “Twihards”).
  7. Both series have spawned extremely popular and high-grossing movies, moving the phenomenon out of the bookstores and deeper into pop culture.

The exterior similarities are such that those who have read neither series tend to view both as pop culture nonsense; so much litarary slush blown far out of proportion to their worth.

These people are only half right.

Twilight is all of that. With writing reminiscent of fan fiction, and less polished than you would find in your standard Harlequin romance, Twilight is slush. I congratulate Stephenie Meyer on her success, but slush it is none the less.

The Harry Potter books, on the other hand, are modern classics which belong on the shelf next to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia. If anything, I find them more entertaining than Tolkien and richer (and less didactic) than Lewis.

The only thing that Stephenie Meyer shares with C.S. Lewis and (sometimes) Tolkien is sexism.

So that will be my focus of my first rant.

“First rant?”

Oh yeah, well, I tried to write a single post about all the ways in which Harry Potter is amazing and Twilight is not, but it was like trying to cram the UNIVERSE into a teaspoon.

This is the best I could do:

[vimeo vimeo.com/26881967]

So… yeah, I’m going to be breaking this up into several rants.

Hope you’re cool with that.

Next: In Which Stephenie Meyer Confuses Feminism With Kung Fu.

THESE FOOLISH MEN

02 Sunday Aug 2009

Posted by IfByYes in Shhh, I'm Reading, Well, That's Just Stupid

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Children's literature, Harry Potter, Inanity abounds, movies, Shhh, I'm Reading

They just don’t get it, do they?

They think that they’re exploiting a fad. They’ve taken a fun adventure story about magic and wizardry, and make millions by translating it to the big screen. They think these books hit a zeitgeist, and that the creative and often funny world of Hogwarts is simply a matter of CGI effects and epic punch lines.

These foolish, foolish men. They understand nothing.

Harry Potter was a classic from the moment it was published. My mother, who is a raving Anglophile, gave me a copy of Philosopher’s Stone for Christmas when I was 17, saying “they’re very popular in England.” I love children’s fiction, so I wasn’t as offended as some 17 year olds might have been at being given a book that was clearly marketed for the under 12 set. I gobbled that book in a day, and then bored my friends at school by raving about it. They didn’t get it. So the kid’s a wizard. That’s nice.

…then Pottermania hit Canada, and suddenly all my friends were on a first-name basis with characters that I had known and loved for several years. It was amazing and delightful.

Why do my friends, who have no interest in Dahl or Lewis or Cleary or Pullman or any of the other children’s books that I breathe like air, love this particular set of books?

The answer is because they are amazing. These movie producers think it’s because of Quidditch and Every Flavour Beans, and maybe it is, a little. But Harry Potter was an instant classic because it is filled with those timeless themes of human existence – love, sacrifice, mistaken first impressions, the contrariness of human personality, and finally… triumph over those who would hurt us.

Watching Half Blood Prince last night, I got the distinct feeling that the people who wrote the screenplay and directed the film had asked some English majors “What are the themes of Harry Potter? What is the heart and soul of the story? Of all the story lines in this book, which are the most vital to the meaning of the book?” and when they had their answer, they said “Okay. That’s what we’ll cut out.”

If they had done it by design, they could not have been more successful at cutting out the heart of the story, and leaving a hollow, empty shell.

The themes of Harry Potter are simple (Spoilers coming):

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