50 Book Challenge 2017 Part Three

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the third thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2017, though reading fifty isn't mandatory. Any type of book can count, it's not too late to join, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.

The first thread of the year is here and the second one here.

@ cheerful. I love "I am all astonishment" almost as much as "Are you not diverted?"

My husband read P&P last year as we did a thing of reading each other's favourites and he thought it was the best book he'd ever read and loved it. Our marriage was allowed to continue. It reminds me, I must actually get around to reading his favourite

What is his favourite, Satsuki?

Cheerful - re children's lit (by which I mean actual children, not "YA" or even teenagers)

"I agree that obviously a child's world has different concern's to an adult's - you don't get many children's books about mid-life-crises, the problems of retirement... But children don't live in a separate world to adults. They live in this world."

Actually, they do live in a different world than adults'. What they get from the events going on around them is very limited, because they have no knowledge of many necessary points of reference such as sexual desire.

Children's world is simple, with clear differences between right/wrong, good/bad etc. Children's books (not YA but books written for actual children) are written in the same manner. Protagonist is good, everyone loves her, she loves everyone, even if there is some problem, it is resolved and everyone goes home happy. Even in the atypical Grimm tales, children are good, wolf and witch are bad, etc.

"They (Children) suffer as much trauma, bereavement, loss and fear as adults do - ... abuse, complex moral battles in which the children are central, bastard fathers who don't want to see their kids any more and mothers posting things like 'I don't like my child'."

Nobody said children don't suffer. Of course, they do. Still, their world is simple and their understanding of what goes around them is very limited. Daddy hurt me, help mummy. I'm confused, why does mummy not help me, etc. Besides, children books are not written for the minority who are traumatised with abuse. They are written for the naive majority living simple lives where happiness is mummy's cuddles and chocolate.

I am not a child and don't want to spend time reading books written so that a little child will understand and enjoy them, whatever their themes and plots are. Other people's tastes may of course be different.

I keep thinking of Diana Wynne Jones' essay about writing for children vs writing for adults - suberic.net/dwj/medusa.html

Oh, I love that, glitterbrained. (And her Doctor Who comparison is quite true - eight-year-olds have no problem understanding Doctor Who, no matter how confused their parents get.)

Cote, if that's what you think children's literature is like, I quite understand why you don't read it. But it honestly isn't - or most of it isn't anyway. (There's as much dross written for children as there is for adults, of course.)

I am torn between a deep-held belief that people should be allowed to read whatever the hell they want and an urgent desire to thrust a reading list on you immediately.

I'm not going to read a whole "reading list" but feel free to give me your best shot. I'll read one

Okay. Philip Pullman's 'Northern Lights' - it's topical at least, as he's just announced a new one.

I read it. That was 2012 (before 50-Book threads) so no proper review, unfortunately. I read its 2 sequels shortly thereafter.

Those books are YA, though, not what I was talking about as "children's books" - i.e. written for actual children = pre-pubescent, around 5-10.

Polyanna and Pippy Longstocking (children's books written for actual children) are not at all the same kind of book as Hunger Games, for example, which is written for teenagers at the very least.

I take no leave of you, 11122aa. I send no compliments to your mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased.

I still think Lord of the Flies is a bit shit though.

I agree that Philip Pullman's Dark Materials are a good example of childrens literature being read at different levels. I bought them for my nephew, who was on reflection a bit too young for them at the time. I didn't read them until a few years after him and I was horrified at the content. Speaking to him about them, he genuinely hadn't picked up on some of the darker themes and took events at face value.

I'm reading Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I'm now back at work, so I may be some time.

Just finished 10: The Book Thief

Been on my shelf forever, and read it fully expecting to be blown away, moved, distraught, uplifted etc etc and generally love it. Actually I was fairly underwhelmed. It was fine, there was a good story in there somewhere and yes at times very moving, but I felt the pacing was all off, didn't like the death as narrator hing as just didn't see what it added over and above just telling the bloody story, and was really irritated by the whole 'this happens in a bit by the way, ok I'll go back and tell you the intervening few months and then tell you again the thing that happens that I've already told you happens'. Again, just tell the bloody story.

Pride and Prejudice is average?!? The horror!

11122aa Did you ever watch the BBC adaption? What didn't you like about the book?

Ooh, this might be where your problem lies - if everything you think is too complicated to be for children counts as YA, I can see why nothing for children is to complicated.

If you look in Waterstones, the categories are 6-8, 9-12 and YA. Pullman isn't YA - you'd find him in 9-12, although I agree he's the upper end. 10-13ish, maybe.

I have a slight problem in that a lot of the books I'd class as complicated 9-12 do sit at that upper end of the age bracket - 10-12 - books like The Eagle of the Ninth, or Watership Down, or A Wizard of Earthsea. I read them at primary school, and again, you won't find them in the YA section (except Watership Down, which I always found bizarre for a book about talking rabbits). But I strongly suspect if I ask you to read The Eagle of the Ninth, you'll tell me it's a YA novel (its hero is a young centurion and, to be fair, I think it probably would be published as YA now). It was written for - and is read by - children though.

How about Philippa Pearce's 'A Dog So Small'? Its introduction, I believe, says they tested it on a handy nine-year-old before publication.

Sorry, that grin doesn't quite look right there. I was looking for a tongue-in-cheek smiley, but Mumsnet doesn't seem to have one.

remus It is Money by Martin Amis. I can't quite bring myself to be in the mood for it.

The Secret Garden has a child protagonist who is a little cow for most of the book, no one likes her and she doesn't much like anyone, her parents are dead and happiness only comes at length when she learns to make relationships with other people and put others needs before her own. So not good/bad happy=Mummy and chocolate, just off the top of my head. Tottie - yes there is good and bad, but there is also getting burned up in a candle to sacrifice yourself for someone you love Horrific. My favourite author of non-classic children's fiction was Vivien Alcock. They were very weird, I'd like to reread some of them.

One thing I like about children's books is that the absence of stuff like sexual desire and limits on violence means an author has to actually develop character and be creative with plot, and not just dole out sex and gore when they don't know how to fill it, which is a complaint I often have with adult fiction.

How about The Secret Garden, Cote? That's a proper children's book (I think I was around 7 when I read it).

Cross post re The Secret Garden!

I'm too young to have watched the 1995 adaption. I might some day but I'm not sure I could Manage six hours of it through all the dialogue probably works better on the screen than the book.

20. Dear Amy - Helen Callaghan (I think - that's the author- not near my Kindle and the wifi in this holiday cottage is so dodgy I daren't move!)
Parts of this were good. I started off hating it. The fact the lead character was a senior teacher in a top secondary school but never seemed to do any work outside school, was always leaving at the same time as the students and managed to run an agony aunt column in the local paper, some what galling and unbelievable. But that was just me and probably those not in the teaching profession wouldn't bat an eyelid.
There is a very big twist which I didn't see coming but although the idea had potential it never seemed to really get going.
Re: children's books - Goodnight Mr Tom still one of my favourite ever books.

I think really good children's books can evoke a mood that children respond to, even if they don't fully understand. They can grasp the existence of a shadowy hinterland, even if it's not yet mapped out.

I'm thinking of The Borrowers series, by Mary Norton. I knew there was an underlying plangency about a vanishing way of life, and a sense of background events not completely known, and there is also something in there about class, and the struggle between duty and freedom, but I felt those things long before I could articulate them.

I also have great affection for Helen Cresswell's Bagthorpe Saga series.

On P&P - I think JA created a template that has been so often followed that it's not always immediately obvious that this is the Urtext.

Cheerful - "Ooh, this might be where your problem lies - if everything you think is too complicated to be for children counts as YA"

Um... I haven't said anything of the sort.

Pollyanna is clearly for actual children (pre-preteen) whereas Hunger Games is clearly for at least a teenage audience, with themes such as sexual desire, intentional violence, and especially state oppression. I hope we can agree that those are not themes that 5-9 year olds would have a snowball's hope in hell of following.

Incidentally, DD read the Hunger Games trilogy last year when she was 10 and I got these faces >>> from her friends' parents who thought they were not appropriate for her age. She enjoyed them but a lot of the story passed over her head, like I thought I would.

"If you look in Waterstones, the categories are 6-8, 9-12 and YA. Pullman isn't YA - you'd find him in 9-12, although I agree he's the upper end. 10-13ish, maybe."

My understanding of the category YA is that it means teenager/adolescent, possibly preteen depending on the themes & accessibility of the book. Your description "Upper end 10-13ish maybe" sounds like YA to me, especially since 13 is in fact teenager. So you agree with me that His Dark Materials is YA.

I see online that His Dark Materials is taught at English Lit to 11-16 year olds, which fits in with what I have been saying re it's for teenagers (YA) and not actual (rather than 'legal') children.

Against my better judgement and despite seeing that it's all about a child and a garden, I got Secret Garden so will tell y'all how that goes

Bibliomania Yes, I'm sure that's true re: P&P. And yes, I nearly suggested Cote read
The Borrowers. And hurrah for the Bagthorpes!

Satsuki - "One thing I like about children's books is that the absence of stuff like sexual desire and limits on violence means an author has to actually develop character and be creative with plot, and not just dole out sex and gore when they don't know how to fill it, which is a complaint I often have with adult fiction."

We must be reading from completely different parts of book stores. I have not read a single book (at least in the past 20 years) where "sex and gore" are used to make up for shortcomings in character development and plot

High five, Cheerful!