http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/us/08picture.html?scp=1&sq=picture%20books&st=cse

The New York Times reports that children’s picture books have become “unpopular” and that publishers have “gradually reduced the number of picture books they produce for a market that had seen a glut of them.”  Jon Scieszka reports that his royalty checks have been “shrinking.”  At the same time, the Young Adult market has been flourishing.  The reporter, Julie Bosman, attributes the decline to parents pressing their young children to leave picture books behind and move on to chapter books.

I wonder if picture books really are on the wane.  Sales of Sendak and Seuss are evidently going strong, suggesting that the winner-takes-all syndrome may hold especially true during an economic downturn.  Picture books are expensive, and I suspect that many parents are turning to the robust secondary market in used bookstores and on Amazon.com.  And why not set up a swap system with other parents or with relatives when a book can cost up to $25?   For chapter books, the price point is quite low, and it doesn’t really pay to buy a book that costs $5-6 on the secondary market, since shipping charges are $3.99.  In short, I don’t doubt that sales of picture books are down, but I am skeptical about the assertion that parents are making the transition to chapter books sooner than they once were.  I have a clear recollection of my own resistance to chapter books (like Alice, I wondered what the use was of a book without pictures and conversations), and I doubt most children will stand for being rushed into chapter books.

Here’s my recommendation: Go to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts, and browse through their incandescent collection.  Ask for Andy, who will match you up with the exact book(s) you want.  He pulled Sarah Moon’s Little Red Riding Hood off the shelves for me, along with a few other volumes that were just what I wanted.  Try Ruth Sanderson’s radiant Goldilocks, which ends with a recipe for blueberry muffins, or Jane Yolen’s hilarious Sleeping Ugly.

It’s the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird, and everyone seems out for blood. In the Wall Street Journal, Allen Barra compares Harper Lee to other Southern writers, and finds her wanting: “And as for Harper Lee—Alabama born, raised and still resident—she doesn’t really measure up to the others in literary talent, but we like to pretend she does.” Only a few weeks earlier, Malcolm Gladwell complained that Lee’s novel reveals the limits of Southern liberalism: “A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb, Alabama.” Does any novel really instruct us about “the world”? Don’t we learn about a specific time and place, and how a heroic character may be ahead of his time but not necessarily ahead of ours? Much of what makes Atticus great is that he is a flawed hero, growing up in a world that does not share our own understanding of social justice. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/10/090810fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

Digs like these are not new. Back in 1960, Flannery O’Connor wrote, after a friend “insisted” on sending her the book: “I think I see what it really is–a child’s book. When I was fifteen I would have loved it. Take out the rape and you’ve got something like Miss Minerva and William Green Hill [a children’s book set in a small town in the South]. I think for a child’s book it does all right. It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book. Somebody ought to say what it is.”

I’m reminded once again of Philip Pullman’s high-wattage Carnegie Medal Acceptance Speech, in which he said:

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book.

The reason for that is that in adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult writers who deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no one expects literary craftsmanship.

But stories are vital. Stories never fail us because, as Isaac Bashevis Singer says, “events never grow stale.” There’s more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy. And by a story I mean not only Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk but also the great novels of the nineteenth century, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Bleak House and many others: novels where the story is at the center of the writer’s attention, where the plot actually matters. The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They’re embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do.

In the novel itself, Miss Maudie explains to Scout why Atticus declared that it was a sin to kill a mockingbird: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out of us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

One popular edition of To Kill a Mockingbird includes that extract on the back cover and describes it as “a lawyer’s advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee’s classic novel–a black man charged with the rape of a white girl.” That seems a real stretch to me, and Atticus’s wisdom seems flattened by that statement. In the context of the recent assaults on Harper Lee’s novel, I can’t help but think that one way of understanding Atticus’s words is to imagine the mockingbird, master of mimicry, as the writer herself. Unfortunately, that makes the rest of us bluejays.

“Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em,” as Atticus puts it.

Are kids tethered to electronic devices? Tarmar Lewin writes in the New York Times that the “average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/education/20wired.html?scp=1&sq=children%20awake%20online&st=cse

Here’s my question: are adults tethered to electronic devices? And why is there a sudden moral panic about children texting and talking on their cellphones when adults spend so much of their time doing the same thing? Are kids getting older younger? Are they exposed through electronic media to words and images that even they do not want to see? What is lost in the transition from print culture/books to Kindles, Nooks, and i-pads? Will children get lost in stories? Can they still practice what Tim Wynne-Jones calls the deep read?

“The deep-read is when you get gut-hooked and dragged overboard down and down through the maze of print and find, to your amazement, you can breathe down there after all and there’s a whole other world. I’m talking about the kind of reading when you realize that books are indeed interactive. . . . I’m talking about the kind of deep-read where it isn’t just the plot or the characters that matter, but the words and the way they fit together and the meandering evanescent thoughts you think between the lines: the kind of reading where you are fleetingly aware of your own mind at work.”

These are some of the questions we considered this week in my class on Childhood. For the first time, I began to have the feeling that the medium affects not only the message but also rewires our brains. Is there such a thing as deep reading in an age of electronic devices. When I read books on a Kindle, I have a slightly eerie sensation: the words seem to disappear as I “consume” them. But who knows–that may change over time as I become more adept at using the various features on the device.

Lauren Edelson worried last week about how college tour guides deliver condescending pitches about how their schools resemble Hogwarts. Not a bad thing in my book, especially when you have seen schools that bear no resemblance at all to Hogwarts. Still, she makes a good point about how high school students are longing to grow up and out of Hogwarts: Leaving home and beginning life in a new place is a nerve-racking experience, and nothing seems more reassuring than imagining that college will be the realization of a fantasy world I’ve been imagining since childhood. Obviously colleges have picked up on this. But they’re trying too hard. They’re selling the wrong thing. And my friends and I won’t be fooled. After all, Harry Potter is frozen in high school, and we’re growing up.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06edelson.html

I was sold on her argument until Dani Duggan (Weston High School) weighed in: What I still don’t understand is why Ms. Edelson thinks “selling” Harry Potter is a problem. As my dad says, you’re old for a very long time. So what’s the harm in a little magic?

And apropos Harry Potter in College, CNN.com has an interesting piece on Pottermania in the college classroom and interviews students who are taking a range of courses in which J.K. Rowling’s series is read.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/03/25/cnnu.potter/index.html

Lois Lowry’s picture book Crow Call may be set in November, but it makes a perfect Christmas gift. Illustrated by the Russian artist Bagram Ibatoulline (The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and Thumbelina, among others), it follows father and daughter on a hunting expedition that takes them from home, through the woods, and back again. In the middle of those woods (and in the precise middle of the book), Lowry describes, with characteristic understatement, an encounter that transforms both adult and child. It was fascinating to me how deeply Ibatoulline understood the story, turning to photographic realism on the very page that captures the fears of the father during his time in the combat zone and the anxieties of the daughter in times of peace.

Lowry alluded to “Little Red Riding Hood” in Number the Stars, and this story too reminds me of the power of a girl, a hunter, and an encounter in the woods. The elements of the fairy tale are configured here in an entirely new way and anchored in the mode of psychological realism. The relationship between father and daughter becomes poetically emblematic, revealing the “groping toward understanding each other” of parents and children (as stated on the last page) as well as the complexities of the human condition (our conflicted relationship to nature and to men and women from other nations and cultures).