Breezes from Wonderland

“Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/12/05/111205crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1f1ZK9Cez

Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker article on fantasy touches on children’s fascination with other worlds.  Below a book on how children, ages 8-14, construct their own alternate realities and imaginary geographies.  The authors point out that these worlds are not compensatory, that is, they are not built by introverts or children who lack social skills.

David Cohen / Stephen A. MacKeith,: The Development of Imagination: The Private Worlds of Childhood

Click on the link below for the trailer:

Snow White and the Huntsman

Are those orcs in the battle scenes?

Animals have always been good to think with,and these three new picture books rework Aesop’s fables in interesting ways.  Below the link to my review of the books in the NYTBR.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/books/…

In 1484, William Caxton, the man credited with introducing the printing press to England, brought Aesop to English speakers — and we’ve been reading him ever since. Aesop has been a part of the nursery for so long it is hard to imagine a jailed Socrates, awaiting execution, deciding that nothing is more important than turning the Greek slave’s fables into poetry. Like the stories Plato called old wives’ tales, these fables have become part of the cultural bloodstream, passing wisdom from one generation to the next.

Here’s Alice Munro on H.C. Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”  In The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, I referred to Claire Bloom’s memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House.  There, Bloom confesses that she gave in to the Little Mermaid complex, embracing the view that love meant pain and suffering: “I believe that the stories my mother quite innocently passed on to me, The Snow Queen and The Little Mermaid, so innocently read to me years ago in a sunlit garden, stories of one young girl after another who had sacrificed herself at the altar of romantic love . . .  had given me an extremely distorted image of sexual relationships between men and women.”

Alice Munro tells a different story.  She read “The Little Mermaid” and was “appalled”:  “She didn’t have to be changed to foam on the sea.”  And so, Munro made up her own happy ending, because she had to “do something” about what she had found.

Even better, Munro tells us about her childhood fascination with beheadings.  It reminds me of my own childhood obsession with Michael Strogoff, fueled by its horrors, in particular the practice of burying people alive.