A playful resolution for 2006
January 1st, 2006
Ordinarily, I avoid New Year’s resolutions, but during my holiday break reading, I found one that delighted me. In the 1934 edition of The Children’s Almanac of Books and Holidays, Helen Dean Fish gives this New Year’s advice: “Resolve to read at least a dozen good children’s books next year, and make a list of them now.”
I have not made my list for 2006, but at the moment, I am re-reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. I wonder if anyone else ushered in the new year with an old favorite as well …
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1. Nik | January 5th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
Great idea!
2. Denise Roman | January 24th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Growing up in Eastern Europe, I’d read Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, Brothers Grimm, Carlo Collodi, Edmondo de Amicis, Jules Verne, Hector Malot, Mark Twain, L. Frank Baum, Robert Louis Stevenson, Petre Ispirescu, and Shahrazad.
They left an enduring mark on me to this day: I see the world beautiful, innocent, promising.
This is also what I try to express in my latest fantasy novel for children, MARIA DRACULA www.mariadracula.com). That is a coming-of-age fairy tale about a ten-year-old apprentice witch and orphan from Salem, Massachusetts, who discovers that she is the great-granddaughter of Dracula — Maria Dracula.
I guess, as writers possessing a hybrid diasporic sensibility, we instinctively bridge novelty and old style, the newly-found home and the lost one, the stories we learn as adults and the ones we’ve heard as kids.