Home » Posts tagged "Goosebumps" (Page 4)

What Banned Books Week Really Means

It’s kind of interesting to look at the opinions, or lack thereof, of the authors of banned books on censorship. R.L Stine, author of the Goosebumps series and many, many other books both scary and funny, doesn’t seem to have much to say. The Goosebumps series was #15 on the list 100 Most Banned/Challenged Books,1990-1999, and was still in the top 100 for the list for 2000-2009, and just last year was challenged in Kirbyville, Texas. But in interviews, he’s rarely asked about censorship of his books, and the most I could find was a comment from him from a chat on CNN that attempting to ban the Harry Potter books was “silly”. Maybe when you’ve written as many books as he has, one person, or school, or library, taking one book from a series with 100+ titles seems pretty insignificant (I’d love to really know what he thinks).

Stephen King, whose book Cujo has been challenged and banned in the past, has made it clear that he opposes book banning, but he’s also said that he doesn’t see it as a major issue. A writer writes, and if he’s defending his books, then he’s not writing. I get that, but he also says he believes a defense should be mounted– but by whom? In a speech he gave titled ” I Want To Be Typhoid Stevie” in 1997 he said that when his books are challenged or banned, he tells kids this:

Don’t get mad, get even… Run, don’t walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.

His philosophy hasn’t really changed too much. I don’t totally agree with him– I think it’s important for kids to stand up for their right to read, and while you certainly can find at least some of his books there (he’s written so many), not everyone has easy access to a library or bookstore where they can easily acquire a challenged or banned book, or owns an ereader (you can now buy his books online, and some of them are only available as ebooks). Maybe if you tear the house apart you’ll find that your dad has a secret stash (which is how I first tripped over King’s books). Or maybe not. If he doesn’t protest challenges to his books, and kids don’t, who in a divided community will provide that defense? A school librarian may be an amazing advocate who carries the day… but it scares me just to think about doing it myself.

But, he points out, and I think this is a point well taken, in the United States, we all have the right to protest a challenge to a book, or a book banning, to give copies of a banned book away openly (as the Kurt Vonnegut Library did in a recent controversy over Slaughterhouse-Five), or to acquire a banned book without persecution. There are parts of the world where that isn’t possible, and times in history when it has been vigorously enforced. Even though we aren’t living in one of those places, or through one of those times, and even though banning books is a serious issue here, he notes in a 1992 essay:

There are places in the world where the powers that be ban the author as well as the author’s works when the subject matter or mode of expression displeases said powers. Look at Salman Rushdie, now living under a death sentence, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in a prison camp for calling Josef Stalin “the boss” and had to run for the west to avoid another stay after he won the Nobel Prize for “The Gulag Archipelago.”

I discovered that Banned Books Week inspires defenders of human rights, who fight for freedom of speech and freedom of expression for writers and journalists who are witnesses to oppression and who live in or write about these places. In America, our right to stand up for the freedom to read resonates throughout the world. In the world of school librarianship, connectedness, collaboration, and social justice are essential concepts to share. Something for all of us to think about is the way Banned Books Week affects not just individual challenges here, but human rights around the world, and the courage to fight for freedom of expression in the face of danger. If you visit our Pinterest board on Banned Books, I shared links there to some organizations that contribute to continuing that fight, and I hope that you’ll check them out. And many thanks to Mr. King to providing quite a bit of food for thought.

 

Posted on September 30, 2012 by , Reply

Is Any Book A Good Book?

Well, the answer to that question is obvious, I think. Of course not. Some books are just not very good. As a review site, of course we discriminate between what makes a story worth reading, and what doesn’t. Otherwise, what good would we be as a resource for readers and librarians? We all have limited time and money for books.

But MonsterLibrarian.com is just that. A resource. People see what we have to say and make their own choices based on that, and probably also recommendations from friends, colleagues, Goodreads, and other review sites, advertisements on the Internet, catalogs and flyers in your mailbox (if you’re a librarian) and reviews in magazines and publications of various kinds. You choose where you’ll go for recommendations, and who you’ll trust to direct you to the “next good book” as we like to say here. I hope you choose to come here and take advantage of our hard work.

To go a little further, is any book that gets people reading a “good book”? I think Dylan, the Monster Librarian, would say yes. And this is a philosophy that I see a lot. Are the Twilight books good books? They got a lot of people reading. That’s a good thing… but are they good books? I think the writing is pretty bad, so I’m going to say no, I don’t think they are. Would I buy them for my YA collection, if I were buying for one? With such high demand, you’ve gotta give them what they want. You don’t take books out of the hands of people who are desperate to read them, especially if this is the first time they’ve ever really wanted to read a book. And I do know people for whom Twilight was the first book they read from cover to cover. But not the last.

I don’t especially like the school of thought that says “well, it’s okay to let them get the bug with R.L. Stine, because at least they’re reading, and that will transfer into a love of great literature in the future”. Maybe, but that’s condescending to those kids. Stine doesn’t even pretend that his books have classic literary value. Like a lot of series books, his books use fairly simple language, predictable structure, and cliffhangers at the endings of chapters to keep kids going. Not everything kids read is great literature, even in the classroom. If you have seen some of the little phonics readers kids use you know that is not even expected. “I put my hat in the van. I put the map in the van. Dad gets in the van”. Simple language, predictable structure (no cliffhangers, though, sadly). We can share the cool books that aren’t Goosebumps or Twilight without seeing them as just a stepping stone. They’re where the reader IS. And maybe the reader will be there for a long time. There are enough Goosebumps books and knockoffs to last the kid who wants them or needs them for a very long time.

But there are also a lot of other books– fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels for kids that are funny and suspenseful and unbelievable. And someday kids will be done with Goosebumps, just like kids from 30 years ago eventually outgrew the series adventures of Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield and kids from 60 years ago eventually outgrew Nancy Drew to go on to other kinds of books. Maybe their interests will take them in the direction of new, similar series and genre fiction(which is often, despite its disreputable status in literary circles, extremely good) and maybe their reading will be shaped by other interests and experiences. Some of those books might be food for thought– but maybe not the ones we might expect. And some may be pure escapism (also maybe not the ones we might expect).

Not every book is a good book. But sometimes it’s enough to tell a good story, one that fits readers at their particular time and place. But those books don’t exist in isolation, even if the reader has a narrow view. Put those stories in the midst of many, and let serendipity take us on its meandering course on the shelves and through the stacks, whether that’s in the classroom, in the library, or at home.

Posted on September 19, 2012 by , Reply

Pictures That Storm Inside My Head: Outside Over There

I’m stealing the title of this post from a poem that appears in a book of the same name to discuss Outside Over There, and there’s a reason for that.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the movie Labyrinth. In it, Jennifer Connelly has to enter the realm of the Goblin King (David Bowie) to save her brother (the movie will be discussed as part of the next Parental Advisory podcast).The movie is, in part, inspired by the works of Maurice Sendak, and, in particular, his 1981 book Outside Over There. The plot of Outside Over There is very similar– in it, 9 year old Ida’s baby sister is stolen by goblins, and Ida must journey into “outside over there” to find and rescue her.

Sendak said in an interview that Outside Over There is the last of three books created to acknowledge the inner world of children, which is often chaotic and feels out of control (I’m paraphrasing radically here). The other two books are Where The Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen. Of the three Outside Over There is, I think, the most unsettling and the most fascinating.

In Where The Wild Things Are, Max’s anger and imagination can’t be contained within mere physical walls. His escape allows him to get his out of control feelings out, to calm down and return home, a place where he can count on coming back home, to soup that is “still hot”. While it’s not a comfortable book for a lot of people, it has a comforting resolution. That isn’t the case in Outside Over There.

Ida’s parents are absent– her father is literally out to sea, and her mother is mentally unavailable. This leaves Ida with unwanted responsibility for her sister. While Ida is, in the words of my son, “busily doing something else”, goblins steal her sister away, leaving an ice baby. And Ida, at first, doesn’t notice. As her anger rises, there’s a storm out the window with a ship astray at sea.

This is the nightmare of so many parents– that their child might be stolen away. And it’s unsettling to certain children that their parents might be absent, even if they’re there; that they could be kidnapped themselves; that their sibling could go missing on their watch; that, like “Ida mad”, they could hold that terrible storm inside.

Ida goes on a journey to find her sister, but she is lost. She’s going in the wrong direction, still unable to see her sister in the goblin world of “outside over there”. When finally she turns around and finds the goblins, they are all babies, and, like the Pied Piper she must charm them away with music into the churning water to reveal which one is her sister. Like Max, she takes control, and finds her way back home. In the illustrations the goblin babies are fascinating and disturbing. Those are the pictures my daughter turns to again and again.

But unlike Max, Ida does not return to the comfort of a mother who nourishes him even when she’s not present. Instead, she comes home to a letter from her father telling her to take care of her mother and sister. Her storm has passed, but she doesn’t get to be a child again.

Outside Over There contains feelings both frightening and glad, ambiguous wording, and illustrations that create the impression of a strangely wrought and unpredictable fairly tale. When I talk about it with my daughter it’s in a very nonlinear fashion. We examine the illustrations, we talk about what some words and phrases mean, we skip around and come up with more answers than questions. For her this is fascinating, but not really recognizable as a traditional story. My son, an older brother who is often “busily doing something else” or doesn’t necessarily want his sister on top of him all the time, wants nothing to do with it. Ida’s anger, expressed so visibly and vividly, is unsettling to him.

Not that long ago I wrote about R.L. Stine’s comments on writing horror for children. Stine (to paraphrase) said that scary stories for children need to be over-the-top fantastic, funny, and sometimes gross, so that kids don’t think the stories could possibly be real. I would say that’s the kind of thing my Monster Kid likes- the Scooby Doo school of horror. Outside Over There is not that kind of story. It taps into something deep inside children, something that speaks to certain children and can really be unsettling to others, and certainly to adults (especially those looking for deeper meaning). It definitely wasn’t written with the same purpose in mind as the Goosebumps books. But both somehow fall into the wider category of scary books for kids.

If you are librarian or parent reading this, whether or not you’d classify this gorgeously illustrated and idiosyncratic Caldecott Honor winner as a scary book for kids doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that you understand the kind of effect it may have on a reader, and plan to take time to talk about it when you put it in a child’s hands, if that child needs it. In my classes on children’s literature, I learned about many Sendak books: Where The Wild Things Are, In The Night Kitchen, and Chicken Soup With Rice… but not once (and I’ve taken multiple classes) was this book ever mentioned. And really, I think it should be.

Posted on August 24, 2012 by , 2 comments
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