Home » Posts tagged "libraries" (Page 18)

A Giant is Gone: Ray Bradbury Dies

Today I learned that Ray Bradbury had died.

From the day I snagged a library copy of Fahrenheit 451 (due to a school board election in which one candidate ran on the platform of removing it from the curriculum), Ray Bradbury had me hooked. It’s funny how his short stories sneaked in to the most unusual of places. I found “The Flying Machine” and “A Sound of Thunder” in my middle school English textbook, and my junior year, after reading “The Fall of the House of Usher”, my American Lit teacher stuck a photocopy of “Usher 2000” in my hands. There were anthologies edited by Martin Greenberg that had his stories within, and somewhere in my days as the librarian for the science fiction society I belonged to in college, I acquired a used hardcover copy of three of his anthologies bound together- The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, and Dandelion Wine. I just read a short essay on Bradbury criticizing him for not having written anything of note since the 1960s, but I completely disagree- although these are probably still my favorite stories, I love his writing for making me think.

I heard Bradbury speak once, on a double bill with Douglas Adams. I have to say that Douglas Adams, as much as I love his writing, was not a great speaker. Bradbury, however… Even in a wheelchair, mere days after a stroke, he was compelling and fascinating. Age, and even illness, did not stop his agile mind. Just this year, I discovered the “official” graphic novel of Fahrenheit 451, with an introduction by Bradbury, where he wrote about how, as time passed, he had been able to reflect and recognize the origins of the book. Which has, ironically, been the target of censors many times, including his own publishers. If not for libraries, this book could never have been written- it’s a true dime novel, written on a typewriter in the basement of a library, at the cost of ten cents per half hour. You can find it at your library and check it out today, knowing that libraries have not only defended the book, but also allowed for its creation in the first place.

Bradbury resisted having his books come out as ebooks, but they did recently come out in that forrm. If you’ve never read his work now is an excellent time to start, and you have all kinds of choices. A giant of literature, with the talent to create compelling, disturbing, and sometimes terrifying visions of the future present, he will be missed.

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Kirsten, 1 comment

Getting Lost In The Classics

Over the past few days I’ve found that one thing just leads to another when it comes to the classics. One book I’ve been reading, Alan Jacobs’ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, led me to reconsider a reread of some of the books I read many years ago, in the hope that I’d find something different, and maybe something more, than I did when I was twelve, or sixteen. Quite frankly, I thought maybe I needed the break. Some of the characters and situations I’ve been encountering in genre fiction recently have been really annoying, and it’s hard to enjoy a book when you want to shake the characters, or, alternatively, the author. I remembered loving Dickens, so I found myself a copy of Oliver Twist (which is free on Kindle, another benefit of many of the classics). And even with background knowledge of Dickens, I might very well have been stopped by his style and vocabulary in the first few pages if I hadn’t been determined to read it. I might add that Dickens’ dislike of the British workhouse system and treatment of the poor results in such heavy-handed sarcasm that anyone who didn’t understand what he was trying to do would be completely baffled. So I get it. It can require guidance to read one of these books, and persistence. It’s not necessarily easy to get into the flow. When Kelly Gallagher writes about teaching reading in a critical sense in his book Readicide, this is what he’s talking about. Some books are worth the effort. You CAN get into the story, but you need help to get through it.

What reading the classics SHOULDN’T mean is that they’re taught in isolation from context, or taught as a means to an end. As I was looking through my library’s catalog to see if it happened to own Tales of Mystery and Imagination, the Poe book with the terrifying illustrations that I wrote about previously, I discovered that while they didn’t own that particular collection, they did own the Kaplan SAT version. WHAT? I guess it’s one way to learn vocabulary, but what a turnoff. You don’t need Poe to learn vocabulary. And that’s not the reason to read him.

There are so many versions of Poe’s work, including student editions like this one, which unobtrusively provides help with words kids might not know, with a focus on the STORIES, graphic novels like this one, and awesomely illustrated ones like this, all of which give their readers compelling reasons to master Poe’s language and style without getting beaten over the head with the test practice opportunities his work may provide. You can memorize words and their definitions all day long if you want but you might as well just memorize the dictionary in that case- for understanding (which you’ll need for those analogy questions) and for enjoyment, wide and deep reading are what’s necessary.

You might need a push and a little guidance from someone else to get going, but promoting Poe as vocabulary practice for the SAT? That’s not how they’ll grab you. Once you get past the first words and start to feel the terror in the beating of your heart, you won’t rest in peace until the tale is done.

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Kirsten, Reply

Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012

It wasn’t just because I learned of the death of the great illustrator and author Maurice Sendak yesterday that I was thinking of Where the Wild Things Are. I have a little boy who sometimes acts very much like Max in his wolf suit, and even runs around at home in a dragon costume. Yesterday afternoon at the park he really was a Wild Thing, and when we got home I sent him to his room. Eventually, he came out, ate dinner, and hugged me. All Wild Things need to know that they’ll be fed and loved.

I had it off the shelf this morning, because I volunteered to be a guest reader in his classroom this afternoon, and my daughter asked me to read it. We read it through and then went back and looked at the pictures, which tell the story more than anything else. We read “That night a forest grew in Max’s room…” and we turned the pages, looking at the room as the walls fell away to the forest and the night sky. When I read this book to children, I always ask them if they think his room really became a forest. She said yes. For children aged 4, 5, and 6, much of the time this is a real journey. Sometimes it’s a scary one, and sometimes it’s liberating, and sometimes a little of both. In the safety of storyhour when you tell kids to roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth, it can be fun to get carried away (not for everyone, some kids are truly frightened). It’s one I love to read out loud. It’s a story that’s so much a part of the inner being and outside actions of so many kids.

Here’s a snippet I found online, courtesy of FridayReads, that expresses so well the way kids engage with Where the Wild Things Are. When most of us think of books, even picture books, we think of reading- the written word, or, if we’re reading out loud, the verbal experience. Sendak’s work can’t be fully appreciated with just a reading, though, or even through the incredible artwork that tells so much of the story wordlessly. For some kids, it’s an immersive, emotional book- something they live, not just something they read, as with the child in this story Sendak shared with Terry Gross at NPR:

Sendakquote