Showing posts with label books for boys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books for boys. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Brains on Legs



Budza and I are listening to a LibriVox recording of Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars, the first in his long-running series about John Carter, Confederate veteran/gentleman adventurer. For those who only know Burroughs as the creator of the pre-Disney Tarzan, Carter is

an omnipotent gentleman teleported to Mars, finding an outlandish society of ape-, tree- and lizardmen, red-, white-, yellowmen, brains on legs, strange bastions and curious apparatuses, where the strongest survives and women are needy beauties to be saved. How can something be so platitudinous and at the same time so imaginative and enthralling?


Ape-, tree-, and lizardmen? Brains on Legs? Sold to the young man in the front row! In fact, when I got to the part about brains on legs, I said to the Budza, "YOU could have written this."

I am not too concerned about the needy-beauties aspect of it; Budza appears deeply uninterested in that, and none of the women in his life, from his BFF to his teacher to his doctor to his 83-year-old grandmother are the needy types. Besides, it's the 1912 version of needy beauties--the novel appeared in six installments in the pulp magazine All-Story. It does seem, to judge by the plot summary up on Wikipedia, that the Martians don't wear clothes. This is where the audio aspect of it comes in handy.

But guess who owns the movie rights to a project with the working title John Carter of Mars? Pixar. We are so there.

You can download the MP3 files of A Princess of Mars and its many sequels from SFFAudio, maintained by Scott Danielson and Jesse Willis. You have to look around for age-appropriate material, but there are great links...I am looking forward to exploring their huge list of online audio links, especially the archived radio shows over at Digital Eel's Radio Tales of the Strange and Fantastic.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

What Boys Read and the Picky Eater Theory of Reading


In the car today I tuned into Robin Young on the Boston radio program Here and Now interviewing Innaugural Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People's Literature Jon Scieszka. Scieszka was talking about his website, Guys Read, and the problem of how assigned reading in school turns boys off of reading. The example Robin Young gave was Little House on the Prairie, as it happens the very book Budza and I are reading aloud right now.

It made me think about how you have to trust the story sometimes and not fall prey to assumptions about what boys will and won't like. Budza is totally fascinated by the way of life in the 1870s in the big woods of Wisconsin and on the high prairie--making a house from logs, living among wolves, having the whole family come down with malaria and having the house nearly burn to the ground from a chimney fire. There is drama in every chapter.

Realize, too, that the story hour in our house means Budza has his pick of his own overflowing bookcase, and a stack about a foot high from the public library. His own 20 minutes of reading right now is from the Edgar and Ellen series by Charles Ogden. When I ask what he wants me to read, he considers all that, and reaches for the Laura Ingalls Wilder. Not every day. Some days he wants silly, or action, or space pirates or zombies or bug-eyed aliens. But sometimes he wants to know what it was like to live on the prairie in the 1870s. Because the best fiction, the most enduring stories, are a tardis, a time machine. They are magical, and they need no apology. The next thing I want to try Bud on is Robert Lawton's Rabbit Hill. Not a boy's book, really. But I am betting it will be my boy's book. It will be interesting to see if he will continue to enjoy books with female protagonists. I am thinking here of Island of the Blue Dolphns, Mistress Masham's Repose, Harriet the Spy.

It's sort of the picky eater theory of reading. You can give your reader the chicken nuggets, the mac and cheese, and plain cheese pizza--the Captain Underpants, if you will, or the comic books or the series books--and then just keep exposing them to the spicier and more complex flavors. It's not good or bad, just a range of flavors.

Friday, December 14, 2007

Reading the Little House books to my son


First, a confession. When my husband and I found out in the summer of 1999 we were having a boy, one of the many thoughts that went through my mind was that he wasn't going to attend my alma mater and that he probably wasn't going to love dolls houses or Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books.

I was introduced to the Little House books in second grade, when my teacher read them aloud to us. The next year we moved overseas, and it was living in the Makati suburbs of Manila where I read (and reread, and reread) the rest of the series. My favorite was The Long Winter, in which the Ingalls family is snowbound during a tough North Dakota winter, twisting straw into bundles to burn in the stove and grinding wheat in the coffee grinder to make bread. Books in which snow features heavily were something of a fetish for me in a tropical childhood that meant trying out new snorkel and fins in December.

Because Budza is now reading chapter books, and because he'd just finished a book report on one of the Magic Tree House books set on the prairie, I decided to try one of the Little House books on him, just to see if he liked it. I thought about starting with Farmer Boy, but decided to begin at the beginning with Book One.

I have to say, I had forgotten how early in the book the description of pig butchering falls. I kept shooting Budza sideways looks to see how this was going over, and his look was hard to read. It was an odd sensation, to read and feel myself falling under the old familiar spell of the words and the marvelous Garth Williams illustrations, at the same time all a-prickle with curiosity about whether he liked it. Was going to humor me this once and then ask for something else tomorrow night? Or would be love these books, too?

When we came to a stopping point, I asked "Did you like that?" and he nodded his head vigorously. It turned out he did want a different book the next night, but then turned back to it, fascinated, as I was, by the way of life in the middle of nowhere in the 1870s, and trying to imagine a Christmas of new mittens and peppermint candy, woods full of panthers and bears, and having for toys a corncob doll and a Nerf ball made of the pig's bladder. Budza loves the other Wheres and other Whens of the Magic Tree House books, but they're necessarily short on this kind of detail. For me, there is enough story and heart in these books to withstand the latest attempt to turn them into an American Girl brand.

For now, we're still reading. I have a feeling it's a window of opportunity that might soon close. Will Budza grow into the kind of reader who won't want to read books about girls? I hope not before I have the chance to take him to The Island of the Blue Dolphins.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

A Reader Is Born


The Budza (my 8 year old son) started reading for pleasure for the first time last night. For some time he's had to read to us twenty minutes a day for homework, and if he wakes up before we do on the weekends he will sometimes page through a book until we are ready to get up and grope our way to the coffeemaker (damn those trained cappuchin monkeys!!! We thought they would bring us coffee in the mornings...)

Anyway, last night we had had a busy day--a bunch of catch-up chores, hosted some other kids on a play date at our house--and come dinner time we decided to head to our local family-friendly pub. Usually the Budza would pack a small toy lunchbox full of "guys," or drawing paper and markers, or a Lego catalogue. Last night for the first time he went to his bookcase and chose three books--an A to Z Mystery by Ron Roy, a Dorling-Kindersley early reader about Batman, and a Marvel Comics kid-friendly graphic novel, Spider-Man and Power Pack: Big City Super Heroes.

It was the graphic novel he read while we were perusing the menu and waiting for our food, and again after he'd pushed his dish of pasta and shaky cheese aside. He finally asked for a bookmark (I tore a slip from a scrap of paper in my purse), and once he'd marked his place he checked to see how far he'd read, with great satisfaction.

A reader is born.