I subscribe to a great weekly Newsletter called Brain Pickings. Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large, who has also written for Wired UK, The New York Times, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, and The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. In the latest post Maria lists the 13 Best Childrens books of 2013. The first six I published yesterday, here are the rest. Her list is interesting and well worth the read. For the entire newsletter and to subscribe, go here.
Brain Pickings participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates
Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites
to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. In more human terms, this means that
whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on here, I get a small percentage
of its price. That helps support Brain Pickings by offsetting a fraction of
what it takes to maintain the site, and is very much appreciated.
7.
THE MIGHTY LALOUCHE
The
more you win, the more you win, the science of the “winner effect” tells us.
The same interplay of biochemistry, psychology and performance thus also holds
true of the opposite — but perhaps this is why we love a good underdog story,
those unlikely tales of assumed “losers” beating the odds to triumph as
“winners.” Stories like this are fundamental to our cultural mythology of
ambition and anything-is-possible aspiration, and they speak most powerfully to
our young and hopeful selves, to our inner underdogs, to the child who dreams
of defeating her bully in blazing glory.
That
ever-alluring parable is at the heart of The Mighty Lalouche (public library),
written by Matthew Olshan, who famously reimagined Twain’s Huckleberry Finn
with an all-girl cast of characters, and illustrated by the inimitable Sophie
Blackall, one of the most extraordinary book artists working today, who has
previously given us such gems as her drawings of Craigslist missed connections
and Aldous Huxley’s only children’s book. It tells the heartening story of a
humble and lithe early-twentieth-century French postman named Lalouche, his
profound affection for his pet finch Geneviève, and his surprising success in
the era’s favorite sport of la boxe française, or French boxing.
8.
GOBBLE YOU UP
For
nearly two decades, independent India-based publisher Tara Books has been
giving voice to marginalized art and literature through a collective of
artists, writers, and designers collaborating on beautiful books based on
regional folk traditions, producing such gems as Waterlife, The Night Life of
Trees, and Drawing from the City. A year after I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery
Tail — one of the best art books of 2012, a magnificent 17th-century British
“trick” poem adapted in a die-cut narrative and illustrated in the signature
Indian folk art style of the Gond tribe — comes Gobble You Up (public library),
an oral Rajasthani trickster tale adapted as a cumulative rhyme in a
mesmerizing handmade treasure released in a limited edition of 7,000 numbered
handmade copies, illustrated by artist Sunita and silkscreened by hand in two
colors on beautifully coarse kraft paper custom-made for the project. What
makes it especially extraordinary, however, is that the Mandna tradition of
tribal finger-painting — an ancient Indian art form practiced only by women and
passed down from mother to daughter across the generations, created by soaking
pieces of cloth in chalk and lime paste, which the artist squeezes through her
fingers into delicate lines on the mud walls of village huts — has never before
been used to tell a children’s story.
And
what a story it is: A cunning jackal who decides to spare himself the effort of
hunting for food by tricking his fellow forest creatures into being gobbled up
whole, beginning with his friend the crane; he slyly swallows them one by one,
until the whole menagerie fills his belly — a play on the classic Meena motif
of the pregnant animal depicted with a baby inside its belly, reflecting the
mother-daughter genesis of the ancient art tradition itself.
9.
BALLAD
The
best, most enchanting stories live somewhere between the creative nourishment
of our daydreams and the dark allure of our nightmares. That’s exactly where
beloved French graphic artist Blexbolex transports us in Ballad (public
library) — his exquisite and enthralling follow-up to People, one of the best
illustrated books of 2011, and Seasons.
This
continuously evolving story traces a child’s perception of his surroundings as
he walks home from school. It unfolds over seven sequences across 280 glorious
pages and has an almost mathematical beauty to it as each sequence
exponentially blossoms into the next: We begin with school, path, and home; we
progress to school, street, path, forest, home; before we know it, there’s a
witch, a stranger, a sorcerer, a hot air balloon, and a kidnapped queen. All
throughout, we’re invited to reimagine the narrative as we absorb the growing
complexity of the world — a beautiful allegory for our walk through life
itself.
10.
THE DARK
Daniel
Handler — beloved author, timelessly heartening literary jukeboxer — is perhaps
better-known by his pen name Lemony Snicket, under which he pens his endlessly
delightful children’s books. In fact, they owe much of their charisma to the
remarkable creative collaborations Snicket spawns, from 13 Words illustrated by
the inimitable Maira Kalman to Who Could It Be At This Hour? with artwork by
celebrated cartoonist Seth. Snicket’s 2013 gem, reminiscent in spirit of Maya
Angelou’s Life Doesn’t Frighten Me, is at least as exciting — a minimalist yet
magnificently expressive story about a universal childhood fear, titled The
Dark (public library) and illustrated by none other than Jon Klassen.
I
think books that are meant to be read in the nighttime ought to confront the
very fears that we’re trying to think about. And I think that a young reader of
The Dark will encounter a story about a boy who makes new peace with a fear,
rather than a story that ignores whatever troubles are lurking in the corners
of our minds when we go to sleep.
11.
JANE, THE FOX AND ME
“Reading
is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with
reality,” Nora Ephron wrote. “If I can’t stand the world I just curl up with a
book, and it’s like a little spaceship that takes me away from everything,”
Susan Sontag told an interviewer, articulating an experience at once so common
and so deeply personal to all of us who have ever taken refuge from the world
in the pages of a book and the words of a beloved author. It’s precisely this
experience that comes vibrantly alive in Jane, the Fox, and Me (public library)
— a stunningly illustrated graphic novel about a young girl named Hélène, who,
cruelly teased by the “mean girls” clique at school, finds refuge in Charlotte
Brönte’s Jane Eyre. In Jane, she sees both a kindred spirit and aspirational
substance of character, one straddling the boundary between vulnerability and
strength with remarkable grace — just the quality of heart and mind she needs
as she confronts the common and heartbreaking trials of teenage girls tormented
by bullying, by concerns over their emerging womanly shape, and by the
soul-shattering feeling of longing for acceptance yet receiving none.
Written
by Fanny Britt and illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault — the artist behind the
magnificent Virginia Wolf, one of the best children’s books of 2012 — this
masterpiece of storytelling is as emotionally honest and psychologically
insightful as it is graphically stunning. What makes the visual narrative
especially enchanting is that Hélène’s black-and-white world of daily sorrow
springs to life in full color whenever she escapes with Brönte.
12.
MY FIRST KAFKA
Sylvia
Plath believed it was never too early to dip children’s toes in the vast body
of literature. But to plunge straight into Kafka? Why not, which is precisely
what Brooklyn-based writer and videogame designer Matthue Roth has done in My
First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs (public library) — a magnificent
adaptation of Kafka for kids. With stunning black-and-white illustrations by
London-based fine artist Rohan Daniel Eason, this gem falls — rises, rather —
somewhere between Edward Gorey, Maurice Sendak, and the Graphic Canon series.
The
idea came to Roth after he accidentally started reading Kafka to his two little
girls, who grew enchanted with the stories. As for the choice to adapt Kafka’s
characteristically dark sensibility for children, Roth clearly subscribes to
the Sendakian belief that grown-ups project their own fears onto kids, who
welcome rather than dread the dark. Indeed, it’s hard not to see Sendak’s
fatherly echo in Eason’s beautifully haunting black-and-white drawings.
Much
like Jonathan Safran Foer used Street of Crocodiles to create his brilliant
Tree of Codes literary remix and Darwin’s great-granddaughter adapted the
legendary naturalist’s biography into verse, Roth scoured public domain texts
and various translations of Kafka to find the perfect works for his singsong
transformations: the short prose poem “Excursion into the Mountains,” the
novella “The Metamorphosis,” which endures as Kafka’s best-known masterpiece,
and “Josefine the Singer,” his final story.
“I
don’t know!”
I
cried without being heard.
“I
do not know.”
If
nobody comes,
then
nobody comes.
I’ve
done nobody any harm.
Nobody’s
done me any harm.
But
nobody will help me.
A
pack of nobodies
would
be rather fine,
on
the other hand.
I’d
love to go on a trip — why not? –
with
a pack of nobodies.
Into
the mountains, of course.
Where
else?
13.
MY FATHER’S ARMS ARE A BOAT
The
finest children’s books have a way of exploring complex, universal themes
through elegant simplicity and breathless beauty. From my friends at Enchanted
Lion, collaborators on Mark Twain’s Advice to Little Girls and makers of some
of the most extraordinary picture-books you’ll ever encounter, comes My
Father’s Arms Are a Boat (public library) by writer Stein Erik Lunde and
illustrator Øyvind Torseter. This tender and heartening Norwegian gem tells the
story of an anxious young boy who climbs into his father’s arms seeking comfort
on a cold sleepless night. The two step outside into the winter wonderland as
the boy asks questions about the red birds in the spruce tree to be cut down
the next morning, about the fox out hunting, about why his mother will never
wake up again. With his warm and assuring answers, the father watches his son
make sense of this strange world of ours where love and loss go hand in hand.
Above
all, My Father’s Arms Are a Boat is about the quiet way in which boundless love
and unconditional assurance can lift even the most pensive of spirits from the
sinkhole of existential anxiety.
BrainPickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the
week’s best articles
No comments:
Post a Comment