Illness; reading to Samuel; reading to Daniel; the canceling of books
Nasty colds this week for Samuel and Daniel. It’s the first cold of Daniel’s life. Samuel, poor lad, is old enough to ruminate upon how unpleasant illness is – and to feel not just ill but, also, demoralized.
To cheer him up, I read him four chapters of Fantastic Mr. Fox. He enjoys it well enough, and then he abruptly goes off to play.
When he is demoralized again, I read him half of The Enormous Crocodile.
“Do you like this book, Sammy?” I ask.
“No,” he says.
But we soldier on. When we finish, I again ask, “Did you like that book?”
“Yes,” he says in a low, raspy voice.
It won’t be very many days until we finish Fantastic Mr. Fox, and then Samuel will have had his first full excursion through an (almost-)novel. We’ve read a good amount of Stuart Little, too, but I had to put that devastating book down for a bit because I was demoralized. Samuel liked it pretty well until he was confronted with E.B. White’s rather technical descriptions of the schooner Wasp.
He may not yet be ready for Herman Melville or Patrick O’Brien. I may never be ready for Patrick O’Brien.
Like his brother before him, Daniel has been signed up for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, and this week he received the usual first installment, The Little Engine that Could, which I neither enjoy nor admire, and of which we already own maybe a half-dozen copies. This version has new drawings. Have the old ones been deemed to be morally beyond the pale? Or just too ugly? I know that a couple of years ago Samuel was given a copy with the old drawings. Since Samuel was born, some of Dr. Seuss also has been canceled, and Roald Dahl has had his bitter prose sweetened up by his publishers. I need to make sure to buy the editions that I like before they disappear.
(It’s hardly a new thing, of course – the canceling of children’s books because of a decline in tolerance for this or that wrongful or different attitude.)
To cheer him up, I read him four chapters of Fantastic Mr. Fox. He enjoys it well enough, and then he abruptly goes off to play.
When he is demoralized again, I read him half of The Enormous Crocodile.
“Do you like this book, Sammy?” I ask.
“No,” he says.
But we soldier on. When we finish, I again ask, “Did you like that book?”
“Yes,” he says in a low, raspy voice.
It won’t be very many days until we finish Fantastic Mr. Fox, and then Samuel will have had his first full excursion through an (almost-)novel. We’ve read a good amount of Stuart Little, too, but I had to put that devastating book down for a bit because I was demoralized. Samuel liked it pretty well until he was confronted with E.B. White’s rather technical descriptions of the schooner Wasp.
He may not yet be ready for Herman Melville or Patrick O’Brien. I may never be ready for Patrick O’Brien.
Like his brother before him, Daniel has been signed up for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, and this week he received the usual first installment, The Little Engine that Could, which I neither enjoy nor admire, and of which we already own maybe a half-dozen copies. This version has new drawings. Have the old ones been deemed to be morally beyond the pale? Or just too ugly? I know that a couple of years ago Samuel was given a copy with the old drawings. Since Samuel was born, some of Dr. Seuss also has been canceled, and Roald Dahl has had his bitter prose sweetened up by his publishers. I need to make sure to buy the editions that I like before they disappear.
(It’s hardly a new thing, of course – the canceling of children’s books because of a decline in tolerance for this or that wrongful or different attitude.)
