Friday Fun Thread: Teenage Kicks

Lao Tzu’s _Tao Te Ching_

Been reading it and rereading it since my teens in various translations and even working through the Chinese with a dictionary at my side a couple of times.

Read it again after about a decade a few years ago and was amazed at how much I’d internalized.

Bridge to Terabithia (sp?) was hearbreaking when I was smaller.

Wrinkle in Time et al.

Sideways stories from wayside school.

Ted, you whippersnapper, are you young enough to include Watchmen as a teen/YA reading experience?

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. I have read the bloggers linking, each to each.

Jeremy, thanks for reminding me of The Phantom Tollbooth, a favorite of childhood I’d completely forgotten about. I’ll have to get it for the kids.

Reading The Lord of the Rings in my thirties, I was astounded at how much I *just didn’t get* when I was thirteen (such as that Tom Bombadil wasn’t just some kooky guy, but a nature god). Yet it shaped my thirteen-year-old brain profoundly, even with low comprehension.

Speaking of low comprehension: in high school I read (on my own; such a geek) Melville’s _The Confidence Man_ in its entirety without understanding a word. I reread it with fascination. Naturally, I was unwilling to get the main joke as a teenager, which is that people are shits and that the river in the story ain’t the Mississippi, but De Nial. Or is that the point?? I’m not 100% certain. And, I am mostly sure there was ONE con man in many disguises, but not entirely sure; maybe there were two. I dunno.

What do you all think of the value during childhood of reading texts over one’s head, and getting what one can out of it?

ps. Thanks back to you, for your line about “the bloggers linking each to each.” That is going to stay in my head for a while.

I read Tollbooth to Sylvia, who is 4 and 3/4 (she will have you know), for bedtime stories over the course of February and early March. She loved the characters though did not get a lot of the story. This week she indicated she would like to reread it; we read the first few chapters and she was very much on top of it, talking about what will be happening later in relation to what is going on now.

Here is a diary of our first read through.

‘The Once and Future King’ is also one of the best fantasies about what the English think being English is about, one of the best explorations of man’s relationship with nature and with time, and should be added to the water supply.

Reading books you don’t understand: I first read ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ at twelve; found the second half boring. Reread it at fifteen and didn’t find the second half (with all the sexy parts) boring at all. Reread it as a snarky college soph. and thought it was so much Whorfian linguistic bullshit. Oh, well.

Auden’s ‘The Unknown Citizen’ was just right when I was 14, and led me utterly uncomprehendingly into the rest of him. Love him still.

Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners (and, really, the whole London Trilogy) & Alan Sillitoe’s Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner come to mind…

Moomintrolls! Yes!

Sorry; my above post #10 misled. The diary of reading Tollbooth with Sylvia is here. And Thomas, thanks form mentioning Watership Down — I have not thought about that in a long, long time but I can definitely see it being a good reread.

Now i can’t resist : link to the “agnostic’s prayer”, one of the book good bits.

http://www.sonic.net/~roelofs/humor/zelazny_agnostic.html

‘Master and Margarita’ is good too though I fail to see how it could have appeal to a 12, 15, or even a 17 year old. The humor and excitement is there but it’s anything but juvenile. Maybe you’re back-projectin’ or something.

Radek – You can certainly take issue with Hungarian high schools assigning such readings as part of the basic lit curriculum. I do. But that is the kind of work we read and were tested on and yes, some of it I did manage to appreciate even at that age.

I’m startled to discover that there’s someone else on the planet who has read Stamaty’s “Who needs Donuts?”.

I can’t be on my list. because I came to it as an adult, but I’ve also stocked up on copies to hand out. An unknown masterpiece.

If you read bedtime stories to your children, you will revisit all the favorites from your childhood. I loved Elizabeth Nesbit (5 Children and It, Phoenix and the Carpet, Story of the Amulet, Enchanted Castle) and still enjoyed them as an adult. Also the “Little House on the Prairie” series.

Great, I’m immune to this meme, since I’m not an adult yet.

When I was in primary school (about 8 years old), I read Herman Melville’Moby Dick. I was probably too young to read it, but the historical stuff about whaling was way cool.

The one book I really remember totally defeating me as a child is the Algol 68 report. (Probably just as well Ada95 wasn’t around back then…)

When I was a kid I read the Critique of Pure Reason but was two young to get his second theory.

“I don’t know how many people ever saw this old horror fiction magazine….”

Well, Tappan King did offer me the job of Managing Editor, circa 1986, but the actual horror mag was the digest-sized Night Cry; TZ had a considerably larger ambit which wasn’t even chiefly, or even very much at all, horror. I took an editorial position at Avon books that allowed me to work on endless amounts of sf, mysteries, history, science, nonfiction, and innumerable books, instead, partially for the range and partially because I didn’t expect TZ and co. to last another year.

Omni had a silly premise, but fed an admirable amount of money into the sf community, and, besides, they had ultra cool parties that actually invited us geeks to mix with, like, the Pets and cool kids, amidst the floating carbon dioxide, drinks, drugs, and whatnot. Who knows where Ellen Datlow would be today otherwise? Only the psychic in the next article could tell.

I read several chidren’s books set in Scandinavia (e.g. Gunnel Linde’s A Pony in the Luggage) . . .

susanc, you put me in mind of foreign children’s books (I’m writing from the U.S.).

Children’s books one revisits to read as a parent are a bit different from childhood reads one picks up for personal pleasure; so in my previous examples I forgot all about these foreign books which were important in my childhood, and which I re-read for bedtime stories:
Selma Lagerlo:f (that’s an umlaut), The Adventures of Nils Goose-Boy (Swedish boy is shrunk, rides goose around all of Sweden, returns)Norman Lindsay, The Magic Pudding (koala turns swagman, takes up with charming rascals in possession of magic never-finished sentient pie, fights off cretinous antagonists who want to steal the pie)Dorothy Wall, The Adventures of Blinky Bill (cute, naughty koala boy has adventures; strong conservationist moral)

Like your example, Nils Goose-Boy makes Sweden a magical place. I only want to know, do you say it “nills” or “niles”?!?

I’ve reversed my opinions of the two Australian books. As a kid (approx. 8, I guess) and as a very young adult, I thought Blinky Bill was way too treacly and sentimental, while The Magic Pudding was super cool for its irony, its biting wit and social satire, its nonsense verse, and its amoral universe (the villians want to steal the pie, which is only what the “heroes” have done in the first place; and the pie itself is a caustic little character). It has a similar appeal to Don Marquis, Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Rocky & Bullwinkle, The Simpsons, or Fafblog —- definitely a superior literary work to BB, and also part of the Pantheon of Coolness.

However, I’ve found that as a parent, I don’t really want my kids blasted with icy gusts of irony and amoral satiric wit; treacle is okay. Lack of irony is okay. And they like Blinky Bill much better, for now.

And Blinky is not as simple as I thought; there is wit, and the conservationist message is pretty good (be nice to animals; don’t destroy habitat; don’t hunt endangered species). The never-ending magic pudding, on the other hand, is a metaphor for endless exploitation of the land. I still like MP better as lit, but not at bedtime.

“Nils Goose-Boy makes Sweden a magical place. I only want to know, do you say it “nills” or “niles”?!?”

If it’s “Niles” I want to know whether that title served as inspiration for “Giles Goat-Boy” or vice-versa…

Er, I mean to say, translation published in 1922. So the original, presumably some year before that.

There’s a boy in the Girl’s Bathroom. Louis Sachar, Zelade

Maniac Magee Jerry Spinelli.

A Girl of the Limberlost, by Gene Stratton Porter, still reads pretty well for all that it was written in 1908. Except for not having Dragons it shows that the art of writing wish-fulfillment books for young women hasn’t changed very much.
Also, any of Heinlein’s juvies, which can be read by adults for the sheer pleasure of his craftsmanship.

Jeremy, thanks for giving me the sense of gratification that having my humor appreciated brings. It doesn’t happen often.

You have a fun blog.

Anon, the wonderful E Nesbit was an Edith, not an Elizabeth.