crooked house: Fairy Tale and Thumb Wars

Take a Look:

Lizzie Skurnick's Buck Up: Life Lessons from Young Heroines.
Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood. Via Gwenda.
Intel has decided to sponsor Mighty Girl Maggie Mason's list of 100 Things to Do Before She Dies -- so over the next three months she's off to Puerto Rico to swim with bioluminescent plankton and learning to tap dance and fun things like that. Now that's what you get for having a good attitude.
Ooh, there's a new Lorrie Moore story at The New Yorker. It's called "Childcare" and, due to the overwhelming demands of my own childcare tasks, I haven't read it yet. Must print it out and read it soonest. Via Maud.
In the "Wish I'd Thought of It" category: Let's Panic About Babies.
Pasha Malla has won the $20,000 Trillium Prize for his stellar book The Withdrawal Method. Via Maud. I interviewed him over there.
Jennifer Niesslein muses on the emotional difficulties people have when it comes to certain foods. Maybe the lactose intolerant simply need to open their minds.
Maud reviews the new biography of Jean Rhys, The Blue Hour. I got three quarters of the way through Rhys's collected works a month or two ago and then had to stop because the novels, based on her life, were so depressing. Sounds like her life was even more depressing than you'd think.
Maud reviews Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger for NPR.
Pretty pretty security envelope patterns. Particularly nice if you love blue.
This is kind of fun: writers talk about their guilty pleasures -- books they love but would be embarrassed to be seen reading. I've read and enjoyed both the Twilight series and the Stephanie Plum stuff. I find I usually turn to this kind of junk food reading when I'm too sick to focus much or think.
Lisa says that, in book cover design, "the sky is the new shoes."
This woman thinks the way I do: many, many children's books are deeply disturbing if you think too much about them.
The Internet in 1969.
Over at Pickle Me This, Kerry, who is going to have a baby tomorrow, has compiled a list of anxiety-provoking books to read while you are pregnant.
Scholar denies oral roots of fairy tales. (Seeing the words "oral" and "fairy" in that headline immediately made me think of the tooth fairy.)

October 08, 2007

Fairy Tale and Thumb Wars

So I've started that biography of Margaret Wise Brown. This afternoon I came across a mention of the infamous "Fairy Tale War." This was the "acrimonious debate over the value of folk and fantasy literature for younger children" between Anne Carroll Moore, the New York Public Library's first Superintendent of Children's Work and Lucy Sprague Mitchell, the founder of the Bank Street College of Education and the author of the Here and Now Story Book. This was back in the 20s and 30s. Moore was for fairy tales and against realistic stories, Mitchell made the opposite argument. (Imagine! The things people get themselves all het up about.) The idea of a "Fairy Tale War" reminded me of The Small Object's Thumb War wrestling belts :

Posted by Stephany Aulenback on October 08, 2007 at 04:15 PM in Books, Little Things | Permalink

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Comments

I JUST started that book too. I think after looking at it after reading about it here...

Posted by: babelbabe | October 08, 2007 at 06:24 PM

Margaret Wise Brown is such an interesting character...

Posted by: Stephany Aulenback | October 10, 2007 at 10:40 PM

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