My house is testimony to the three Rs of environmental action.
Reduce. We live in a too-small house. It reduces us to tears.
Re-use. You don't want to see how many times underwear can be washed and worn. Really.
Re-read. Much of our house is stuff that other people have thrown out or would throw out. I have a treasured set of John Dickson Carr mysteries that I bought over the internet. My kids read books I bought years ago.
I re-read a lot of my books. The past ten years I re-read as many of my favorite books from childhood as I could find at the library or online. Occasionally, I stumbled across one in the library or in a local bookstore. So I re-read Jane Langton, Edward Eager, Witch of Blackbird Pond, Wolves of Willoughby Chase.
Re-reading is my favorite part of living green. You get so much out of reading these books that you didn't get as a kid. You understand the adults in the books. You get jokes and references that you didn't get the first time around.
You also realize that these books stayed in your head for so many years because they ARE good books.
It's always been easy to turn out crap kids books. Kids who like to read read a lot. Libraries have to fill shelves. The publishers turn out series because that's how to make a lot of money. A lot of money.
Writers who don't make any series characters have to have every book sold on its own merits. And that is harder than saying #9 of the bestselling CRAPOLA series.
There are some juvenile series out now that I like:
The Last Apprentice by Joseph Delaney
Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling (done now?)
Percy Jackson and the New Olympians by Rick Riordan
Pure Dead series by Debi Gliori
Mo Willem's Elephant and Piggie (easy reader series)
The Floods by Colin Thompson
I'm sure that I could think of some more, but not many.
The Golden Compass series (Philip Pullman) and the Sabriel trilogy (Garth Nix) are finished, but they are magnificent.
The Montmorency series by Eleanor Updale is fantastic. I can't believe that they stuck it in Young Adult to kill off readership. Fight the YA label and read these witty historical adventures featuring a spy, a doctor, a thief, and a very interesting young woman.
Sorcery and Cecilia is the beginning of a very sly Austen-period with magic series by Patricia C. Wrede and Carolyn Stevermer. Once again, sticking it in YA is just dumb beyond belief.
Considering that there are a few thousand on-going series out there, this is a very SHORT list of recommendations.
I'm a hard sell on series books. When I was a kid, I adored the Oz books and read anything by L. Frank Baum that I could find. I also read Nancy Drew.
Nancy Drew is a problematic juvenile series. The originals were published in the 1930s and contained terrible racial stereotypes. They were revised/censored in the 1950s (familiar yellow spine series), but made shorter and maybe dumber. A few years ago, a publisher re-released the "original" Nancy Drew books, and I read the first one. After that I can't help but believe that Nancy was a racist cow--so I'm out of the Nancy Drew fan club.
The recent development is a series of Nancy Drew graphic novels, to appeal to today's lazier reader.
I guess no one is all that interested in developing a NEW girl detective, but the Sammy Keyes juvenile mystery series by Wendolyn Van Draanen is the most likely successor I've seen.
Well, if you ever get imprisoned in a library's children's room, you'll know what I would recommend.
Reduce. We live in a too-small house. It reduces us to tears.
Re-use. You don't want to see how many times underwear can be washed and worn. Really.
Re-read. Much of our house is stuff that other people have thrown out or would throw out. I have a treasured set of John Dickson Carr mysteries that I bought over the internet. My kids read books I bought years ago.
I re-read a lot of my books. The past ten years I re-read as many of my favorite books from childhood as I could find at the library or online. Occasionally, I stumbled across one in the library or in a local bookstore. So I re-read Jane Langton, Edward Eager, Witch of Blackbird Pond, Wolves of Willoughby Chase.
Re-reading is my favorite part of living green. You get so much out of reading these books that you didn't get as a kid. You understand the adults in the books. You get jokes and references that you didn't get the first time around.
You also realize that these books stayed in your head for so many years because they ARE good books.
It's always been easy to turn out crap kids books. Kids who like to read read a lot. Libraries have to fill shelves. The publishers turn out series because that's how to make a lot of money. A lot of money.
Writers who don't make any series characters have to have every book sold on its own merits. And that is harder than saying #9 of the bestselling CRAPOLA series.
There are some juvenile series out now that I like:
The Last Apprentice by Joseph Delaney
Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling (done now?)
Percy Jackson and the New Olympians by Rick Riordan
Pure Dead series by Debi Gliori
Mo Willem's Elephant and Piggie (easy reader series)
The Floods by Colin Thompson
I'm sure that I could think of some more, but not many.
The Golden Compass series (Philip Pullman) and the Sabriel trilogy (Garth Nix) are finished, but they are magnificent.
The Montmorency series by Eleanor Updale is fantastic. I can't believe that they stuck it in Young Adult to kill off readership. Fight the YA label and read these witty historical adventures featuring a spy, a doctor, a thief, and a very interesting young woman.
Sorcery and Cecilia is the beginning of a very sly Austen-period with magic series by Patricia C. Wrede and Carolyn Stevermer. Once again, sticking it in YA is just dumb beyond belief.
Considering that there are a few thousand on-going series out there, this is a very SHORT list of recommendations.
I'm a hard sell on series books. When I was a kid, I adored the Oz books and read anything by L. Frank Baum that I could find. I also read Nancy Drew.
Nancy Drew is a problematic juvenile series. The originals were published in the 1930s and contained terrible racial stereotypes. They were revised/censored in the 1950s (familiar yellow spine series), but made shorter and maybe dumber. A few years ago, a publisher re-released the "original" Nancy Drew books, and I read the first one. After that I can't help but believe that Nancy was a racist cow--so I'm out of the Nancy Drew fan club.
The recent development is a series of Nancy Drew graphic novels, to appeal to today's lazier reader.
I guess no one is all that interested in developing a NEW girl detective, but the Sammy Keyes juvenile mystery series by Wendolyn Van Draanen is the most likely successor I've seen.
Well, if you ever get imprisoned in a library's children's room, you'll know what I would recommend.
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