Could we make such a list of children’s books? We’d have to wrestle with the problem that difficulty in a children’s book is grounds for many to not consider it a children’s book, et voilá. But I might include the William Mayne novel pictured here, Anderson’s Octavian Nothing, Hamilton’s Arilla Sundown, Garner’s Red Shift . . . . Martha mentions Paton Walsh’s Unleaving, and Elissa offers Kingley’s Water-Babies as a book all the Simmons students resented having to read. (Let me add to that my experience Grahame’s The Golden Age, which I read for a CLNE seminar with great, great grudging.) What else?

One question I have here and about PW’s list is the assumption that difficulty equals accomplishment, that the harder a book is to read, the more an author has to say and the more the reader has achieved. Nah–the most difficult reading I see in this office are the review copies of self-published novels, for children and adults, written by crazy people.

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But a recent NYT story makes me verrry nervous, especially this quote from playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, tasked with revising the opera for this production. She says, “if [Gershwin] had lived longer he would have gone back to the story of ‘Porgy and Bess’ and made changes, including to the ending.” She’s going to change the ending? The ending is the BEST: Porgy, freed from jail, returns to Catfish Row only to find Bess has run off to New York with that no-good Sportin’ Life. “Bring me my goat!” he commands, referring to the goat-driven cart he uses to get around (although not, apparently, in this production; he’ll use a cane instead). And off he heads to New York, leading the chorus in the rousing “Oh Lord, I’m on my way.” What is Parks going to do instead, send Bess to rehab? This is kind of like saying that had E.B. White lived, Charlotte would be happily spinning sheets for Fern’s babies.

So now I’m just hoping it won’t be the adolescent disaster that was ART’s Cabaret.

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Yes, I do feel better, thanks for asking.

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Although there was that one time a publisher threatened to sue us if we reviewed any more of their books (we did and they didn’t, by the way, but they no longer submit their titles for review), most of the flack we get here is about the books we don’t review. (Cue Alex Forrest, with a butcher knife, holding a copy of Peter Rabbit.)

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In other blog news there was a Twitter-tempest last night over a blogger’s review of Laurel Snyder’s completely amiable middle-grade novel Penny Dreadful. Book blogger Noël De Vries was loving the book until she came to a reference to lesbian moms which implied they were “normal.” De Vries wrote “The only problem is, being a lesbian is not normal. It’s not something that “just happens” to people, like being poor or brave. In fact, when you look through Biblical glasses, homosexuality is, well, an abomination.”

Ohhhh-kay. I suppose if you are looking at at homosexuality from a Biblical perspective (albeit a very particular fundamentalist one), De Vries’ assertion makes its own kind of sense, but she then veers into a decidedly irrational corollary: “Characters like Willa and Jenny [the moms] with their happy little family, show elementary-age readers that Christian beliefs are hateful and silly. Add these characters to the full-blown assault of politically-correct propaganda that is molding America’s children.” So if an author depicts characters whose behavior you label abhorrent, then he or she is making you out as the hateful one? Note to Noēl: not everything is about you, dear.

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Then Mr. Sconzo went on to say that there are so many authors they could never have them all at their Teen Lit Fests. Like I’m just another author. (Oh, except one that apparently gets under people’s skin.) I am not just another author. I’m an author who is a voice for a generation that faces real problems every day. An author who tries to dissect those problems, look for reasons, suggest solutions, show outcomes to choices through characters who walk off the page. I’m an author who cares about her readership in a very real way. I am thoughtful, respectful of my readers, and not afraid to tell the truth.

I’m on your side and all, but please don’t make it any harder than it needs to be.

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And I’ve just finished proofreading the preschool section of the forthcoming (print) edition of the Guide. Lots of go-to-sleep books, along with the apparently unstoppable flood of Mommy/Daddy-Love-You-More-than-Anyone-Has-Been-Loved, Ever (and you had better love him/her right back) books. My generation certainly raised a bumper crop of insecure parents.

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Me, I generally give a gift card rather than a book, a dodge that Anne Quirk rightly denounced as cowardice. Richard is braver and/or more thoughtful, and almost always comes up with gifts of books or music that reveal he keeps a close eye on my tastes as well as what I already own. But for my last birthday he gave me a copy of Arthur Phillips’ The Song Is You. It was a good guess, all about love and music and iPods, sort of a higher-minded High Fidelity, but reading it was complete hell–the prose was simply way too rich for my taste. But I gamely soldiered on, a few pages here and there, always packing it in my bag for vacations but never getting much beyond page 75. You have to, right, when it’s a present from someone who loves you?

He eventually noticed that it was languishing, however, and took it for his own enjoyment. (Perhaps this was his motive for buying it in the first place, the way I bought him Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room, which, fortunately, he loved and I am loving.) But today, triumph! I just got an email from him quoting from the Phillips, “her breath a cumulus the size of a peach,” adding, simply, “slows you down, doesn’t it?” Uh huh.

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