Golden age
When my friends first started having kids (the first such child was Jazz, born in 1994), I thought: Cool, now I can get the kids to read all the cool kids' books I've always loved. Only it gradually dawned on me that toddlers are not really ready to appreciate, say, The Dark Is Rising.
Fast-forward several years to hearing that Jazz was entering the age of being interested in Egypt. I immediately thought of The Egypt Game, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, which was my favorite book for a year or so at some point during my childhood. I spent about a year planning to acquire, then acquiring, then planning to send, then finally hand-delivering a copy of the book to Jazz's parents, only to learn that they had acquired a copy already.
So I pretty much gave up on trying to get books for kids of my acquaintance; too disorganized, too slow. But this afternoon I was sitting chatting with now-10-year-old Jazz, and asked him what he liked to read, and he said science fiction and fantasy and mystery and stuff, and I asked him about favorite authors or books and he mentioned L'Engle. And I thought, The golden age of science fiction is about 11 or 12. Um, no, actually what I thought was: I was ten years old when I read The Dark Is Rising.
So I asked Bhadrika & Steve later whether Jazz had read Susan Cooper, and that book in particular. And they said, "The dark is what?"
And we talked about it some more, and they suggested that Jazz would be particularly likely to read books that arrived in a box with his name on it, like an Amazon or Powell's box.
So I'm putting together a booklist. It turns out that the vast majority of my favorite kids' books are listed at Amazon as being for ages 9-12; I imagine that means some of them will be a little too young for Jazz (but may be just right for his sister Wolf; I think she's less sfnally inclined, but I think she might like the Miss Bianca books, among others), and I imagine that a fair number of them will be entirely uninteresting to him. And I definitely don't want to deluge him with stuff he won't like; this isn't meant to be a chore.
But I'm thinking I could send him, say, a book a month, and if I can get him to give honest feedback about which ones he does and doesn't like, I might even be able to tailor later books to his actual tastes.
My list so far includes my favorites from my kids' booklist (which I never did clean up as much as I intended, or even decide what kinds of things to include and not include) and Mary Anne's Kids' SF booklist, and it's a lot longer already than I can easily supply before Jazz gets too old for 'em. But if any of you have any particularly strong recommendations that are missing from those lists, for kids' science fiction or fantasy books appropriate for a bright 10-year-old who likes medieval stuff and L'Engle, lemme know.
I should note that Jazz is not, as far as I can tell, nearly as bookish as I was at that age; he'd rather play shoot-'em-up computer games, I think. But maybe this is our chance to give him a few gentle nudges into the magic of books. Or maybe he'll hate 'em, but I figure it's worth a try.
