The Perfect Non-Reader of this Tohu-Bohu is, as YHB has mentioned before, an avid reader. Her particular favorite is fantasy adventure; she started with the Oz series and went on to the Secrets of Droon (the wrong way around? Surely, but then we started her on Oz by reading the first three to her, and she found the Droon books herself) and now reads Gail Carson Levine and John Fardell and Jessica Day George and Cressida Cowell. This is a Good Thing.
Digression: I am vaguely aware that I didn’t write a Book Report about Ella Enchanted, but I thought I had written about the book-and-movie, but clearly I didn’t. And evidently I didn’t write a Book Report for either Fairest or The Two Princesses of Bamarre either, so I have left all three Gail Carson Levine books off the blog, for no good reason, as not only did I enjoy them all, I have things to say about all of them. Hmph. End Digression.
On the other hand, we don’t want her to think that fantasy adventure is the only good thing to read, so we try to interest her in historical novels and other sorts of things. While it is true that she will eventually read any scrap of writing left within arm’s reach, our attempts to grab good books at the library and thrust them at her have met with the usual resistance. So our main chance is the Bedtime Book. Now, it is also true that my Best Reader and I also prefer the exact books that she is enjoying, so we enjoy reading them to her at bedtime. We have tried to alternate fantasy-adventure with something more naturalistic/realistic, to widen horizons generally, but of course it is easier for us to come up with something we really want to read in the YA/SF genre than something that is appropriate to her age and not specfic.
Our latest entry in that field was Cheaper by the Dozen. I had read it as a callow whatnot my own self, and remembered very little about it except that it was (a) funny, and (2) not inappropriate for a young ’un. So. We read it, and I think the Perfect Non-Reader liked it, although there was a lot in it she didn’t get at all. For good reason. And she was heartbroken by the end, which I had forgotten or blocked, I guess.
Coincidentally, I happened to read an article in the New Yorker called Not So Fast, by Jill Lepore, who has a lot to say about Lillian Gilbreth, the mother of the Dozen. Ms. Lepore holds up Ms. Gilbreth as a kind of counter to Frank Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, but even more so (in the essay, and I agree) the father of management consultancy, where impressive-sounding guys come in, apply some nonsense theory to the work done by actual people, and walk away with a lot of money in their pockets. There is an undercurrent to Cheaper by the Dozen when you read it now, that the family makes its money in just that way, and although there is a lot of affectionate ribbing about the silliness of the efficiency notions and jargon, the children who are writing the book later clearly never entertained the notion that Father and Mother were ripping off the suckers.
I’m just saying. It’s all fantasy adventure, when you look at it in the light of day, isn’t it?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian