FMK #34: Chapter Books
Over the weekend, instead of catching up on my reading, I wrote a javascript toy that lets me take any arbitrary list and rank it using pairwise comparisons. I feel like this was a good life choice and thus I can tell you that my subconscious definitely, clearly, mathematically provably wants this week's poll to be kids' chapter books.
How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.
I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.
Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)
Cam Jansen: The Mystery of the Stolen Diamonds by David Adler (1980)
Travelers by Night by Vivien Alcock (1990)
The Three Investigators: The Mystery of the Green Ghost by Robert Arthur (1965)
The Search for Delicious by Natalie Babbitt (1969)
Matilda Bone by Karen Cushman (2000)
The Case of the Phantom Frog by E. W. Hildick (1975)
Rumble Fish by S. E. Hinton (1975)
Adventures of the Blue Avenger by Norma Howe (1999)
Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney (2007)
The View from Saturday by E. L. Konigsburg (1996)
Go Jump in the Pool! by Gordon Korman (1979)
Ishi, Last of His Tribe by Theodora Kroeber (1962)
The Silver Cup by Constance Leeds (2007)
Bill Bergson, Master Detective by Astrid Lindgren (1968)
Anna Smudge, Professional Shrink by MAC (2008)
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen (1987)
We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea by Arthur Ransome (1937)
Ghost Twins #1: The Mystery at Kickingbird Lake by Dian Curtis Regan (1994)
The Witch's Brat by Rosemary Sutcliff (1970)
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend (1977)
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ETA: I also like Jack London. You can possibly use this to calibrate your likely response to Hatchet.
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I also have this vague memory that everybody who told me about it focused on how TOUGH and DANGEROUS it was and ONLY HIS FATHER'S HATCHET let him SURVIVE until RESCUE, and I was like "pfff, did Sam Gribley just angst about his dad until he was rescued? Did Mary and Jean Wallace? Did the ROBINSONS? NO, and they had families and/or baby animals to take care of too! Sounds like it has too many feelings, not enough building houses. Must be a boy book."
But that was twenty years ago and I never actually read the thing, so....
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Did you read the Ghost Squad books by the same author? It's aimed a little bit older and I love it so much and that one was hard to find even when I was a kid.
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I remember absolutely loving Adrien Mole, which has a pretty hilarious unreliable narrator. I don't know how well it holds up but I still remember his liveblogged-before-liveblogging account of a disastrous school outing, and his ode to the girl he has a crush on, "Oh Pandora/I adore ya/I implore ye/don't ignore me."
I had to read Cam Jansen because it was under consideration for movie option. It was incredibly boring.
Cushman and Korman are great but I haven't read those particular books. I used to love The Three Investigators but probably you need residual childhood fondness to enjoy reading them as an adult.
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I also have read other Cushman and Korman and Three investigators and like them! (A lot of the ones on this list are ones I own due to residual fondness but never finished the series, actually.) I have no memories of Adrian Mole, though, and don't quite remember why I picked it up, unless somebody was recommending it on DW.
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Astrid Lindgren's Bill Bergson books are a lot of fun but are really hard to get in the US right now. I've been trying to find a copy of the second book (of three), Bill Bergson Lives Dangerously, for a couple of decades now, but every time I look online I wince at the prices. This one is a murder mystery with children. One of the main trio (the girl, of course) witnesses the murder and has some psychological issues over it (understated enough that I didn't actually understand them at 12). The impetus for trying to find the killer is that the girl might recognize them and that the killer knows who she is.
I loathe the Wimpy Kid books. The main character isn't atypical for his age (middle school), but the funny/terrible things that happen and that he does don't actually make him change at all. He never actually realizes that he's done something wrong. They're spectacular for certain types of reluctant readers 3rd-6th grades because the kids find them incredibly funny.
I have a kneejerk negative reaction to S.E. Hinton because those books were shoved at me repeatedly as a better alternative to the fantasy/SF that I preferred in the late 70s/early 80s. I don't know that they're actually bad; they're just, for me, symbolic of serious irritation.
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I think I read Outsiders by Hinton when I was a kid and it was... okay, but not what I was interested in? And also that was another author my sister really liked. I have slightly less restrictive tastes now, though (and things that I was probably a little to young to read at the time I read them are no longer).
Wimpy Kid is still SUPER popular at the library (and so many similar rip-offs....)
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Which is me having been in my 40s when I read the first one and therefore very much Not the Right Audience. I simply felt that I had to talk with my then six year old daughter when she read them to make sure she saw the connections between what the character did and what happened to him. The connections are there, but it's a breezy, first person narrative by a character who never sees how the things making him miserable result from things he chose to do.
The chances are that kids reading the books do spot the connections, but the character never stops digging.
It's a pretty common form of humor, but I loathe it equally in Looney Tunes or teen comedies where the character stumbles from humiliation to humiliation. I'd be a terrible audience for Punch and Judy or Commedia dell'Arte. A lot of not-me people find that sort of thing funny rather than horrifying.
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I loved The Search For Delicious as a kid but I have no idea how well it stands up to reading as an adult.
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I liked Tuck Everlasting (which I read as an adult) but don't know if I'd like any of her others.
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Assuming I'm remembering the title correctly, that's the one that has astral projection in it. Maybe that counted as "not supernatural" in the 60s??
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I think the one that stuck with me the most was the one with 'Silver Spider' in the title. It wasn't really a mystery so much as a Ruritanian adventure which really didn't fit at all with the rest of the series but was something that small me thought was just amazing and ever so much more interesting than stuttering parrots or screaming clocks.
I remember buying some of the newer books in the series at one point for my younger brother (eleven years younger than I) and then reading one and finding it really terrible. I was relieved that, when I went back to the earlier books in the series, they still had clever puzzles and at least a smidgen of character depth.
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But that's a series with a really long and complicated publishing history, so yeah. I was a little past the prime of their original popularity in the US so I never found very many.
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