Kids’s books that is
These books were all published in 1964, an amazing year for children’s books, says Scarlet Neath in Bustle.
The ’60s in general are seen as the start of the modern shift in children’s literature from being completely sanitized to more brutally honest. As Maurice Sendak said, “I’m not going to bullshit [kids].
CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG – Ian Fleming is best known for his 11 James Bond novels, but he also wrote one children’s book while recovering from a heart attack (and he unfortunately did not live to see it published).
The Disney movie version, which is arguably the creepiest kid’s movie of all time, was very loosely based on the book—pretty much all they have in common is the flying car.
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25 of Children’s Most Beloved Female Characters, Ranked in Coolness
If you grew up as a literature-loving young lady, there’s no doubt that you also had a bookshelf full of novels with characters you felt were as near and dear as any flesh and blood friend out there in the so-called “real world,” Kate Erbland writes in Bustle.
Did you ever pretend that Ramona Quimby was your own precocious little sister? Or ponder which member of the Baby-sitters Club would be your best pal in real life? Perhaps you dreamed about somehow folding yourself in between the Pevensie sisters, giving The Chronicles of Narnia a fifth kid to honor? Or imagined that you lived up in that nasty old attic alongside Sara Crewe?
Pippi Longstocking: Wild, fun, wild, really fun, crazy, imaginative, nutty old Pippi is the heroine of her own life — and her blasé attitude towards authority and big love for animals mark her as cool even today, despite the fact that she was invented in the early part of the twentieth century.
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The 100 Best American Novels, 1770 to 1985 (a Draft)
“About a year ago I put an end to my indiscriminate reading habits,” David Handlin says at The American Scholar, “so I resolved to read, at least for the time being, only American novels….(and) would compile a list of the 100 Best.”
Handlin cautions that he writes “as an enthusiast, not as a scholar” and offers a thoughtful essay on how he chose his list. Definitely worth reading.
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GROAN
25 Literary Pun Names For Your Cat, selected by Nathan W. Pyle at BuzzFeed and inspired by Catticus, mascot of The Next Page bookstore in Philadelphia
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The Creativity Pill
Neurologist Rivka Inzelberg recently noticed that her patients with Parkinson’s disease seemed to be authoring more novels than older people tend to author, James Hamblin reports in The Atlantic.
Looking closer, poems and paintings also seemed to be pouring out of afflicted patients, in a relative sense—specifically those treated with a synthetic dopamine-precursor pill, levodopa (L-DOPA).
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SciFi and Fantasy’s Best Librarians
Tor has selected some the most notable librarians in SF/Fantasy. For example:
CAL Doctor Who Silence in the Library librarians
The story of Charlotte Abigail Lux (CAL) is tragic enough to break both your hearts. When she was dying, her father preserved her consciousness within a program that simulated a dream world, giving her access to all the knowledge in the library. CAL used this knowledge to help save the Doctor, Donna, and others from the fearsome Vashta Nerada.
Art by Paul Kidby
The Librarian—The Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett
Transformed into an orangutan by a wayward beam of magic, the Librarian is a member of the small, elite group who have the knowledge and ability to travel through L-space. His true identity is unknown and he speaks only through a series of “ooks” and “eeks,” but he’s still a pretty low-key guy when he’s not protecting the world’s knowledge. Just don’t call him a monkey. Trust us on that one.
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A Tale of Two Internets
Mikki Kendall is black and a woman and her Internet may be wildly different from yours. Every morning she looks at Twitter, and sees tweet after tweet of personal invective and vitriol. There are death threats and rape threats and threats against her family from people who disagree with things she’s written online.
As part of an experiment, she changed her avatar to that of a white male. The difference was black and white.
She talked about it at On the Media.
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An Apartment Tower Designed To Help Residents Make Friends
A 24-story residential development in Belgium is designed to get people talking.
It’s hard to foster community in a tower. High-rise towers often lack common spaces that give people a reason to bump into each other or hang out informally. There’s only so much interaction that can happen as people move straight from the lobby to an elevator, then into their apartment.
Social interaction is the main goal of a new high-rise design in Antwerp, Belgium.
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Quote of the Day
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Alma Alexander
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