image credit: npr.org

If you decide to follow the tunnel, turn to page 151. If you decide to cross the bridge, turn to page 12.

Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books? Now you can enjoy the series in ebook format with the new iPhone app U-Ventures. The app was created by Edward Packard, one of the authors of the original Choose Your Own Adventure series and creator of U-Ventures.

In an interview with NPR host Neal Conan, Packard comments on some of the narrative changes made possible by the new digital format. First there are the obvious bells and whistles that ebooks allow:

CONAN: Well, these were obviously interactive books. Clearly these are a natural for dig.

Mr. PACKARD: They were. And so, when we decided to put it into app form with Simon and Schuster, we had to get a developer expanded app out in L.A. and develop it really – which is more than just transferring it into digital form, because we wanted to add a lot of tricks and things and features that the app could perform that you would never have been able to have in the printed book. [...]

CONAN: Books can’t make sounds and that sort of things, yeah.

But there are less obvious point-of-view changes, as well:

[PACKARD:] My original first book, I – first one of these that I wrote, I wasn’t able to sell it, but I got a small publisher to publish it, and we decided we’d have it – try to have a unisex you, so – but even that, it wasn’t too satisfactory. And the publishers, Bantam, when they started bringing out the series in a big way, they said, you know, we have to represent it with somebody as you, the reader. And this somebody turned out to be a white boy, looking like sort of a junior James Bond. And this didn’t sit too well with a lot of people, especially girls.

And so we decided, with these apps, we’re not going to have that problem. We’re going to make it point-of-view, the reader. And as you go through your adventures, all the illustrations show things as you see them with your own eyes.

Listen to the full story here, and if you’ve tried the U-ventures app, let us know what you think of it.

The online version (along with a slideshow of images from the store) is available at no cost on P&W’s website…but if you want a print copy, Poets & Writers‘ special offer to Fiction Writers Review readers (only $12 for a year-long subscription) is still up for grabs; if you order through this page before May 15, you’ll get the current issue featuring Women & Children First. Regardless of when you order, a subscription will show support for independent bookstores everywhere.

Here’s an excerpt from Jeremiah’s Women & Children First profile:

photo by Jeremiah Chamberlin

When I walked into Women & Children First, the feminist bookstore that Linda Bubon and her business partner, Ann Christophersen, founded more than thirty years ago, the overriding feeling I experienced was one of warmth. And it wasn’t because Chicago was having a late-winter snowstorm that afternoon. From the eclectic array of books stacked on tables, to the casualness of the blond wood bookcases, to the handwritten recommendations from staff below favorite books on the shelves, everything feels personalized; an atmosphere of welcome permeates the place.

In the back of the store, a painted sign showing an open book with a child peering over the top hangs from the ceiling, indicating the children’s section. Not far away, a similar sign, this one of a rainbow with an arrow below it, points toward the GLBTQ section. Despite these signs—not to mention the name of the store itself—Women & Children First carries more than books for women and, well, children.

And here’s Linda Bubon, on her (and the bookstore’s) future:

Linda Bubon / photo by Jeremiah Chamberlin

I’m a bookseller, but I’m a feminist bookseller. Would I be a bookseller if I were going to run a general bookstore? I’m not sure. Sometimes I think, “What will I do if the store is no longer viable?” And I think that rather than going into publishing or going to work for a general bookstore, I would rather try to figure out how to have a feminist reading series and run a feminist not-for-profit. Because the real purpose of my life is getting women’s voices out, and getting women to tell the truth about their lives, and selling literature that reflects the truths of girls’ and women’s lives. Sometimes we’re abused; we have to talk about that. Sometimes we take the bad road in relationships; we have to talk about that. Sometimes we’re discriminated against in the workplace; we have to talk about these things. Violence against women in the United States and worldwide has not stopped. We don’t have a feminist army to go rescue women in Afghanistan—would that we did.

The goal of my life has been to get the word out, to understand women’s lives. We have to continue to evolve and change if we’re to have a full share, and if our daughters are to have a full share of the world.

photo: GPN/Nebraska ETV Network and WNED Buffalo

Six months ago, we here at FWR (and many others) mourned the end of long-running PBS show Reading Rainbow. Now, rumor has it that Reading Rainbow may make a comeback. Host LeVar Burton recently tweeted:

You heard it here first… Reading Rainbow 2.0 is in the works! Stay tuned for more info. But, you don’t have to…

If you can complete that sentence, you’re probably one of the millions who can’t wait to see this show—which encouraged kids to love books and reading—back on the air. No further details have been released yet, but we can hope, right?

Via.

“I would tell them to go to hell,” Sendak said. And if children can’t handle the story, they should “go home,” he added. “Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it’s not a question that can be answered.”

In a bracingly unsentimental interview with Newsweek, Sendak, director Spike Jonze, and screenwriter Dave Eggers discuss why Max’s dinner is “still hot” and not “still warm,” why he believes Disney is bad for children, and why it’s okay—maybe even necessary—for children’s books (and films) to be scary:

Jonze: We are squeamish. We are Disneyfied. We don’t want children to suffer. But what do we do about the fact that they do? The trick is to turn that into art. Not scare children, that’s never our intention.

[...]

Sendak: [...] This concentration on kids being scared, as though we as adults can’t be scared. Of course we’re scared. I’m scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can’t fall asleep. It never stops. We’re grown-ups; we know better, but we’re afraid.

Why is that important in art?

Sendak: Because it’s truth. You don’t want to do something that’s all terrifying. I saw the most horrendous movies that were unfit for child’s eyes. So what? I managed to survive.

Maurice Sendak’s picture book Where the Wild Things Are is nearly 50 years old, but the release of Spike Jonze’s film adaptation has sparked a resurgence of critical interpretations of the story. A sampling:

On the Oxford University Press blog, philosophy professor Stephen T. Asma ties our love for Where the Wild Things Are to our fascination with other monsters–”zombies, vampires, and serial killers”:

As the movie’s trailer reminds us, “Inside all of us is a wild thing.” And in our therapeutic era, we generally accept that it is good and healthy to visit our wild things –to let them off their chains, let them howl at the moon. You can also taste some of this Romanticism in the recent relish of the Woodstock anniversary, with its celebration of noble primitivism. But the hippy view of “the wild” is quite sunny, whereas Sendak (who lost family during the Holocaust) wanted to acknowledge some of the darker aspects of uncivilized life (even, or especially, through the eyes of a child). Despite these darker notes, however, Where the Wild Things Are still affirms the idea that danger, at least in small doses, is good for you. And this latest fascination with beasties, together with the approach of Halloween, reminds us that we have a love/hate relationship with monsters generally. We are simultaneously attracted and repulsed by them.

At The Millions, Emily Collette Wilkinson looks at WTWTA through a Hobbesian lens:

And so we have in Wild Things Hobbes for children and a Hobbesian child hero (“no Arts; no Letters; no Society…the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”) Max seems constrained by the civilized domestic world in which we find him in the first frame. Sendak reveals Max’s confinement by making his first illustration only four inches by five and a half, with three-inch, white margins; the story’s illustrations grow progressively larger as Max’s wildness escalates and he is finally sent to his room. Only when the imaginary forest realm of the wild things has totally overgrown his room do the illustrations take up the whole of each page—as if to say that only when Max enters his imaginary world of unadulterated wildness and savagery do we see him fully.

New York Times columnist David Brooks uses WTWTA to illustrate the psychologist’s view that “we are a community of competing selves” and meditates on the value of creative work–sort of:

In the psychologist’s version, the good life is won indirectly. People have only vague intuitions about the instincts and impulses that have been implanted in them by evolution, culture and upbringing. There is no easy way to command all the wild things jostling inside.

But it is possible to achieve momentary harmony through creative work. Max has all his Wild Things at peace when he is immersed in building a fort or when he is giving another his complete attention. This isn’t the good life through heroic self-analysis but through mundane, self-forgetting effort, and through everyday routines.

And finally, on Huffington Post Books, the voice actors of the film reflect on the book that inspired it all.

[[Lauren Ambrose]]: That’s exactly what we all do, trying to solve our problems. People lying on couches and going to therapy and trying to access this vast unconscious to allow it to help us solve our problems. That’s what the book is about. One of the things it’s about to me is that this kid goes and is able to access his vast imagination, childlike imagination, which is what we all try to get back to, to help him learn how to be in the world and learn how to solve his problems with his mom. It’s also about how success and fame and being the king is nothing compared to family, community, soup and your mom. That’s the last page, that soup that’s still hot.

Read more here.

One of the wonderful books the library would love to have / click on the cover to read a review

Now you can help stock this library by clicking here and buying a book (chosen by the school to fill gaps) from Book Culture for for its collection. ReadThis will pay shipping, and the bookstore will donate 15% of sales for each book back to the school as a donation. In one swoop you’ll be supporting a library and an independent bookstore.

Geri Ellner, Library Media Specialist at Brooklyn Collegiate, responded to the impact of her school’s new library (via Book Culture’s site):

“Too often, people comment on how few young people read printed books in this electronic society. You saw that this is not true. What might be true is that many young people cannot afford to own their books in these economic times. Also, many students do not use the public library if they have to walk through an unsafe area to get to one. As I told you, circulation has gone up since your books arrived. More students come to the library. It has been a great wonderful first year here. [ReadThis] performs a wonderful service. Please keep it up.”

What do you think?

Tove Jansson’s Moomin world, created in the 1940s, is still quite popular in Japan (there is a Moomin theme park there, and another in Jansson’s native Finland), but few of my American contemporaries seem to have read these books as children. This may be because they are very strange.

The Moomins are a family of small hippopotamus-like creatures. They are thoughtful and inquisitive, and their personalities are only half decided by their names. Creatures is really the only word to describe the other beings that populate the landscape. Some include Whomper and Misabel, more or less human-looking, but with snuffly animal-like noses and hair; there is the Fillyjonk, a mousy female who is excessively and nervously concerned with cleanliness; there is the bossy Hemulen, who looks a bit like the Moomins but who contains none of their creativity or calm; there is Snufkin, a shy, self-possessed, wandering musician. And finally, there is Little My, small enough to curl up in Moominmamma’s knitting basket, and prone to throwing fits and biting people’s ankles when she is annoyed.

If this sounds a little overwhelming, it can be—I remember trying to keep everyone straight as a six or seven year old first reading Moominsummer, and getting distracted by the sounds of the names, which in retrospect are onomatopoeic. But Jansson refuses to explain or introduce each character—the newer edition I purchased lately does include a sort of glossary in the back, but I don’t remember any such thing in my childhood copy. Jansson would never condescend to her readers by assuming something needed to be explained, yet there is plenty of irony and sly wit here that adults will enjoy. She never winks at adults at children’s expense, however. The troubles at stake here matter, as does the joy.

The adult characters in the story often behave with the irrationality and the curiousness of children, and their world is just as attractive to me now as it was then in its mixture of routine and adventure. Moomins need to eat and sleep, and they like to be warm and cozy, but they don’t worry too much about going to bed on time, or ownership. When their house is flooded, they cut a hole in the ceiling and dive down for cups and plates:

“I’m not washing any dishes today,” Moominmamma said hilariously. “Who knows, perhaps I’ll never wash dishes any more. But please, can’t we try to save the drawing room suite before it spoils?”

The Moomins may be relaxed, but they are also resourceful and humorous, often both at once in a way that will make you wish you could deal with life with such aplomb. When the storm that will flood the valley arrives, Moominpappa asks, “Did anybody take the hammock in?” No one had remembered the hammock. “Good,” said Moominpappa. “It was a horrid color.”

There are more than a half-dozen books in the Moomin universe, and they each take their beginnings from the seasons and events in the natural world. Jansson grew up spending part of each year on an island off the coast of Finland, the daughter of a sculptor and an illustrator. She subsequently lived there with her partner, the artist Tuulikka Pietelä. Moominsummer Madness captures the laziness of sunny summer days and the mystery of summer nights. After Shakespeare, there is a play, with a lion in it. And there are some of the same confusions and tangles of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as characters misunderstand each other, or willfully persist in wanting things that they can’t have.

The other books in the series likewise explore how nature affects our doings and our moods: in Moominland Midwinter the family munches pine needles to keep their bellies full while they hibernate, and we follow the strange little creatures who come out in the snow. A comet and an ocean voyage begin two other books, and always Jansson makes us aware of the trees, the rain, the moon that (in English at least) seems to give her dreamy title family their name.

Most children’s books manage to impart some kind of message; the measure of any book is how well it manages to make you forget that there is any message in it. In Jansson’s world the message is always subordinate to the sheer energy of the plot, but certain ideas gradually become clear: that some people are lonely, and that if you are kind to them they will be less so; that authority figures are often not to be trusted, but that they are cruel or bossy out of loneliness themselves. Some creatures here take on our own neuroses: they cry that the sky is falling, they are a little mean or scary, they get anxious and worried and lost, but others prove that nothing truly horrible ever comes to pass if you keep calm, although a little civil disobedience isn’t out of place either. The theme of loneliness often returns, usually precipitated by the atmosphere of the natural world. There is plenty of action, but characters also often have to go off and sit by themselves and think, whether to pout or reflect or figure out how they feel.

This is a major reason children (and adults) should read these books today: in a contemporary time where there is always something to do, often a rather shallow electronic distraction, Jansson shows that quietly sitting and thinking by yourself is a valuable activity. She also shows that almost everyone is lonely from time to time, and that while community can be an antidote to loneliness, we can also learn from solitude. Being happy all the time shouldn’t be our goal.

The one character who is never lonely is Little My. Perhaps she’s so ferocious to make up for her size—instead of being sorrowful she gets mad. And when she’s alone she always entertains herself, by cutting up balls of yarn, for example, which is fun in a destructive and pointless kind of way. There is also a minor character who may always be lonely: the Groke. She is drawn as a kind of slow-moving yeti, and she’s always cold. She wants to get warm, so she creeps toward any light, but as soon as she sits down on it to heat herself up, she puts it out. Her frightening, endless search is one aspect of the novels that moves them firmly out of the realm of “cute,” although plenty of the characters, especially the Moomins’ big velvety noses and the pleading eyes of the smaller creatures are exactly that.

My two favorite characters, then as now, are Snufkin and Little My (read a conversation between them at the end of this review). Neither of them is exactly cute, and if they are, they’re attractive only in their perversity. Snufkin is the most independent character in the book; he is nonchalant but stubborn—a poet-transient who wanders into and out of Moonminvalley each year. Little My is also stubborn, but she’s loud. She enjoys a little entertaining chaos, but she’s happiest when she’s in charge.

As a child, I found the series fascinating for its balance of family security with freedom from convention and control. I’m apparently still as attracted to a world where I can imagine myself as a dreamy song-writing anarchist who is prone to defiant ankle-biting when she doesn’t get her way.

It was Snufkin himself in his old green hat who now stood on the shore and stared at the workbasket he had caught.

“By my hat, if it isn’t a small Mymble,” he said and took the pipe from his mouth. He then poked at Little My with the crochet hook and said kindly: “Don’t be afraid!”

“I’m not even afraid of ants,” replied Little My and sat up.

They looked at each other.

The last time they had met, Little My had been so small as to be nearly invisible, so it wasn’t very strange that they didn’t recognize each other now.

“Well, well, dear child,” remarked Snufkin and scratched his head.

“Well, yourself, with knobs on,” said Little My.

Snufkin sighed. He was here on important business, and he had really hoped to be alone for a few days more before returning to Moominvalley for the summer. And then some careless Mymble went and put her child to sea in a work-basket. Just for the fun of it.

“Where’s Mother?” he asked.

“Somebody ate her,” replied My untruthfully. “Have you any food?”

Snufkin pointed with his pipe stem. A small kettle of peas was simmering over his camp-fire nearby. Beside it stood another with hot coffee.

“But I suppose milk’s what you drink,” he said.

Little My gave a contemptuous laugh. She did not bat an eyelid as she swallowed two brimming teaspoonsful of coffee and ate no fewer that four peas.

Then Snufkin carefully extinguished his camp-fire with water and remarked: “Well?”

“Now I want to sleep some more,” said Little My. “I always sleep best in pockets.”

“Quite,” said Snufkin and pocketed her. “The main thing in life is to know your own mind.” He tucked the angora wool in around her.

Then Snufkin continued his way across the meadows by the shore.

If you enjoyed the Moomin books, you might also like Jansson’s The Summer Book, a collection of stories based on her childhood, recently reprinted by Sort Of Books. A Winter Book, which contains her other fiction for adults, is also available.

And things, it appears, are getting better all the time. The author’s 9-city video tour concluded on October 9, and now, as I read, I can go here to watch and listen to Gaiman — in a fetching leather jacket, no less — read the entire book to me.

To learn more about the much-acclaimed The Graveyard Book, listen to this episode of All Things Considered. The NPR page also features a review by Laurel Maury, some of the book’s haunting artwork, an excerpt, and an interview with the author–as well as a photo of him in bee-keeping gear, harvesting honey. To hear first-hand what Gaiman is up to, spend some time on his blog.

Trailer for The Graveyard Book: