Thanks to Chicken Spaghetti, I found this article, announcing the shortlist of a Carnegie of Carnegies - the best children's books of the last 70 years. This list is fascinating to me, not least because I've only read one of them, the first in the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. The list calls it Northern Lights, but I read it as The Golden Compass; I'm assuming the difference is between the British and American editions.
Of course I can't comment on the books I haven't read, but in all this strikes me as a bit of a quirky list. Here's the lead of the article:
"One is a cosy bedtime read about a family of tiny people who live beneath the floor; another takes you into the world of a 14-year-old heroin user; and a third enacts an elaborate fantasy of demons and witch-clans.
They are among 10 books today nominated as the most important children's novels of the past 70 years, and encompass gritty themes of murder, war and illness as well as the deeds of fairies, angels and strange beings."
12 minutes ago
3 comments:
Your "this article" link points back to your post rather than the article.
Thanks, Amy. I just fixed it. I was trying to post at school and the connection kept coming in and out - ugh.
Well, clearly I'm lacking in the children's lit department, because I've only ever heard of one of these books (The Borrowers) and I've never read any of them. However, as I was looking up the first several on the list on Amazon, I started to realize that the list compilers seem to have a different definition of "children's books" than I do. I'd call many (if not most) of these "young adult fiction" and not consider letting my kids read them until they were high school age.
Of course, I'm not very keen on dark-themed books in any case (which several of these seem to be) so I don't know that I'd recommend those to the kids in any case.
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