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Author
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Comment
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Terri
Registered User
(12/30/01 8:21:06 am)
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Fairy tales and Lemony Snickett
There's a short piece in this week's Sunday New York Times by Maureen
Dowd about fairy tales and the Lemony Snickett books. Here's a link
for those who are interested: www.nytimes.com/2001/12/30/opinion/30DOWD.html
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Heidi
Anne Heiner
ezOP
(12/30/01 1:31:29 pm)
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Re: Fairy tales and Lemony Snickett
Thanks, Terri. It was especially nice to see Alison Lurie quoted. Snicket is popular at my library and they are on their own display next to Potter and Tolkien right now.
I met Snicket in September and he was quite fun. I was at a booksellers banquet for adults with only one child present and sitting at my table. The child was too young to know or care who he was and he had fun flirting and sharing his gift chocolates with her. I got the impression he is a man who hadn't thought about kids much until someone thought his books would make a great kids' series. Then he started meeting the kids and discovered he was having fun doing what he never dreamed he would do. He even mentioned the possibility of a picture book somewhere down the line after the series ends at book 13 (of course).
Heidi
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Terri
Registered User
(12/31/01 5:52:13 am)
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Re: Fairy tales and Lemony Snickett
I heard him interviewed on NPR and he sounded like a fabulous guy. I was quite smitten.
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(1/1/02 5:22:36 am)
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Dour and unsmiling
I found the first Snicket book marginally charming. The second repetative. The third so predictable I could only make myself finish it. But I did so because I was doing a commentary on them on the BBC.
But the packaging of the books is brilliant.
Jane
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kate
Unregistered User
(1/1/02 11:51:07 am)
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Snicket
You probably all know, but he's also in a band called The Magnetic Fields. Not to be missed, though not hyped in the media. Revered by musicians.
I haven't read all the books but am curious about the disparate views on them here. Will check them out shortly . . .
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Posey
Registered User
(1/1/02 2:36:00 pm)
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Re: Snicket
I agree - I really wanted to like these books more than I did but they're just so... formulaic & bland. Don't editors understand that formula=formula, no matter how it's dressed up?
And to think I just bought them all in the January sales! *sob*
Posey
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Karen
Unregistered User
(1/3/02 5:49:33 pm)
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sickert
Kate,
I didn't know about the Lemony Sickert- Magnetic Fields connection.
*That* is really quite interesting!
K.
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irishkelly
Unregistered User
(4/17/02 5:04:24 pm)
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lemony
I am really gobsmacked about the magnetic fields/snickett thing. I went to see them gigging in Dublin last year (I'm presuming it's the singer with the deep voice). Amazing!
I'm doing an article at the moment for a children's lit. mag about the trend in dark topics. Just doing it because I love reading them. What do ya all think? Have they always been so popular? Darren Shan, Lemony, Potter (?!), Philip Pullman...
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Terri
Registered User
(4/18/02 8:26:01 am)
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Re: lemony
Oh, yes, historically. Some of the Victorian children's literature was very dark indeed -- particularly works by women. (See U.C. Knoepflmacher's books in this regard, such as Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers, and Ventures Into Childhood: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity). Or look at Barrie's original text for Peter Pan, for instance, which has a dark and arch quality -- as opposed to the bland adaptations one often sees today. There's a lot of good info on the dark side of fairy tales in Marina Warner's No Go th Bogeyman. Let us know when and where you article appears -- it sounds fascinating.
Edited by: Terri at: 4/18/02 8:27:21 am
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Heidi
Anne Heiner
ezOP
(4/18/02 9:53:52 am)
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Re: lemony
At my library, Snicket is very popular--I keep him next to my Harry Potters. However, I think many factors have worked to make this series so popular, including their humor, the packaging, the bookstore marketing, and the nature of it being a series. Series books are always, always popular.
Then there is the mystery and suspense that appeals to readers. I think the dark side of the tales is where Snicket started developing his tale, but they are not necessarily what have made the books insanely popular. The wry admission in the ads and on the covers of a dark tale inside is a challenge to the kids to read it. They do and then they get their peers to do it as the next cool book to read.
Finally, yes, dark books are popular with a part of the reading population but I have just as many kids complaining that the books are too dark and depressing. I think the horrific elements of the story fascinate--these seem to be the same kids who want to read Stephen King and Dean Koontz just a few years later. These kids are still clamoring for Goosebumps, too, although the books are much harder to find and are not being marketed to them anymore.
However, "darker" authors like Pullman and David Almond are being checked out more by the adults who have heard about them than the kids themselves. When the darkness is horror/suspense related, it is more popular, especially if good triumphs at the end. They explain to me that they felt better about their own lives by reading about someone else who overcomes "worse than them."
When it is just dark about life itself, such as about depression and abuse, not really traditional horror/suspense, but "real" world issues they face daily, these books are not popular and you feel like you just condemned a kid to hours in the dentist's chair without anesthesia instead of a fun or even enjoyable reading experience. Their eyes look like this book is one they have to survive to get a grade, not to read because they want to. They do not come back asking for "another one just like this one, please!"
Heidi
PS: Snicket is also just clever with words and handling a lot of clues and surprise elements very well for this reading level. The real question to be answered is how the last book will end. Are the Baudelaire parents really dead? Will everyone die or will they ultimately have a somewhat happy ending? The ninth book is due out in June--The Carnivorous Carnival. Doesn't it just sound delicious and more erudite than most titles for this age group?
Final conclusion is that humor even more than darkness motivates children to read. Captain Underpants, Junie B. Jones and even Beverly Cleary's long lasting Ramona books disappear off the shelves because the kids always seem to know where to find them.
But they still love the dark fairy tales and such. All of it has its important place.
Edited by: Heidi Anne Heiner at: 4/18/02 10:07:31 am
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Jane Yolen
Unregistered User
(4/19/02 2:43:17 am)
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My half cent
I was not put off by darkness in the Lemony Snickett books, but by the repetative nature of things, and the super-arch and know-it-all tone of the narration.
Jane
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JaNell
Registered User
(4/19/02 5:05:10 am)
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Yes
I was, too, but everyone seems to rave on so much about the books that I just figured that there was some subtlety I was missing...
So many books and movies that people go on about seem paint-by-numbers to me.
Maybe I've become a terribly snob, not enjoying big blinking arrows pointing at a joke, unless, of course, there actually *is* a big, blinking arrow pointing at the joke...
which can get repetitive quickly.
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KlausIsDaBomb
Unregistered User
(6/17/02 8:28:36 pm)
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yes
i agree with you kinda but what i dont get what your saying is the dark thig(?????????)but the thing that makes them really good books is the way there shown in public....like how people talk about them and the illistrations. but i think the book does have a good plot and the characters are good but the story is really just like any other one.
*got my 45 on*
*sooo i can rock on*
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(6/18/02 6:51:10 am)
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Re: My half cent
My son is two and a half but I am already discovering that there are books we can enjoy together (though I enjoy them somewhat less after the 10th consecutive reading!) and books that he likes but just leave me cold or fill me with distaste. But of course he's coming to it with vastly different experience, and is focusing on entirely different things. For a while the only part of GREEN EGGS AND HAM that really interested him was the train-and-tunnel sequence. It was the "train story" and right now THE CAT IN THE HAT COMES BACK is "the snow story" -- whereas I think of them as the one where good disorder triumphs and the one where bad disorder is conquered. In a way it's amazing that children and adults can ever agree on any kid's story, and I suspect that when they do, it's for different reasons. When I was a kid I was often put off by the books adults would give me that were supposed to be wonderful kids' stories. BOR-ing.
I've read only one Snicket book (which I bought for my niece) and was disappointed -- I was too was expecting something both more surprising and more ghoulish, maybe like Gorey's Gashlycrumb Tinies. But the only way you know something is formulaic is to have read enough to pick up the repetition, right? Which many adults have not done, never mind kids. And humor can transform something formulaic (which George Lucas seems to have forgotten).
Judith
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anotherboyforpele
Registered User
(6/18/02 10:06:25 pm)
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Re: Fairy tales and Lemony Snickett
Someone was guessing that Lemony Snickett is the Magnetic Field member with the deep voice. That's not him--you're thinking of Stephin Merritt, the brainiac behind the Fields. Lemony Snickett is Daniel Handler, the guy who sometimes plays the accordian for them. He also writes novels--I just read one called The Basic eight, which was funny and dark and satirical. I saw the Magnetic Fields give a two night concert this past March in New York City, and Snickett displayed those same qualities on stage too--he had the whole audience laughing uproariously at one point.
Anyway, go listen to the Magnetic Fields too. They're wonderful.
Chris
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anansia
Unregistered User
(6/30/02 11:02:31 pm)
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Too creepy for me
I've just finished reading book 2 of the Lemony Snickett series to my 8.y.o. son. He likes them, I don't. I have trouble actually articulating what I find disturbing about them - some bits I like but others I find too creepy.
I find it hard to articulate exactly the problem - I'm not in principle opposed to 'dark' or scary fiction for children, although I confess to a leaning towards humour, rather than horror.
The best I can come up with is that the characterisation of Count Olaf is sometimes a bit too real for comfort. I just wonder how these books would be read by kids who've experienced abuse, because every now and then a line strikes me as having a very nastily genuine ring to it. It doesn't seem as far removed from reality as say the Goosbumps books, to feel safe.
Has anyone else had thoughts along these lines?
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anndowner
Registered User
(8/12/02 11:16:36 am)
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Re: Fairy tales and Lemony Snickett
I bought and read the first, with smiling but not laugh-aloud amusement. I remember thinking that Joan Aiken/Charles Addams/Edward Gorey had been there and done that, and to my mind done it better.
For some reason naming the baby Sunny bothered me.
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