My Favorite Children's Book

My Favorite Children’s Book

My friend and fellow writer (she is actually published) Katherine Harbour recently asked me if I could write a few words about my favorite children’s book.

Katherine Harbour

Here goes.

I work at Barnes & Noble in the Children’s Book Department. I do storytime. I have a 5 shelf bookcase at home full of children’s books.

There are so many to choose from.

I have been an avid reader for most of my life. I attribute this to a couple of different influences.

My father (through means unknown to me) came across a cache of comic books when I was a young lad. He paid my allowance in comic books. It worked like gangbusters, until I discovered the secret location of his troll hoard in a cubby ‘neath the stairs.

Those comic books sent an electrical shock wave up and down my spine and caused my eyes to spin and unleashed torrents of my imagination.

My Great Grandmother Naomi used to take me to the Velma Teague Library in Glendale, Arizona.

I remember dozens of people thumbing through vinyl records searching for an LP to check out. There were comic books there as well. My obsession was the discard racks at the entrance full of pulp science fiction novels with lurid and fantastical covers.

To this day I still fetishize discarded books. My particular kink lies in books from far off libraries that still have the library cards inside with names and dates.

That is how things get embedded in our psyches and our collective unconscious minds methinks. A mixture of childhood sense overload and budding hormonal desires. I still get a particular warm shiver when I find a certain book at a used bookstore or when my rabid comic book desires get whetted.

Anyway, we were talking about children’s books. Let’s hit on a few while I try to settle on one.

Brighty of the Grand Canyon by Marguerite Henry. As an Arizona kid reading a true legend about the place I was from was a real treat. The illustrations by Wesley Dennis are like kid catnip. I love this book so much I currently have two copies.

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume. When I was in fourth grade an elderly teacher began reading this to us as a treat. I was desperate for each installment. I had to know what happened next. I was feverish. I was manic. I was obsessed. The way my teacher would lick her finger before slowly turning to the next tantalizing page filled me with unquenchable anticipation. I tried looking at a new version of this book to see if I would get the same sense memory from it to no avail. Without the Roy Doty illustrations, it just wasn’t the same.

How To Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell. With laugh out loud humor and Vonnegut like short chapters, I read and re-read this one until it literally disintegrated in my hands. This is the only cover for me. New updated covers of books you loved as a kid seem, at the very least, to take away some of the ownership you might feel for a beloved tale of childhood yore. Here is an example below.

You see? Just not the same.

There are others. So many others. Bunnicula - which sent me spiraling into the vortex of anticipation known as the Scholastic Book Fair…

My Side Of The Mountain by Jean Craighead George and the film that followed…

Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls which spoke to the spiritual yearning that has been a companion to me and something for which I have had to struggle to reconcile in the face of what I know now vs. what I knew (or thought I knew) then.

The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary …

There are some children’s books that transcend the genre and becoming something more. They speak to us at the various stations in our lives and are as relevant to us when we are young and when we are old. Like…

And…

The above you could read to an infant, or a graduate, or at a wedding, or to someone on their deathbed, and it would have meaning at all those occasions.

Okay? Okay. I’ve stalled long enough…

Drum roll.

a beat...

(insistently) Drum Roll!

My favorite children’s book (at this time) is…

As much as I love Quentin Blake, Joseph Schindelman has been and will be the only illustrator for Roald Dahl’s Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. I have focused a lot on illustrators throughout this piece. Illustrators are vital. Tellers of tales are vital. When you find the perfect partnership between the two, sparks and magic are created.

Is there a Hunter S. Thompson without Ralph Steadman?

What would The Wizard of Oz be without William Wallace Denslow?

No, for a children’s book to become a classic it has to fire on both cylinders - a fantastically written tale married to timeless illustrations. That is why I love “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory” so much.

Joseph Schindelman in The New Yorker

I love classic Disney. Roald Dahl is like the anti-Disney. He is the Agent Smith to Walt’s Neo…

Whereas (most of the time) Walt & crew polished over the rough edges, Roald Dahl dove right into them with sinister delight. The book is like a children’s version of Dante’s Inferno. Dahl was a treasure. His voice is sorely missed.

Schindelman’s illustrations scratch an itch deep down in my soul. I am as satisfied when studying his delicate whimsical crosshatching as I would be eating a Wonka Scrumdiddlyumptious Bar. Truly a masterpiece.

I even tried to duplicate his drawing technique. 

Like Charles Schulz, Schindelman's exquisite technique is far more complex than it appears upon initial inspection. Don't believe me? Try to draw Charlie Brown. A lifetime of experience and practice can make the hand into a magical instrument.

Well, there it is. My favorite. For so many reasons.

My own well worn and much loved copy.

What is yours?

I’ll close with this quote from the film version…

fin

The Retail Manifesto

From my novel "The People's Republic of Retail". As things begin to unravel at Mega Mart, despotic store manager Bill Cox doubles down on meting out punishment in an effort to quell the oncoming rebellion. Eric George, as a suspected ringleader, is suspended (exiled) for two weeks. He sits down at his manual typewriter and begins typing out what will become known as "The Retail Manifesto".

The Retail Manifesto

Part I.

    We are the ghost generation. We are the hidden mechanism that runs your service economy. We are the spectral hands that stock your bread & milk - your staples. We are the expired student I.d. generation - forced to work menial jobs for minimum wage. We are a generation stunted by debt - held back from our greater aspirations by maxed out credit cards and high interest rate loans.

   
You lured us in, before we had a chance, with the promise of things we couldn't afford, and now we are stuck making french fries - sweeping floors - and selling your gasoline. We have been locked in a prison cell whose only key is submission. We have a name for our prison. We call it Retail!

Part II.

    We are the wage slaves. America's forgotten sons and daughters, trapped behind WAL's (sic). You see a big box - we see a gulag. You see low prices - we see the true cost in the precious blood & sweat of foreign children. Children who should be in school rather than manufacturing things that could be made in American factories by American workers paid decent wages. You see economic development - we see urban sprawl & the death of the middle class. You find comfort in the monotony of suburbia - we are wondering, "where is our American dream?"

Part III.

    The corporations have become tyrannies - ruling vicariously through media outlets that spread more lies & misinformation than news, through politicians bought & paid for, through political action groups who capitalize on fear & hysteria to get the populace to vote against their own self interests. Did you know that the money squandered on wars and disinformation could pay for universal health care and education for all - several times over? These robber barons and their stooges spend more to oppress public initiatives than it would cost to allow them to just pass. It’s time to wake up - strike torches - and burn our way through the web of lies that protects the rich while crushing the poor and working classes!

Part IV.

    We have been in a coma - turned into zombies by corn syrup and Ritalin and anti-depressants. We medicate ourselves into a stupor to hide from the bleak realities of roles we didn't choose but were lead to like cattle down a chute to the slaughterhouse floor. I say we face the world awake - with our eyes wide open! We don't need more medicine. The situation is depressing. Only when we face this inescapable fact - consciously, can we effect real change!

Part V.

    We are beginning to rise from our slumber. There are those of us - inside the machine, who are sounding the alarm. We were educated inside your institutions despite your best efforts. You cut taxes for the rich while slashing public education perennially. But in spite of it all we have uncovered the truth. We have read the banned books. We have learned the story of labour movements - excised from our history books. We know - now, that our world has fallen to shadow. It has come to pass, as Orwell prophesyed, that all the hard won advances now lay rusting across the landscape, the promises abandoned like Midwestern factories, the ghosts of prosperity reflected in shattered windows and ivy-entwined brick. The once mighty cities have fallen - like mythic civilizations, into modern day ruins. Detroit - Cleveland - Allentown - Baltimore - Flint: Once they were citadels of enlightenment & culture - now infested by drugs & poverty. How could so much promise be wiped away, and for what? To make room for big chains? Multi-National conglomerates bringing forth low wages - poor benefits, and big box blight? It doesn't have to be that way. The future is not yet written. We have a choice. We can wrest control of these monstrosities, and against all odds, we can rebuild the dream!

Part VI.

    You cannot run from accountability. You who have hidden behind a flag made in China. You who have shouted down opposition with empty gestures of patriotism - while justifying the deaths of scores of young men on foreign battlefields. Did you ever notice that in war, only the blood of the young gets spilled? I say no more! The real war is here! It's time for us to rise up and heed the call!

    
Individually, we can be defeated. But united, we are a revolution! Like a million trees growing out of the cracks of American sidewalks, we will fight and persevere. The goliaths of greed will fall and on their foundations we will till the soil of a better tomorrow!

Today Mega-Mart!

Tomorrow the World!

Eric George

Labor Day