randomly
 SEPTEMBER 28, 2005I fell asleep on the end of one of the girl's beds this evening. Which meant t... read...
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"A Telegraph reader thought you would be interested in this article"Every other day I get ... read...
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 secondly, WHAT a good idea, another bloganthology for a damn good cause, Warchild. I'm sur... read...
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 An experiment in drinkenness. How many writers and painters have you heard about in your lifetime wh... read...
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 One good thing about having one's car buggered by buggers is that one has to walk to and from th... read...
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 spot the bug: We visited the new place this weekend, to remind ourselves how much we can't wait ... read...
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 I'm awfly glad that the Olympics are in China this year. Not for any political reason am I glad. ... read...
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Sunday, 28 September 2008 17:45 |
 Last night we sat down as a family to watch "The Golden Compass" on DVD. The film started with one of those "It was the times of the Bingly Bong and the Tookah Hoo had fallen into the hands of the Wankesterium" kind of narratives, so I knew what we were in store for. I had forgotten it was a Philip Pullman book (I tried reading one of the Dark Materials books once... I think I threw it out the window). The action began with people running around, each with some kind of talking animal next to them/above them/stuck on them.... called their demons.... oh, please, I was thinking up (REALLY BAD) poetry and stories like that when I was an eejit (I really was an awful drip) thirteen-year-old....This film was a load of drivel, nonsense, poppycock and piffle. And not because it was a children's story. Children's stories should be as good as growed-ups'. I find these stories of "other worlds" by JRR Tolkien, JK Rowling (listen, when Gordon Brown said the other day that JK was one of our greatest authors, I know he had to say SOMETHING because she is a friend of his and she'd just given the party a million quid, but come off it Gordon...one of our greatest authors?), CS Lewis, P Pullman et al so damned tiresome, don't you? When something is a complete fantasy, it feels like it's too easy to tell the story, getting bogged down with silly magical objects and characters with spiritty names to get the story to move from the start to the finish. The Dingly Dangly witch from the lake of the HHHHhhhhhh will have a magic pixie on a stick to help them get to the Hoofly Maaaaachchchchch Island with some godawful superimposed floaty spirituality in the shape of someone who looks like Tilda Swinton (or sometimes, Tilda Swinton) talking in hushy hushy tones, with floaty hair and a diaphanous dress to appeal to the terminally shallow and not particularly interesting thirteen-year-old girls of this world. Twaddle. Just saying, like. You know I'm right. And I'm expecting the dolphin crowd in.
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Alright, I can definitely see your point.
But what about Madeline L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time series) and Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game series)? I'm curious -- what type of children's book do you like, then?
Tove Jansson is the only one who can write - and beautifully illustrate - children's stories without patronising - and there are maps at the front too...check out Moominpapa at Sea, the greatest (and deepest) book ever written...Kafka bog off...
Though there really are no fairies and, technically, no children either... but there are a couple of very mattelizable characters... so...
Oh, and speaking of fairies... Have you ever read Raymond Feist's Faerie Tale? Made me fall in love with the nasty little buggers all over again.
As for Pullman, the only thing I thought when I read the books was that he was annoyingly trying way too hard to make it MEANINGFUL, like you know "it's not just fantasy, it's an allegory for so and so, see, see, I'm a serious writer!". Bah!
best map at front of book:... winnie thur pooh and the hundred acre wood.
I don't like all these Sword of Spigglywig or Cape of Kerfuffle sorts of stories but from when I was wee I've always liked books with maps at the front. Serious fantasy is too earnest, slapping you upside the head with various blunt moral objectives. But funny fantasy, I like.