Oldest, best... books!

a few favorites from the Allen family bookshelf, plus guest commentary by Richard

One of the joys of having kids, for us, is re-experiencing our childhood memories, traditions, and stories through Bea and Harriet’s eyes, as well as our own adult eyes. It’s funny the things you realize about why you liked something so much—Anne of Green Gables was essentially about female friendship, blissing out on nature, beating boys on school tests, and fashion, so of course I loved that book. Bea loves it too (of course).

Richard’s parents, Bea’s Nana and Grandpa, are tremendous savers and caretakers. They have original Lego sets with every single Lego. Plus the instructions! They gave us a drum of wooden Playskool blocks, and it has every single block inside! But the best carefully-saved items they have passed along have been books.

I made a Friday list of our favorite finds from the Allen family bookshelf. And keep reading for an appreciation, by Richard, of one his own childhood favorites.

Finn Family Moomintroll (plus Comet in Moominland, Moominpapa at Sea, and many others)—these books are a little hard to explain, but their creator, the Finnish cartoonist and writer Tove Jansson, has recently had some charming, illuminating write-ups in places like the New Yorker. Bea would tell you that you just need to READ THESE BOOKS.

Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren—these are great, truly enjoyable read-alouds for both the adults and kids. Plus, Pippi Longstocking was Michelle Obama’s favorite book character growing up. From an interview in the New York Times:

Pippi Longstocking was my girl. I loved her strength — not just her physical power, but the idea that she wouldn’t allow her voice to be diminished by anyone. She’s independent, clever and adventurous — and she’s clearly a good person, someone who always does right by her friends. What I loved most was that she was a girl, and she was a little different, and she was still the most powerful character in those books.

Uncle Elephant by Arnold Lobel. There’s a lot of wisdom in Arnold Lobel books, plus his settings are just the coziest, green-brown world. If all you’ve read of Lobel is Frog and Toad and Owl at Home (my personal favorite), you should also seek out Uncle Elephant, the story of an elephant uncle caring for his nephew while the young elephant’s parents are (temporarily) lost at sea. A really powerful evocation of something every kid experiences at some point: an adult distracting them from their fears and loneliness.

(Side note: I read once that Lobel considered himself more of an artist than a writer, telling an interviewer, “I feel that I'm a trained illustrator and a lucky amateur in terms of writing.” He said that writing, for him, was more intuitive. I find this so interesting because, although Lobel’s illustrations are marvelous and unique, I find his writing voice is equal to them. A vote for amateurs, I suppose! Or humility.)

When Bea and Richard sit down to read together, more often than not they’ll choose a mystery—especially Encyclopedia Brown, a series taken right from Richard’s crowded childhood bookshelf. Bea loves guessing the solution to the mystery, even though, as Richard points out, it’s sometimes impossibly specific. Take it away, Richard:

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A Boy Detective

by Richard Allen

Given the popularity in today's middle-grade books of "Chosen One" narratives, in which the protagonist's facade of ordinariness lasts a chapter or two before some magical ability or destiny is revealed, what stands out most in rereading Donald J. Sobol's Encyclopedia Brown series may be the author's commitment to building a world in which his boy-detective hero's extraordinary qualities don't mark him as essentially different or lash him to the mast of some greater destiny.

Sobol's Idaville is a certain kind of smart kid's fantasy: a place in which a ten-year-old's remarkable learnedness and Holmesian powers of perception and recall bring not derision, nor even much scrutiny, but a steady stream of quarters plunked down on the gasoline can in Encyclopedia's garage-office, where he sees clients when he's not doing enviably fun things like playing baseball and going to the beach. Encyclopedia's peers don't have time to dwell on his smarts: they need his help, and they're willing to pay for it. His inexplicable mental acuity (we never see Encyclopedia in school, because his detective agency's only open in the summer) brings him respect, acceptance, and purpose of the sort at which serious-minded real-life ten-year-olds can only marvel.

Encyclopedia owes his stature as a leader among children, rather than a pitiable nerd, to the moral depravity of a significant number of Idaville's swindling-addicted young people. Sobol's creativity and wit shine through in each book's cavalcade of eccentric victims and shockingly amoral young villains. A remarkable number of Idaville's children, unsupervised to a degree that's a little implausible even for the 1970s, spend their ample free time cultivating any number of eccentric hobbies, entering a succession of contests related to those hobbies, and then either cheating to secure, or being cheated out of rightfully earned, victories in those contests. The remainder are regularly minutes away from being sweet-talked out of the last of their scant pocket change by various teenage mountebanks ("teenager" is almost synonymous with "shiftless" and "predatory" in these books, which should be validating for readers with older siblings in their teen years).

More than a few mysteries do hinge on Encyclopedia knowing some piece of information that no ten-year-old today would know, or that simply isn't true anymore. "The Case of the Coffee Smoker" from "Encyclopedia Brown Gets His Man" revolves around the mechanics of a seventeen-year-old pipe(!) smoker lighting a match with his shoe sole (did you know that strike-anywhere matches are in fact still widely available in the US? I did not). The solution to the same book's "The Case of the Million Pesos" involves the amount of time it would take robbers to count one million Mexican one-peso banknotes - a denomination taken out of production in 1970. Those stories nevertheless offer opportunities to discuss with your child what, for instance, rotary phones and typewriters were, how they worked, and how essential the idiosyncrasies of their operation were to 20th century crime fiction.

(Classic children’s books also make great Halloween costumes—here is Bea as Nancy Drew, and Harriet as Harriet the Spy, back in 2019. Our love of detective stories runs deep!)

What childhood favorites do you like to read with your kids? Any new discoveries of old(er) books?