I'm begging all of you:

[conuly]

If you have children, or teach children, or otherwise are in any way going to be called upon to recommend/supply books to children read some children's books that were published in this century.

And then, when you're stocking your home or classroom library, or suggesting a long list of books for a friend's child, look at what you've picked out and ask yourself: is this a long list of wall-to-wall white people*? are they all straight, NT, nondisabled, middle class, nominally Christian? is it just chock-full of the 'isms? is this really a complete list?

I swear, sometimes I feel like I'm banging my head against a freaking wall. If the only books you're suggesting are the ones your beloved auntie put in your hands when you were small, the same ones she inherited from her favorite teacher, please. For the love of everything. Read something new.

Also - if you feel you need to warn that a rec has "some sexual content" or "some violence", but don't feel the need to warn that it's brimful of bigotry, maybe ask yourself why that is. (Or, flip it - if you're asking people to warn you for two of those things but not the third, again, why is that? When did you decide it was okay for your kid to read Ma Ingalls saying, without an ounce of narrative criticism, that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, but it's not okay to read about the ghost of somebody's lynched father showing up to wake her and alert her to the need to flee?)

Comments

[conuly]

Also, let's be blunt: the average children's book written today is still better written than most of the "classic" books from yore.

I know a lot of people who have a weirdo idea that it's the opposite, that books in the past have a higher quality of writing, and they're just straight wrong. And that's even before you account for the filtering effect, ie, only the best books are even remembered a generation later!

[lilysea]

Yeah, if you asked me to recc older children's books that are still good

I'd recc the Pippi Longstocking books (but NOT the one set on an tropical island, that one has serious racism problems)

the Moomin books (which don't have any problems that I'm aware of - it probably doesn't hurt that the author was a female artist, a member of the art avant-garde world, and either lesbian or bisexual)

and some of the feminist fairytale retellings books from the 1970s (there are so many of these, and many of them are VERY GOOD).

Oh, and some Maurice Sendak books,

the Phantom Tollbooth,

and Edward Gorey.

[conuly]

I have a longer list.

Though I think I know what the problem is with those folks, and Pippi is actually a great example.

When they think of high quality literature, they often tend to cite more complex sentence structures and occasionally more low-frequency vocabulary. Now, I wouldn't really call that "better" or "worse", just a different style, but they do.

However, where they go wrong is they confuse complex sentences for complex writing. And guess what? Older books, especially older children's books, do not often have more complex writing! They are significantly more likely than modern books to have each chapter make up a single, more-or-less self-contained story, with few or no arcs that the reader has to keep track of through the entire book. Each story is likely to have exactly zero subplots. There often isn't much need to consider multiple viewpoints.

There certainly are exceptions, there always are - but those are mostly suitable for older children or even adolescents.

So look at Pippi. I love her, but she's just what I'm talking about. Every story sits by itself. The children don't really change over the course of the books. Pippi is always interesting and funny and in the right - no doubts there! Which is great, but no matter how fancy the sentence structure of the translation it doesn't really make for a complex and varied story.

[thekumquat]

My experience is that language change over generations results in kids needing to be a couple years older than their parents were, to understand the same story.

Taking Enid Blyton (basically the main storyteller in the UK in my youth), and finding the ones which weren't too stereotyped or had been 'updated', the biggest issue was sentences involving "I shall" and "shan't", words that have practically vanished (conversely, 'immediately' didn't seem to be in Blyton's vocabulary. Add all the cultural assumptions of After the War no longer being part of popular culture, and her books (some, at least) are now aimed at children 3-5 years older than the original readers.

Some stories hold up for an older audience; others... don't.

Some stories are worth a remake - Four Children and It, for example.

[conuly]

Nesbit had her blind spots, but she remains one of the best children's authors of all time.