Hi readers,
I need to let you all know that I am officially resigning from adult life. I’m not planning on resigning from all of adult life, mind you. Just the parts that expect me to be realistic.
I have come to this decision after multiple consecutive years of reading children’s novels, aka novels that don’t prize realism over truth. (And yes, I think there is a difference.)
I’ve always been a reader. I’ve always loved to read. Even more than loving to read, I have always loved the idea of reading. Books have always seemed magical to me. They held keys to all sorts of unexamined nooks and crannies of the world.
My love has waxed and waned over the years, but it always remained somewhere in there, simmering.
But one thing has been happening over the past few years that has drastically altered my reading habits: my children are getting older. This means that sometimes Dr Suess can be put aside for a moment and longer books can be delved into. And we have been delving.
Last year, we all listened to Little Women in the car. We put a lot of miles on our car, and the March sisters were with us the whole way. Then Magoo and I started (and finally finished) Anne of Green Gables. We started it a long time ago and just finally finished it tonight because we kept taking literary detours along the way and then we refused to read the lat chapter because when we did, we knew our inaugural voyage into the world Anne would be over. And my three oldest and I have been working our way through the Little House series. We just started the fifth book yesterday.
These books are all about vastly different characters in dramatically different situations, and yet they all have one thing in common: they make me want to shut the world away, cuddle under a big blanket with my girls, and just spend our lives reading. They create a world that’s not less real than our current one – it’s just handled more gently, preserving for us the beauty that’s there for anyone to find if we will only look.
I was thinking about this as Magoo and I turned the last page of Anne, me choking back a tear. What is it about these books? At first I thought it was because they are children’s books and as such don’t provide dark glimpses into the world.
But then I realized that’s not the case. Anne starts out in sad straights and definitely faces sadness by the end of the book. We all know the sad case of Beth March, and in the first two chapters of By the Shores of Silver Lake, Mary has gone blind, Pa has had to leave the state for work, and Jack the bulldog dies.
Surely these books are not free from sadness.
But what sets these books apart from some of our more modern and mature novels is that the characters themselves remain light and virtuous despite their hardships. They don’t succumb to despair or bitterness or cynicism. They don’t lose faith or hope. Their edges don’t harden. They don’t give up on goodness or beauty or light or faith.
If there’s one thing that bothers me about more modern literature, it’s that artists seem to have taken on the view that in order to be true, something need have a certain level of darkness. I can see this temptation. I can see the inspiration. But I sometime wonder if we create our own destiny. Do we become dark, do we become jaded, do we lose our innocence because it is natural or do we lose it because we expect it of ourselves and our society expects it from us?
Good quality children’s literature doesn’t presuppose that to be real something has to be dark. Rather, it presupposes that in order to be virtuous, we need to hold fast to our light.
I’m not one for the conduct novel as a genre. I muddled my way through enough of those in graduate school. I think children want to be entertained and delighted not preached to. But I also think children like having heroes. And I believe the best in children’s literature gives us the absolute best of these heroes and heroines.
And if we want to be the best adults we can be, maybe we need to go back to those heroines of childhood to remember who it is we are striving to be.
What do you think? What novels most inspire you? What do you recommend I read next with my girls?
Also, I wanted to share with you this neat little book I got in the mail last week from My Catholic Kids. She was giving them away as a promotion for her game Fishing for Saints, a Catholic take on the card game, Go Fish. I don’t have the game myself, but it looks adorable, and I love this little prayer book.
The book contains pictures of well known saints and then a little prayer with each picture to that saint asking for help in a certain area. I’ve read it multiple times with all four of my kids, and they really enjoy it. We’ve even learned of a saint we had never heard of!
And if you try out any of her products, let me know. I’ve been trying to hard to find play things that tie into our Catholic faith. I figure if we want to pass our faith on to our kids, the best way to do it is to make it light and fun!
If you get a chance, head over to her Instagram page because she’s giving away a copy of her game – the giveaway ends November 14th.