Let's Be Serious

it's time we defeat kids' books once and for all

Welcome to the one place on the internet that takes children’s books so seriously we make them fun again. Maybe you’re a parent reading Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie for the 90th time, a youth librarian, or simply a child who should not be reading this, it’s not for you, please go to bed. Whoever you are (unless you’re a child, gross), happy to have you! I’m the Jangler, a modern parent with the cranky, censorious soul of an anonymous reviewer in 18th-century Edinburgh.

Let’s not waste time, though. I’m writing this newsletter because almost four years ago, when my daughter was born, I re-entered the world of children’s literature with force. We began reading aloud to her immediately and often, and as she grew she came to like books. It’s easy to help kids enjoy reading, by the way: make their lives boring. Stop showing three-year-olds Frozen. You probably shouldn’t be playing videogames, so why is your six-month-old? No iPads or tablets of any kind. No kid apps on the iPhones. If possible, the only light they should see is sunlight and candlelight. Yes, your life will be impovershed. No, there isn’t any fun allowed. But your kids will love books. Probably.

To continue, my daughter is now nearly in pre-school and my son is almost two, and we’re besotted with the reading of picture books and board books and more. And instead of dutifully turning my brain off and having a little lark, or even just surviving the marathon that is re-orating The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, I walk away from our reading sessions and analyze the texts. It’s the tic of a diseased mind, one riven by useless degrees I scandalously under-studied to achieve. I step away from a tottering book pile and it just happens. I wonder about Beatrix Potter’s fluid first- and third-person narration or the way We’re Going on a Bear Hunt is a masterclass of illustrated emotional context. These are thoughts which are good for nothing but too detailed to ignore; which is to say, the stuff of literary criticism.

I have no hot takes. I’m not interested in cheap controversies or easy condemnations. Huck Finn is problematic, for me, because Twain allows Tom Sawyer to swagger into the final third of the novel and destroy most of the excellent work performed thereto. Obviously no one should use the n-word, but I leave it to better minds to tell us how best to gloat over the corpse of Twain on that front.

Suffice to say, there’s almost no longform posturing about children’s literature, thank God, a virtue I intend to tar and feather. If there was a high-falutin’ way to describe what this newsletter will be, I’d say it’s close reading of the New Criticism ilk weaponized for, and against, kid-lit. I intend to tell you exactly why Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is an exercise in wanton cruelty, and it has nothing to do with “J.K. Rowling.” I am the addled literay bastard of I.A. Richards: authors aren’t real. And I guess WWII also hasn’t happened yet.

If there’s one goal I have for this newsletter, it’s that I get cancelled. I don’t know how else to get anyone to read Substack, and I’m not sure 12,000 words on the legacy of Animporhs will get it done. But by God I’m going to try.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any comments, please consider going outside instead. As Homer Simpson almost said: Here’s to books, the cause of, and the solution to, all of life’s problems.

For my next installment, I intend to roast Eeyore over the fire of his Disney-fied misrepresentation. Subscribe and spread widely.