Lindgren and Larsson and Anderson

Warning:  Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is for the grownups.  It is emphatically not a book for kids (it's not even a book for me).  I mention it here because today is Swedish children's writer Astrid Lindgren's birthday, and Lindgren really informs Larsson's book.  His two main characters, financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and punk hacker Lisbeth Salander, have fictional counterparts in Lindgren's boy detective Kalle Blomkvist (Bill Bergson in the English translation, sadly OOP), and none other than her redheaded heroine Pippi Longstocking, all grown up.

While I hate to imagine Pippi growing up to be Lisbeth, I wonder what other characters from children's books might be like as adults.  Ramona Quimby, for example, or Harriet the Spy.  Have you ever thought about them this way?  I would love to know whom you would like to know (or not know!) as an adult.

[N.b.  Astrid Lindgren would have been 102 today, which means that it's bookstogether's blog birthday, too (two).  Thank you for reading!]

People of the Book

From Geraldine Brooks's People of the Book (Viking, 2008).  Book conservator Hanna Heath is leaving the hospital room where Ozren Karaman, head of the museum library in Sarajevo, visits his young son.

"I pushed past him on the way to the door, and saw that he had a kids' book, in Bosnian, in his hands.  From the familiar illustrations, I could tell it was a translation of Winnie-the-Pooh.  He put the book down and rubbed his palms over his face.  He looked up at me, his expression drained.  "I read to him.  Every day.  It is not possible for a childhood to pass by without these stories."  He turned to a page he'd bookmarked.  I had my hand on the door, but the sound of his voice held me.  Every now and then, he'd look up and talk to Alia [his son].  Maybe he was explaining the meaning of a hard word, or sharing some fine point of Milne's English humor.  I'd never seen anything so tender between a father and his child."  (38)

I get the impression that, for Ozren, neither is it possible for fatherhood to pass by without those stories.

Byatt's Children's Book

No, A.S. Byatt has not written a children's book, she has written The Children's Book. I first heard about it at the Guardian books blog, where I get all my British book news ("The stories children's books tell about the world they're written in," 4/27/09), then tracked down the flap copy:

"Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, children of a city stockbroker, and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets."

There's more, notably a German puppeteer, but that was enough for me.  The Children's Book is available from amazon.co.uk on May 7, and I'm tempted to order it from them now rather than wait for the US edition in October.  Maybe I could pick up Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall at the same time, just to make it worth it?

Nonfiction Monday: Script and Scribble

Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting by Kitty Burns Florey (Melville House, 2009) is part memoir, part history, part examination of handwriting's place in an increasingly digital world.  Like Florey, I identify with my own script (13); and I found the whole thing fascinating (okay, I might have skipped the chapter on graphology).

The section on handwriting programs in Chapter 5, "Is Handwriting Important?" is particularly relevant to parents whose children are learning cursive in school.  I'm now convinced that it doesn't make sense to teach kids to print and then a few years later switch them to cursive.  Just teach them a sixteenth-century Italic hand right from the start, I say!  [Note that this is not as crazy as it sounds; the Portland (OR) Public Schools have been using the Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting System for 24 years.]

Any anecdotal evidence re:handwriting programs?  Our county uses Handwriting Without Tears: I don't like it.

[Nonfiction Monday is at Charlotte's Library.  Thank you, Charlotte!]