Book 41 - Boy and Girls Forever: Children's Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter

Book related link of the day: Did you ever read that picture book Each Peach Pear Plum? LJer fox1013 has created a more contemporary version. The rhyming scheme is at times a little... crazy, but her collages are simply amazing. The first page is here.


Title: Boys and Girls Forever: Children's Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter (2003)
Author: Alison Lurie

Why this book?
Because I found it in a second-hand bookshop and... it looked good? Basically I should just not be allowed in any second-hand bookshops.

So what's it all about?
Boys and girls forever is a collection of essays exploring various facets of children's classic literature - some on specific books, like Little Women, and some on general themes, like the place of nature in children's books.

The Good and the Bad
I nearly put this book down as soon as I picked it up, thanks to this paragraph:

"Other nations have produced a single brilliant classic of series: Denmark, for instance, has Andersen's tales; Italy has Pinocchio, France has Babar, Finland has Moomintroll. A list of famous books in English, however, could easily take up a page in this volume"

I'm sorry, but I call bullshit. I'll admit that I can't name many books beyond those that Lurie has mentioned (aside from the French Le Petit Prince and Le Petit Nicholas) but then, I'm not Danish or Italian or French or Finish and I wouldn't expect to be familiar with their children's literature. (In fact, I learned French at school, which is why I have at least a passing familiarity with some French works.) Of course, I'm hardly an expert on the subject, but given that most of the books which are considered New Zealand children's classics would be unheard of in the UK or the US, I don't doubt that the same applies even more so to classics from countries where English is not the mothertongue.

I also think it's far too soon to be labelling Harry Potter a "classic". Yes, I read every Harry Potter book and loved them, but without the mania whipped up by both publishers and media, will my kids be interested in reading them? I mean some of the books were just awful. (I'm looking at you, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.)

However! I pressed on, and despite my initial misgivings and Lurie's Anglo-American focus there was still plenty to interest me among her essays. The place of feminism and gender identity in The Wizard of Oz and its sequels, Louisa May Alcott as a fairly revolutionary writer, and an essay on the humanity in modern fairy tales were all of great interest to me. They were all good enough for me to bookmark them for future reading - others, however, didn't interest me at all, or were perhaps a step too far from the "children's classics" theme of the book.

So should I read it or what?
If lit crit lights your pipe (and it certainly lights mine) then this is a book worth dipping into, but it's hardly the seminal work on children's lit (although it doesn't claim to be, either).

Book 32 - Chanel: Her Life, Her World, the Woman behind the Legend

First of all, man I'm behind! I've read at least ten books that I haven't written up yet, so I'll probably do a couple of multiple-book posts soon for series and/or books that other people are unlikely to be interested in.

Secondly, it's December already! You may have noticed by the intensification of seasonal decorations around your village, town, or city, and/or by the fact that shops have started playing cheerful Christmas music incessantly. Good times.

Seasonal link of the day: Reindeer Training School.

And now, on to our feature presentation.


Title: Chanel: Her Life, Her World, the Woman behind the Legend (2009)

Author: Edmonde Charles-Roux

Why this book?
After watching Coco avant Chanel ("Coco before Chanel") I wanted to find a more, you know, accurate portrayal of the designer's life. This book was in fact the inspiration behind the film, which means that someone read this book, then got drunk and wrote a script which bares a kind of passing resemblance to a book which must have taken several years of pain-staking research.

So what's it all about anyway?
As I've probably mentioned before, it's kind of hard to give a plot summary of a biography, ("She was born, um, and then some stuff happens... and then she dies") but I will attempt to do so anyhow! Chanel's rather villainous peasant father abandons her and her brothers and sisters at quite a young age, leaving Chanel at a charity school run by a religious order. When she's old enough to leave, Chanel and her aunt (who is about the same age as her) become dressmakers' assistants in a town full of cavalrymen. Chanel soon finds she has a passion for horses, and strikes up relationship with the upper-class, horse-owning Balsan.

Chanel is desperate to make a name for herself somehow, and just as desperate to leave her peasant roots behind her. She starts designing hats as a hobby, then, with financial backing from her new lover Arthur 'Boy' Capel, opens a shop in Paris. With help from her aunt and her younger sister, Chanel manages to open several new stores during the First World War, when exiled Russian aristocrats and the French elite still wished to shop and dress to impress. Chanel's empire slowly grows, and Chanel has a string of affairs - her lovers are mostly from either the French and English elite, or the extended group of artists, musicians, dancers and writers she spent her time with.

Chanel's story is not exactly a happy one, despite her success. Her cynicism makes her a good businesswoman, but also allows her to see all-too-clearly the realities of her own life: that the men she love most will never marry her, that she cannot afford to be anything other than completely independent, that she can never let the media know the truth of her origins. She gives the impression of always looking over her shoulder, waiting for someone to take away everything she has built for herself.

The Good and the Bad:
You don't really have to be incredibly knowledgeable about fashion to enjoy this book. Everything I know about fashion comes from Project Runway, and at no point did Coco Channel have to design a red-carpet gown entirely out of dead insects in order to win a trip for two to New York Fashion week. On the other hand, Charles-Roux spends a lot of time going off into tangents about the celebrities and aristocrats that Chanel hung out with, and the political and social trends and events of the time. You certainly couldn't write a biography of Chanel without placing her firmly in the socio-political context she was living and designing in, but it can be pretty heavy going reading about the political machinations of French and Bristish industrialists who only have very tentative connections with her. Then again, we also get details about Picasso and the great choreographer Diaghelev, and many other artists and artistes that Chanel hung out with, which I found far more fascinating, so perhaps it's only a question of taste.

So, should I read it or what?
Like I said, you don't need to be knowledgeable to read this book, but you do at least need to be a little bit interested in fashion history. Chanel was, after all, one of the driving forces behind such innovations as MAKING DRESSES THAT DON'T HAVE WAISTS. Thank God for Chanel. And yeah, you should totally read it.

Book 8 - Bomb, Book and Compass, or: Scientists get all the chicks

Completely unrelated link of the day: Orisinal: Morning Sunshine is where I spend my tea breaks at work. It has a few dozen beautifully designed games, most of which are horribly addictive. My all-time favourite has to be Winterbells, where you, as an adorably cute bunny rabbit, have to jump and hit as many falling bells as possible. But I also love Floats, and Bugs, and Cats, and OK I just love everything.

The People have spoken: Colonel Mustard is the favourite murder suspect of The People, no doubt because of his colonial attitudes and suspicious moustache, and the fact that mustard is probably the worst condiment ever invented (besides barbeque sauce, ugh.) Please answer this week's poll, which asks a question for the ages: which branch of science is the sexiest?

Obviously the most suspicious thing about him
is that he has a yellow cone instead of a body.

And now, to business: I seldom read nonfiction, which probably makes me a terrible person, but in my defence my history textbooks in high school were about as dry and boring as the surface of the moon, and they more or less scarred me for life. However, every now and then my interest in something will be piqued by a movie I watch, or a fictional story I read, and then I'm forced to turn to my old foe, Nonfiction, for answers (I like to imagine Nonfiction as an olde-time villain, twirling his moustache, hiding behind his cape, and tying young, virginal women to railway tracks).

Title: Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China (2008)
US Title: The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom (2008)

Author: Simon Winchester

Why this book? What with the Olympics being held there last year and everything, it suddenly became trendy to actually have some sort of interest in China. Although, in my case, it was actually a review of this book in my local paper that made me interested to find out more about the life and times of Joseph Needham. I bought it and started reading it last year, but I never really had a chance to get stuck into it until this year.

What's it all about, anyway?
Joseph Needham (full name: Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, awesome) was a radical scientist working at Cambridge in the 1920's. Radical in the sense of his political and social views, which were definitely a little left of the spectrum, and by a little I mean a lot, although his ideals and sentiments were not entirely unusual for an academic of his day. He studied embryology and morphogenesis, and was married to a fellow biochemist Dorothy Moyle, who was lucky enough to also be offered research opportunities at Cambridge at a time when few women were.

Joseph and Dorothy had an open relationship, and in the 1930's Needham began an affair with a visiting Chinese scientist, Lu Gwei-djen, who began to teach to write and speak Classical Chinese, and who gave him the name Li Yuese. Thanks to Lu, Needham's interest in, and passion about, China began to grow, and when, in 1944, the Royal Society offered him a chance to actually travel to China, he took it.

Officially, Needham's role was a kind of goodwill ambassador to Chinese Universities - parts of China were being occupied by Japan at this time, and as a way of demoralising the Chinese people the Japanese were closing and ransacking her universities - in at least one case, university buildings were turned into brothels. Needham traveled the country - in itself a difficult feat, what with the war going on and all - visiting Chinese academics, showing that the international community had not forgotten about them (yet). He realised that many of the scientific discoveries that the West had claimed as its own had in fact first been discovered in China - a realisation that eventually lead to him writing his opus, Science and Civilisation in China.

The Good and the Bad:
OK, I realise this doesn't sound like the most scintillating read, but Winchester has an light, racy style of writing, always finding little bits of information, picking up on the oddities of Needham's life in Cambridge and China, and going off into tangents about the other famous figures that Needham meets, most of whom are just as eccentric as he was - people like Rewi Alley and Wang Ling - scientists, archaeologists, politicians. A lot of the information comes directly from Needham's diary, too, so it doesn't feel like Winchester is interpreting Needham's life, just describing it.

Winchester clearly admires Needham, but it's probably also fair to say he neither condones nor condemns his views and behaviour. That's one of the best things about this book, because while Needham's views disn't bother me especially (although his support of Communism did bother a lot of people) his behaviour frequently did. Needham was an unabashed womaniser, and although he and his wife did supposedly have an open relationship there is no mention of Dorothy having any extra-marital affairs. In fact, both Moyle and Lu completely fascinated me, yet the information about them compared to many of the other figures in Bomb, Book and Compass seemed rather sparse. It's a great pity - these were two women that not only influenced Needham's life and passions but who both defied the odds themselves, if in a much quieter way. I would have liked to get to know them a little better.


Womanising aside, by the time I had finished this book I was half in love with China myself, and very much ashamed that I know so little about a country that is so vast and which holds so much history and so much culture (and so much science, of course.) I guess this book made me realise that, while China can be a controversial subject, there's so much more to her than political manoevering - that beyond the politics, there's a China who's really worth discovering.

Lastly, I have to say that I have no idea why the Powers The Be decided that the good people of America needed a different title to the good people of everywhere else, especially since, in my opinion, Bomb, Book and Compass has a much nice ring to it than The Man Who Loved China, which sounds a little like a James Bond ripoff. Perhaps they were worried that the word 'bomb' had connotations of terrorism? Or maybe they worried that if people bought something with the word 'book' in the title they might realise they'd actually been tricked into reading one? Or perhaps it was a push from the Anti-Compass Lobby? We may never know.

So should I read it or what? This is definitely one of the best biographies I've ever read; possibly the best. Bomb, Book and Compass is not the book to read if you're looking for light entertainment - but if you're looking for entertainment with substance you should give it a chance.