To seek revenge may lead to Hell
But everyone does it, and seldom as well
As Sweeney, as Sweeney Todd -
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street!
Last month, feeling 100% in the Halloween spirit, I was looking for something seasonal to listen to. My go-to album for that time of year is Tales of Mystery and Imagination, but this year I felt like something more intense and listened to the original Broadway cast’s recording of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which I hadn’t listened to in years.
I’ve written a few posts over the last year discussing various children’s books and authors, but I don’t know a lot about the history of children’s literature or what criticism of the genre looks like. So, I decided to start looking for a general overview and began with The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel. It was published in 2009 so it’s not the leading edge of criticism, but for a general overview that seems plenty recent enough.
Library booksales are wildly hit-and-miss affairs, usually more of a miss. Once in a while, though, you can catch a break - like us at a sale earlier this year, where we walked out with several dozen books for $20. Of course, mere quantity means little if every book is rotten, but we were able to find a lot of good stuff. What helped, I think, is that staff gradually restocked the tables over the course of the morning, so the early birds weren’t able to pick out absolutely everything worth having (often to sell on eBay later, not even to enjoy for themselves!
When reading Serious Literature for Grown-Ups, we may often feel like the Ethiopian courtier reading Isaiah, “How can I understand, if there is none to instruct me?” This can be difficult for some to admit, given the modern preference among many for coming to one’s own conclusions on things, but if we’re to grow in wisdom we need the intellectual humility to recognise that we do not and cannot know everything, especially on an early reading of a difficult text.
Dr. Seuss is a contender for the most famous author of children’s books, especially if we restrict that category to picture books. So, he’s not someone who needs my advertising here, but I only had a couple of his books when I was growing up, so reading these with my children is a new experience for me and I thought I may as well share a few thoughts on them.
I wasn’t able to do any seasonal reading for October last year, but now that I have a little spare time I decided to check out Pu Songling’s collection, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. I’ve read a few of these stories before in adapted form via the app Du Chinese, and eventually I’d like to read the original book. For now, though, I have to be content with the translation by John Minford.
Sometimes, I come across a book that reminds me of how little I actually know. I’ve read a lot of books over the years, but as I’ve said elsewhere, my learning is broad but shallow. So, I always appreciate reading an author with true depth of knowledge is a specialised subject - e.g., A. C. Southern’s Elizabethan Recusant Prose: 1559-1582.
Who is A. C. Southern? I actually couldn’t find much about him, except that this work is a revision of his Ph.
When it comes to Serious Books for Grown-Ups, I’ve never read so little as I have in the past year and a half or so. That number hasn’t dropped to zero and I do still read more than the average American (though yes, that’s a low bar to clear), but it’s certainly not what I’d like. However, the total amount of time I’ve spent reading is as high as it’s ever been thanks to my children and their library of board books - which, for those who don’t know, are short books for babies and toddlers printed on stiff cardboard pages, so they’re much sturdier than regular books.
A few years ago, I read and reviewed Yuri Pines' book The Everlasting Empire, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in Chinese intellectual history, or Chinese history generally for that matter. Since I enjoyed that book, when I was looking for more work on Confucianism a while back I picked up one of his earlier books, Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period, 722-453 B.C.E. Confucius and his followers did not, of course, emerge from nowhere, so a full understanding of Confucianism requires some knowledge not just of their source materials (primarily the Five Classics), but the intellectual milieu they originated in.
As a person who likes Japan, likes literature, and likes what he’s read of the combination of those two, I want to like haiku. However, it’s never really appealed to me. In my experience, five-line tanka are about as short as a poem can be and still feel like it has some substance to it, and even that takes a patient sort of reading to appreciate. I also hadn’t read all that many of them though and didn’t know much about the context in which they were written, so I hoped that reading The Penguin Book of Haiku, with its large sample size accompanied by an extensive introduction and some commentary, would help me to at least appreciate if not enjoy the form.