[HN Gopher] The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading
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       The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading
        
       Author : samclemens
       Score  : 10 points
       Date   : 2024-09-05 05:35 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (literaryreview.co.uk)
 (TXT) w3m dump (literaryreview.co.uk)
        
       | rcktmrtn wrote:
       | Good review: I hadn't heard the Christian Science take on The
       | Secret Garden before and am surprised the wikipedia article
       | doesn't mention it, but it's pretty obvious now. The title
       | imagery really makes me think of:
       | 
       | Lost in a haunted wood,
       | 
       | Children afraid of the night
       | 
       | Who have never been happy or good.
        
       | KineticLensman wrote:
       | Haven't had a chance to read the book itself but I am working
       | through a history of fairy tales called "From the beast to the
       | blonde". Not just the stories but also the people who told them.
       | Goes back all the way from Old Mother Goose to the ancient Greek
       | Sybil. Fascinating stuff
        
       | supertofu wrote:
       | This reminds me of the year I really got into reading (5th - 6th
       | grade), and I remember reading: Alice in Wonderland, Little
       | Women, Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar,
       | Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, Julie of the Wolves, the
       | Babysitter's Club, The Giver, Holes, and Captain Underpants. I
       | honestly could go on and on.
       | 
       | These are all wildly different books and I loved them all! At
       | that age, I had no idea what I even wanted from literature. I
       | just asked the Children's Librarian for books and she decided for
       | me. Almost all of these books were plain old good stories.
       | 
       | It took me _years_ to figure out what my reading preferences
       | were. And as I got older, my fiction choices dramatically reduced
       | in breadth. I kind of miss the lack of discernment I had when I
       | was a reader of exclusively Children 's Lit.
       | 
       | Now, it's really hard for me to read anything that's not the very
       | specific genre of Psychological Thriller or woman-authored LitFic
       | that I prefer.
       | 
       | I miss just receiving a stack of books and loving whatever I got.
       | That there is the real magic of Children's lit.
        
         | mncharity wrote:
         | > fiction choices dramatically reduced in breadth [...] hard
         | for me to read anything that's not the very specific genre
         | [...] miss just receiving a stack of books and loving whatever
         | I got
         | 
         | For non-fiction, I much enjoy the breadth-stretching of surfing
         | the New Books shelves at libraries, gathering "oh, that's
         | neat"'s - the bite size making success easier and exploration
         | cost smaller. For fiction... that seems less available. Maybe
         | if one enjoys jumping into the middle of stories? Or exploring
         | the writing itself. On google books, one can search for random
         | words and phrases, and wander the results and Previews. Eg, a
         | random "elephant fiction"[1] has fragments of children's books
         | and history and ...
         | 
         | [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=elephant+fiction&tbm=bks
        
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       (page generated 2024-09-06 23:01 UTC)