LARS'S LIBRARY: WHERE THE CLASSIC THINGS ARE

When I first heard that Where the Wild Things was to be made into a movie, I was appalled. As with all adaptations of well-loved works, the question arose, “Why?” Why muck up a masterpiece so perfectly done, so self-contained and so succinct?

Then I read that Maurice Sendak wanted Spike Jonze to make the movie, indeed, urged him to do so for quite some time, despite Jonze having many of the same objections as I did. And that Jonze had collaborated with Dave Eggers on the screenplay.

I got interested and started thinking about what makes me rate a book as “classic” and untouchable. I turned my questions around. Why should any work be sacrosanct? If a work is well-loved, shouldn’t it be re-examined and re-interpreted?

And what makes a children’s book “classic,” anyway?

I wasn’t alone. In the days preceding the release of the movie, The Boston Globe’s Ty Burr examined Hollywood retellings of children’s books in "Where the Wonder Goes." In a provocative essay in The New York Times, “Where the Wild Things Weren’t,” Bruce Handy questioned whether children actually like the books their parents call classics. Some of us, he wrote, didn’t like Where the Wild Things Are or The Wind in the Willows.

So what does make a children’s book a classic? Its appeal to adults or children or both? Or is it the subject matter—profound thematically, or boundary-breaking in the way it deals with childhood struggles (certainly the case with Where the Wild Things Are)?

Maybe it’s best to be flexible. Everything changes. Lists such as the one on Wikipedia, which limits itself to books “published at least 90 years ago…still enjoyed by children today,” are valuable references. But the criteria are so narrow.

I prefer the looser parameters set at by Eden Ross Lipson, former children’s book editor of The NewYork Times Book Review. As paraphrased by Dwight Garner in an excellent piece called “The Reading Life: What Makes a Children’s Classic” (with lots of great reading suggestions in the readers’ comments):

“It isn’t the critics’ reviews. It’s whether your children choose to read the book to their children, and so on, an organic and generational process of elimination.”

That means, though, that it’s adults who are driving the process, as they remember, perhaps misremember, revise, and codify their own childhood experience. Nothing’s wrong with that, and children benefit from exposure to the books in a recognized canon. However, I believe it’s important that we don’t get too stuck in a groove, and too tied into that canon.

At the same time as all the adult-engendered hoopla over Where the Wild Things Are, another cultural phenomenon took place, this one clearly driven by kids. It was the release of the latest book in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, Dog Days. The day it came out, book stores were jammed with anxious children. Almost immediately, it jumped to the top of bestseller lists. The publisher pushed the initial printing up from three to four million copies.

Is Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days a classic? Using Lipson’s guidelines, we can’t know until the millions of kids who are reading it grow up, since it’s up to adults to decide the answer to that question. What is more important is that millions of kids are reading it.

Parents may complain that Dog Days is “a poor choice for good character building in your children,” but there is no doubt author Jeff Kinney has struck a chord that resonates deeply with the elementary and middle school audience.

It matters that kids see that they can make a book a success, and that reading is worthwhile. How many children are turned off by reading because it’s something they have to do?

Some schools are beginning to allow students to choose their own books. This approach, known as reading workshop, recognizes that what we think children should read is not always what they want to read, and that children, like us, have different tastes.

It’s an approach that requires more work by teachers and parents because they can’t fall back into familiar territory—the “classics.” But it could lead to more reading by more kids, and perhaps to the startling discovery by more adults of new classics.

For the record, Lars’s library contains many of the books on the Wikipedia list of children’s classics, as well as many Newbery Award winners. I believe that a number of the re-evaluated books in “Where the Wild Things Weren’t”—Alice in Wonderland, Winnie-the-Pooh, Eloise—are classics. I don’t see Wimpy Kid as a classic. I have read the first three books (and you can find them in my library), and have been caught laughing out loud in the process. Eventually a young reader will probably get me to read Dog Days. And I really liked Where the Wild Things Are, the movie.