Martin Gardner 1914 - 2010

I don't know that I would have cared that much for the books of Lewis Carrol if it hadn't been for Martin Gardner.  I certainly never would have discovered The Hunting of the Snark back in fifth grade, and I don't know that I would have enjoyed lateral thinking if I hadn't discovered Perplexing Puzzles and Tantalizing Teasers around the same time.  As an adult, an educator, seeking sources for presenting logic problems and puzzles to students Gardner's Aha! books reminded me not only of those earlier books but that he had been a much larger influence on my reading then I realized.  

The summer of 1972 my family moved to another part of town, to a new neighborhood.  In those odd, alienated days of late June I remember exploring my new neighborhood and discovering the local branch of our town library.  It was carved into the stage left wing of my new school's cafetorium, a room perhaps ten feet wide and forty feet long.  Seeing that our family of six had just moved from a two-bedroom apartment to a spacious three-bedroom house the smallness didn't seem unusual or limiting to me; cramped living arrangements happened in the world, libraries included.  The library was an open-armed sanctuary with a choice selection of books for a lonely 11 year old boy.  That library and its books shaped a lot of who I am as a person and a reader.  

I was probably looking for books I already knew – Pick a Peck of Puzzles by Arnold Roth seems likeliest – when I stumbled onto Martin Gardner.  I remember Perplexing Puzzles looking very approachable, with clear language and Laszlo Kubinyi's pen and ink illustrations, even though I often couldn't solve the riddles or puzzles.  Unlike many of the other similar books intended for children the puzzles didn't talk down to me as a reader or go for short term entertainment; the problems invited contemplation even after I had given up and gone in search of the answers in the back of the book.

When I went in search of more books by Gardner I was surprised to be led to Alice in Wonderland, exhaustively annotated by Gardner and full of crazy details outlining all of Carrol's logic and whimsy.  I confess, I might not have actually read Alice before then, having probably assumed I knew all I needed to know from the Disney movie adaptation.  I do know that I read and grew a deeper appreciation for for the possibilities of nonsense even when it wasn't thick with hidden meaning.  The invention of words, Carrol's definition of portmanteau words, the rhythm of the language... I can't say I would have picked that up without Gardner and might not have continued my friendship with books and libraries if I wasn't constantly in search of the type of surprise that came with discovering books like Gardner's. 

Edward Lear wasn't far behind, and books of codes and ciphers, Ray Bradbury and Vonnegut closely after that.  Although it sometimes seems like very distinct, wildly disparate times in my reading timeline the through-line from Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House is a scant two years.  And in between I don't know how many times I went back to Gardner to help pull at the taffy of my brain and expand it further into shape for lateral thinking.

I don't know that the current generation of emerging adolescent readers have anyone doing for them what Gardner did for me back then, but at least his books are still in print and widely available just in case.

The Wonder Book

by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
drawings by Paul Schmid 
HarperCollins 2010


A fine collection of illustrations, accompanied by an okay set of poems. 

I admit, sometimes I come to books from odd directions, especially illustrated books.  A good deal of my life has been dedicated to a number of visual arts and occasionally that is the greater draw for me.  I'll forgive weak content over strong visuals, and sometimes I'll even miss the weak content.  Not here, though. 

Paul Schmid is an illustrator I would hire to do spots drawings for my mythical magazine I hope to one day start.  His black and white line drawings do echo Silverstein, but there's often more than meets the eye.  They have a childlike whimsy and an innocence about them, his characters all blobby and bendy and spindly at the same time.  And there are the odd details that beg you to dig further, to look back at the text, and find the invisible connecting thread between them.  Yes, I'm talking here about the elephant on the page.  Literally. 

Too bad I hid a boot.

Rosenthal's palendrome is nothing new – I have it in at least two other books I own – so it falls to Schmid to give us a new reading with his picture.  And what do we have?  A small boy in a striped shirt (or old fashioned one-piece bathing suit) holding a shovel and a pail and wearing only one rain boot.  Cute, but that's not all.  Flanking the boy on either side are a pair of elephant rear ends, both facing the boy.  For a boy who looks primed to try and shovel several pounds of maneuer into a two pint bucket it is, indeed, too bad his is minus a boot. 

Not every illustration contains such quiet gems, but then the poems don't always exactly inspire more than a literal representation.  Which is not to say this is a terrible collection, but it is a weaker one for the effort.  I think it is far too easy with poems for children to go for the rhyme or the unusual without actually stretching the imagination.  When I look at poems for children  – especially humorous poetry – I am looking for something that would make both me and the reader wonder how a mind could come up with such images, such quirkiness.  Puns and palindromes and the recasting of nursery rhymes are fine, but lacking a theme or the spark of something truly unique the collection becomes pedestrian. 

This little piggy played the stock market
This little piggy loved a gnome
This little piggy was a toast thief
This little piggy loved a nun
(And the French little piggy went Oui Oui Oui all the way home)

This is the sort of thing writing students toss off to keep the juices flowing, a game of Tweak the Familiar.  It dosen't really satisfy as nonsense because it doesn't take enough of a risk to differentiate itself from the original or stand out on its own.  

The lasting effect of this collection was that when it was over I had to start over again because I couldn't remember a single poem.  But the illustrations were fun.  

I thought I'd at least rate a PG-13...

Very interesting. Based on a very low sampling of words scanned from my blog I apparently warrant a PG rating. Here's the deal:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

• steal (3x)
• pain (2x)
• dangerous (1x)
  

I wonder how the rest of the kidlit blogosphere checks out. Click on the rating and check yourself out.

Sideways Stories from Wayside School

by Louis Sachar
Harper Trophy 1978

They got it wrong when they built Wayside School. It was supposed to be one story tall and thirty rooms wide, but instead it's one room wide and thirty stories tall. Sorry about that, say the builders. It's a weird building (with a lot of playground as a result) that has a lot of strange stories attached. And with that we're off on 30 short stories (one for each of the building's floor, though they all concern the occupants in the class on the top floor) of all the strange goings on at Wayside School.

It's taken me a while to get to reading this book because it seems beyond review. Just shy of being 30 years old the book has obviously proven itself over time with kids, and given its age I'm sure there is a generation bringing this book home to read whose parents read it when it was still a new book. But I missed it, being that I was in high school working on my AP English when it was initially released.

Each of these incredibly short interconnected stories usually focuses on one individual and is made up of complete nonsense. Their first teacher turns students into apples when they misbehave until she herself is turned into an apple and eaten by the playground supervisor. One boy becomes class president and is responsible for turning on and off the lights but loses his position one day when he is late for school and finds the class working in the dark because no one else knew how to turn on the lights. Utter absurdity, pure entertainment.

This is one of those books that flies under the radar with parents, one of those books kids read and like and the parents just go "They really liked those wayside books" but never read themselves. Having transitioned from series books like Mary Pope Osborne's Magic Tree House or Jon Scieszka's Time Warp Trio parents my just write off the Wayside books as more gobble-em-up stories, books aimed at a very hungry readership that reinforce reading without challenging them either in content or vocabulary. I'd like to suggest that there might be another reason kids are drawn to these stories, something beyond the familiarity factor.

A little over a year ago I caught my girls working on a secret project in a notebook. Caught is a relative word here, they only hid it from me when I casually went to check on why they were being so quiet. The notebook, it turned out, was a collection of individual stories about various "characters" in their school, friends whose names were changed only slightly in order to distance themselves from being accused of making fun of their classmates. I smiled, remembering how me and some friends had made a similar collection of stories when we were their age, sharing them in secret on the playground or at lunch.

I don't remember the source of inspiration for the character studies we made back then, and I can't be certain that the Wayside Stories were the inspiration for my girls, but the timing makes it plausible that the two are connected. Even if it's a coincidence there appears to be something deeply rooted in the exercise of children inventing nonsensical stories once they have a feel for the telling of stories. The freedom of being able to write whatever you want, coupled by the excitement of actually inventing stories is just too irresistible. The appeal of a book that does the same thing probably equally so.