On cartoon book characters

(This post wound up going a different direction than I originally planned...)

Eeyore is also my favorite Winnie-the-Pooh character. I don't find him so annoying (though in the original Milne books he is actually more cynical than he is in the Disney portrayals). I think the reason I always liked him best (even as a child) is because of an idea someone put forth about "sad" or "negative" characters in children's books - that, on the one hand, the child feels good about it because it acknowledges that the child isn't always happy and cheerful (And while I was, in many ways, a pretty happy kid, I also had bouts of melancholy). But on the other hand, the child thinks just maybe THEY could be the person to cheer up that character - and it makes them feel "needed" in some way.

I was also awfully fond of Puddleglum in the Narnia books. (But interestingly, now, after re-reading as an adult, I'm struck not by his pessimism but by how constant and steady he was - when everyone else was bewitched and convinced Aslan did not exist, that he was just a dream, Puddleglum went, and at some risk to himself, insisted that the truth was the truth, and broke the enchantment).

In the Moomin books, the fillyjonks (of course) were always my favorites. I think, as a child, I related better to their fussiness than I did to the "let it all hang out" spirit of the Moomins. (I actually think I would have found the Moomins annoying in real life, as they were mostly kind of clueless. Moominmamma was probably the most reasonable one, but even she seemed kind of vague at times. And Snufkin, with his tendency to just leave when he was done being in a place, just leave with no goodbyes, that kind of thing would bug me too.) Actually, I think I probably would have liked the hemulins as well; they also tended to be fussier and even more academic. (There is one hemulin who is described as "The Botanist," and he carries around one of those old cylindrical tin cases that plant collectors used to carry for their specimens).

(I'm trying now to remember other books I read as a child...there were a lot I read once or twice but don't remember so much, at least not in the sense of letting its characters inhabit my mind and populate the stories I made up in my head...I read a lot of the traditional fairy tales, though I mostly found the princess-in-need-of-rescue ones kind of boring (and got the idea that being a princess would probably be pretty boring from them).

I had a deep fondness for "My Side of the Mountain" even as I recognized that running off and living off the land would be impractical if not impossible. I largely liked it for the descriptions of how Sam lived, where he got his food, how he made "salt" from hickory twigs...I also liked "Island of the Blue Dolphins" for similar reasons, the description of how the lone protagonist managed to find food and make tools and such. Years later, when I had to read "Robinson Crusoe" for school, the most interesting parts to me were actually how Crusoe tried to manage on the island.

I remember reading "She Was Nice to Mice" which was about mice in Queen Elizabeth (the 1st)'s court. (It was an imaginative story; the mice were humanized, they weren't like real mice). I tended to read a lot of "talking animal" books as a kid.

Oh, I also read "The Mouse and His Child" by Russell Hoban many times. (And when it came back out in hardback a few years ago, I bought my own copy to have). It was a compelling story but I admit feeling a little sorry for Manny Rat, who was a "bad guy" at the start but then lost his teeth and sort of reforms (And I seem to remember him sacrificing himself for the good of the others? Or maybe I'm wrong. I should probably re-read the story). In places, it was a very sad story - a surprisingly large number of characters die, or are lost, in a book for children. I remember always feeling like there was some deeper message to the story I was not quite getting.

I also read the E.B. White "classics" - Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and the Trumpet of the Swan. I have to admit I liked Stuart Little the best of the three. I actually had a toy mouse that I named Stuart and did things like made tiny skates out of paperclips and suchlike for him. The ending of the book always made me feel strange, though - Stuart setting off in the miniature car, in search of Margalo...and you never hear from him again. (This is another book where I felt that there was something JUST BELOW THE SURFACE that I couldn't quite get at, either because I wasn't old enough or didn't have enough life experience...)

I also read The 101 Dalmations, which was fairly different from the Disney movie. The biggest thing I remember is the "Twilight Barking," the sort-of relay system dogs used to send messages across the countryside.

And I had the whole set of Margery Sharp's "Miss Bianca" books. I loved the idea of Miss Bianca and what she did and her Porcelain Pagoda and all of that. (I liked the Disney movies, too, though they were simpler than the books and changed a lot of things from the books). I didn't fully understand the idea of "prisoner's aid" because I wasn't as aware of the idea of people being prisoners of conscience or political prisoners, but I understood the mice taking pity on someone who seemed to be wrongly imprisoned. (Again, this was a series of books - kind of like The Mouse and His Boy - that used pretty complex language and syntax. I think a lot of the books I was given to read as a child helped shape my love of language and whatever ability to write that I have - and at the very least, I can recognize "good" and "poor" writing because of early exposure to well-written things).

(I should go back and re-read some of these. I actually have most of my childhood "chapter" books still - still have the set of Narnia books, have an entire set of the Moomin books (some of which I only obtained as an adult; most of the ones I read as a kid came from the library), I have the Miss Bianca set. Sometimes I find that reading most "grown up" stuff is kind of taxing - I keep finding myself picking up and putting down "Bleak House" because parts of it are fairly grim (right now, where I'm at, Esther is in the clutches of some disease that has apparently made her go blind, and I've just passed the point where Mr. Krook has spontaneously combusted) and even sometimes crime dramas, if they're too realistic (I'm reading one of the Scarpetta novels right now, after hearing part of it on Book Radio, and it's pretty grim) get me down. I commented the other day in a discussion on Ivory Tower Fiber Freaks that I "needed" stories where the good guys won - which is often the case in the "classic" children's "chapter" books*. Actually, maybe re-reading some of the Miss Bianca stories would be a good thing to do this fall)

(*It's funny, I don't remember them EVER being called "chapter books" when I was a kid - to differentiate them from the shorter "picture books," but that term seems pretty widespread now)