One of my favorite places to just poke around in the library is the Favat Children’s section. I love children’s books – at one point I even thought I wanted to major in it, if that was in any way possible – and strolling through those couple of aisles, always give me a very nice, private, unthreatening sensation of calm.
It’s always nice getting new things, but equally delightful finding old children’s books that I had forgotten, some little piece that I’d picked up years and years ago in the corner of my elementary or middle or high聽school teacher’s classroom, in a town far, far away from here.
Today I found The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold by Francesca Lia Block. Years ago, it immediately attracted me probably from a combination of my children’s books/fairy tales/myths love and a lurking interest in dark stories and things and images – things that made me worship Tim Burton as a kid. These fairy tales are odd reimaginings of classic stories from the beautifully twisted, darkly poetic mind of Francesca Lia Block. They’re a jaded adult in the body of a girl-child, a tea party of the most tired experiences in a woman’s lifetime, a band of teen hoodlums getting drunk in the kid’s theater house they just broke into, sugar icing on a rotten cupcake – melancholy, and ironic, and sad in the sharpest way.
One of my favorite places to just poke around in the library is the Favat Children’s section. I love children’s books – at one point I even thought I wanted to major in it, if that was in any way possible – and strolling through those couple of aisles, always give me a very nice, private, unthreatening sensation of calm.
It’s always nice getting new things, but equally delightful finding old children’s books that I had forgotten, some little piece that I’d picked up years and years ago in the corner of my elementary or middle or high聽school teacher’s classroom, in a town far, far away from here.
Today I found The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold by Francesca Lia Block. Years ago, it immediately attracted me probably from a combination of my children’s books/fairy tales/myths love and a lurking interest in dark stories and things and images – things that made me worship Tim Burton as a kid. These fairy tales are odd reimaginings of classic stories from the beautifully twisted, darkly poetic mind of Francesca Lia Block. They’re a jaded adult in the body of a girl-child, a tea party of the most tired experiences in a woman’s lifetime, a band of teen hoodlums getting drunk in the kid’s theater house they just broke into, sugar icing on a rotten cupcake – melancholy, and ironic, and sad in the sharpest way.
Hi Natalie–I find young adult and children’s literature really interesting too. I’ve thought before about trying to become a young adult librarian for that reason. I think there’s a lot of psychologically interesting material out there, and I find that many of the stories are genuinely moving. (Or at least they affect me that way!) I do know that at Simmons, you can also get a master’s in Children’s Literature.
I went to library school initially thinking I would be a children’s or young adult librarian, because I love the literature so much. It’s true that at Simmons you can get a master’s in Children’s Literature — I considered this several years back when I’d decided to go to grad school. But it wasn’t clear to me what you’d DO with that master’s degree — at least the master’s in library and information science had a practical application and an obvious career path, so I went with that instead. I ended up finding I fit better in a role like my current one — reference and instruction in an academic environment — but I still think it would be great fun to be a school librarian and introduce kids to all the books I loved. (Honestly, now I’d be concerned that getting a master’s in children’s lit would take all the fun out of it… 馃檪 )
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