Book by Book by Michael Dirda Page A

tastes had shifted to grown-up novels of the fast-moving sort: Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu thrillers, the science fiction of Robert Heinlein, the adventures of James Bond. For many years thereafter I utterly disdained “kiddie lit.” In my midthirties, though, I unexpectedlyfound myself asked to add children’s literature to my responsibilities as a writer and editor for
Book World.
Being conscientious, I consulted librarians about recommended reading, checked out several dozen juvenile classics, and studied the criticism and history of the field. Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself particularly entranced by the complex synergy of words and illustrations in classic picture books.
    As I would learn, the late 1970s and ’80s ushered in another golden age of children’s literature to rival the earlier one of
Peter Rabbit
and
The Wizard of Oz.
Think of just a few of the authors, artists and eye-popping works of that era: Maurice Sendak’s complex
Outside over There
, numerous masterpieces by Chris Van Allsburg, including
Jumanji
and
The Mysteries of Harris Burdick
, William Joyce’s
Dinosaur Bob and A Day with Wilbur Robinson
, picture books by Leo and Diane Dillon, William Steig’s
Dr. De Soto
and
Shrek
, David McCullough’s
Black and White
, Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s
The True Story of the Three Little Pigs
, and those are just the beginning. The past thirty or so years have also seen Gary Paulsen’s survivalist adventure
Hatchet
, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s classic
Shiloh
, award-winning novels by Katherine Paterson and Walter Dean Myers, Russell Hoban’s touching fable
The Marzipan Pig
, the metaphysical comedies of Daniel Pinkwater, Joan Aiken’s rambunctious tales of Dido Twite, and the intricate fantasies of Alan Garner, Richard Kennedy, and Diana Wynne Jones. And let’s not overlook that most elegantly structured of all juvenile time-travel novels, the gravely beautiful
Tom’s Midnight Garden
by Philippa Pearce.
    Then came the tsunami of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books,shortly followed by—in my view—the finer but more controversial fantasies of Philip Pullman
(The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass).
More and more adults began to read “kiddie” books—and not aloud to their offspring but on the beach, in bed, and at the beauty parlor.
    Obviously I should have been one happy children’s book reviewer, but another development of the 1980s troubled me. In 1950s Ohio, a boy could slide easily into daydreams about King Solomon’s mines, mysterious islands, swordplay in Ruritania, cackling master criminals, and dark avengers. Books fed the imagination. Then suddenly CD-ROMs, video games, and digitalized movies began to surpass any child’s wildest fantasies. But all they exercised, as far as I could tell, was hand-eye coordination. Yet more and more it grew clear that computer monitors and wide-screen TVs were becoming, in Keats’s phrase, “charmed magic casements” to transport us to “faery lands forlorn.”
    While I sometimes think it’s wrong to be concerned, it
has
been a long while since I glimpsed a kid sprawled under a shade tree lost in a book. After all, we can’t count on J. K. Rowling alone to create or sustain a passion for turning pages. Like Aristotelian virtue, reading is a habit. Children need to read, then to read some more. Quantity matters far more than quality—there will be plenty of time for classics. But when starting out, the young should be immersed in a culture of the sentence, not the screen.
THE CHILDREN’S HOUR
    Anxious parents—are there any other kind?—long for advice on just how they can encourage their kids to read more. Here are some suggestions, most of which fall into the category of common sense.
    1. Read aloud to your children. Joan Aiken once said, “If you’re not prepared to read to your children an hour