Just in case you’ve been waiting for the new movie………………..
Children are taking over the world!
It all seemed to start about 10 years ago with Harry Potter. Children everywhere began reading the book and the world changed. Suddenly, children were setting the demand for books. J. K. Rowling became instantly wealthy and the Harry Potter series spawned games, movies and much more, all from a “simple” little book. Authors were now scrambling to get their youth-aimed books published for the generation who could make or break their careers. Tweens were no longer the only ones who had money to spend and ideas on where they wanted to spend it. Children were trend-setters.
Over the past few years, children’s literature has seen many new series, some which have done well (Eragon by Christopher Paolini) and others which have faltered, trying to be what every child wanted (there are too many books about wizards, dragons and magic to name.) Recently, the craze has shifted again with the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer.
The Twilight craze is something we are dealing with at our library right now, and although this is aimed more at the young adult generation, these are the same readers that began with Harry Potter. We can’t keep the books on our shelves and I’m sure it’s the same in most libraries, especially since the movie was released. Vampires are the theme this time, another fantasy, but at least it gets kids reading.
I started thinking about children being the driving force of the economy lately after reading a ridiculous article in Forbes Magazine about Hollywood children. The article was announcing the Most Influential Child under the age of 5. (Suri Cruise won, by the way.)
I just found it ridiculous that someone could assume a child who isn’t even three years old yet will be the future of the entertainment industry, just because her parents are famous. No one ever assumes, for example, that a child born to the head salesman at an insurance company will one day be the head of all insurance companies everywhere. It is almost as though “regular” children don’t have the same potential. But I guess that is another argument for another day.
So if children are the ones who are choosing what they want to read, watch, wear and listen to, and some of the most powerful industries are predicting the rise of children to the top, what is happening to the rest of us? Are we just blindly following what our children are asking for or do we have a say in how the world moves as well? What do you think?
Welcome, Kelsey and something for Harry Potter fans!
We have a great new summer student who started today at our library. Welcome, Kelsey! Kelsey will be running our children’s program for the summer and she is hard at work already planning for the weeks ahead. We should have a summer schedule out within the next week and a half, so pop into the library to see if one is ready. We’ll also post the summer schedule on our blog.
For those of you that thought Harry Potter was finished, J. K. Rowling has written an 800 word prequel to the series, handwritten and auctioned off for $48 858. You can click on each picture below to see what she wrote.
For more on this prequel, check out the link here.
You can’t read this….you’re too old.
The Children’s Book Group of the Publishers’ Association in Britain announced last week that they will now start posting a recommended age rating on each children’s book that is published. This was decided after a huge survey that said that consumers were in favour of a ratings system to help them purchase books. You can read a copy of the article written in The Guardian.
The aim is “to increase consumer confidence”, according to Rebecca McNally, publishing director of MacMillan’s children’s division. However, as you can imagine, this is drawing some negative feedback, mainly from authors. Although the article in the Guardian claimed that authors were asked about the ratings idea and many responded favorably, it seems that many others are highly against a ratings system.
Phillip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass, is leading the pack against the proposed system, claiming that children should be allowed to choose what books they’d like to read, according to the covers or their description. He says that he writes his books for absolutely no age frame in mind, and that children should read something they are interested in, not just because it is in their age level.
So what does this really mean? Is it a way for publishers to try to market books in more areas, such as grocery stores and corner shops, rather than limiting choices to a bookstore where someone can recommend a book? Will this make bookstores less appealing or less useful? And what about libraries? Will it be easier for a librarian to recommend a book because it has an age rating on it, or will it cause more grief to parents who see the ratings and decide their child cannot read something because they are not in the targeted age?
If you think about movies, ratings are awarded based on content so that something inappropriate will not be seen by a young child. Will the books ratings be similar? Will it be purely based on content rather than what publishers believe children should be reading at a certain age? I think the lines are easily crossed here. What would have happened had this ratings system been around when Harry Potter was first released? It might not have been the runaway bestseller that it is now if it had been targeted only to a certain age group.
Choosing appropriate books is always a tough task for a librarian. Often, we select books for our libraries based on catalogues from booksellers that only show a cover picture, a brief description, and sometimes an age recommendation. And for the most part, once a book is delivered, it is just fine. However, on occasion, the book turns out to be for someone older (although you wouldn’t have known that from the description), or just wildly inappropriate. For example, going to a book fair this past winter, some of my co-workers were helping to choose children’s picture books, and we were all stunned by the difficulty in choosing great books. What appeared to be a nice, friendly cover could sometimes end up having scary looking illustrations or characters that did things we thought would send the wrong message (such as ripping pages out of books as a joke).
One great find I’ve come across for children’s picture books is this site:
It allows you to look through quite an extensive list of picture books, and actually flip through them page by page so that you can see illustrations and content. This has helped me make a selection more than once when I wasn’t sure on title alone.
I guess the concept of marketing books toward a certain age group will never change, but do we really need someone to tell us what to read? It might work for some, but children are not like cookie-cutters…..they are all a little different and we must remember that.
Sharks, Hobbits and Wizards
Sharks need not be afraid anymore. The world has lost actor Roy Scheider, the hard-working sheriff from the movie “Jaws”. When we hear of someone in the entertainment world passing, we often associate them with their biggest role, or the one that left the biggest impression, and so it is true with Roy Scheider. Many of us will never forget the impact the movie “Jaws” had on us all those summers ago. And even watching it years later, without all of the special effects the movie world offers us now, the shark can still chill us to the bone and make us want to avoid even our own swimming pools. The imagination can be much more powerful than anything a movie can show us. Which is why books are so wonderful, and also why many books are made into movies.
Jaws was not the first novel to be made into a movie and it will hardly be the last, with so many amazing stories being written every day. It must be easier for studios to pick up a book that has been on the best seller list and make it come alive on the big screen, than to have writers come up with original stories. After all, someone has already done the hard work for them….creating characters and plots that beg to be brought to life. Often we read books that we think should be made into movies, because our culture these days demands the quick-fix that only a movie can bring. A lot of people would rather sit in the theatre and watch something for 2 hours than read a book over the course of a few days or weeks.
So, why don’t we all just read the books? Usually, they are much better. The characters are more fleshed out and there are usually more plot twists or details than we’d ever find in the movie version, but if we haven’t already read the book when we see the movie, very few of us ever go and get the book to compare. At the library, we do tend to see an influx of people coming in to get a book that has been made into a current popular movie, but rarely do we get requests for an older movie/book duo. Let’s think about it though….what inspired someone to make that movie? The book, of course! That book must have affected someone so powerfully with its story and characters to make them want to pursue making a movie. So, let’s talk about the books!
Jaws, by Peter Benchley, is just one of many famous movies derived from a book.
But there are many more award winning movies that came from books, such as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone…..
which of course was the first of seven amazingly popular books, and subsequent films. This movie, however, seemed to be produced more to give children something else “Harry Potter” during the frenzy. You would be hard pressed to find any child that hasn’t read at least one of the books and most have read all of them, and the movies are just a bonus to them.
What about “The Green Mile” by Stephen King? Many people didn’t even know that the famous horror writer had anything to do with this film.
This little gem of a movie actually came from the creation of a serial that King put out over the course of 6 or 7 months, producing mini-books, much like they used to do in the past to get readers hooked on a series. It worked. And the movie stuck pretty close to the book, but the draw to this story was only being told a little bit at a time. I don’t think it had the same magic even being published in a single book format once the entire serial version was finished, however, if any of you have seen the movie, you’ll agree it was a special film, and not what you’d expect from a horror writer.
And we can hardly mention books being made into movies without talking about The Lord of the Rings , by J. R.R Tolkien. I think that anyone who read the books as a child (or older) was pleased that the movies were made during this stage in history. If they had been done before (shorter versions were produced, but without much acclaim), the special effects could not keep up with our imaginations. I think we would have been disappointed in the translation to the big screen. But Peter Jackson’s version brought the characters and the places we could only imagine into reality for so many of us. 
Even though this is only a short splattering of movies created from books, it gives us all a sense of what can be done, and even if it should be done at all. The imagination can be so much more vivid than something produced, even with a big Hollywood budget. Maybe we should all save the $14+ ticket price and pop to the library to get the book! It might be more rewarding in the long run.
