Posted by Peter Ceresole on April 04, 2010 at 09:57:12 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Top 20 Children's Books posted by Mike Dennis on April 04, 2010 at 00:25:47:
>i>Top of the list if The Wind in the Willows - no argument there.
I would; I think that for children, as opposed to adults, 'Wind in the Willows' is terribly over rated. I remember, when I was about 12, being bored to death by it, while I was never bored by the AR books, from eight years old onwards.
Unfortunately the list is somewhat devalued with No. 2 being Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings, I'm fairly sure Tolkein would be disappointed to see it viewed this way
Do you think so? I know that the book he actually wrote for his children was 'The Hobbit', but I believe that as he wrote 'Lord of the Rings' he tried it out on them as he progressed; it's for older children, but still I think for children.
Of course it was freighted with his ideas about language and heroic morality, the Norse sagas and the virtues of the English yeoman, but that didn't stop it being a rattling good yarn. I read it a bit late- first time round I must have been 16 or 17 and even then found some of the language a bit arch- but I wasn't bored for a second, and played in the background the froglike sounds of Gerry Mulligan and Zoot Sims in 'Western Reunion', which was a perfect accompaniment; I can't re-read a page of it without hearing that music or hear the music without feeling the brooding threat of the Dark Tower. The point being that if the definition of 'children's books' shades into adolescence, then LOTR is included all right.
Tolkien might have felt he intended it to be more serious than that, but once an author has released a book, it leaves his control, a bit like a pigeon being released at Strickland Junction.