I had to go back and look to see how long ago I’d first read about Where the Wild Things Are being made into a movie. It turned out that it was last February, and my feelings haven’t changed since then: I feel a deep sense of trepidation about the whole project. Sometimes a movie ruins a great book, and I worry about that, here.
So today when I saw that Lauren Ambrose has been cast as a voice talent for the project, I did not find myself feeling warm and fuzzy. Ambrose is a great actress; that’s not the issue. It’s that apparently the Wild Things will be talking. I’m already twitching. Though, people are apparently thinking really hard about this stuff:
Ambrose is replacing the previously cast Michelle Williams. According to a production source, the filmmakers enjoyed working with Williams, but her voice didn’t match their original vision of how the Wild Thing should sound.
You know how a Wild Thing should sound? I’m just guessing, here, but given a broad array of possibilities, I don’t think of Michelle Williams or Lauren Ambrose. Or, in fact, any perky young actress. Go figure. I could be picturing it wrong, I guess, but again, it all just seems a little weird to me.
So after reading about that and getting worked up all over again (”My preeeeeshus! You mustn’t wreck my preshus!”), I was delighted to run across this piece in Slate about the evolution of illustration in children’s literature:
Books were for schooling or for teaching religious and moral lessons—with properly serious illustrations chaperoning the text.
This somber mode continued through the Civil War. And then it went poof, dispelled by artists who became children’s illustrators by happenstance.
The piece is accompanied by a slideshow which is not to be missed. Where the Wild Things Are figures prominently in the history, of course, but so do Gellett Burgess’ turn-of-the-century Goops, who are an old family favorite of ours. (The article compares the Goops to the South Park gang, which made me laugh out loud.) Whether the movie meets expectations or not, there’s no question that Sendak’s Wild Things are an important piece of history. (But, uh, if the movie folks are reading? Here’s a special message from me to you: Please don’t screw it up.)
Thanksgiving has come and gone, and hopefully you got some good shopping in (and don’t forget that you can 
This story is generating a ton of buzz online, and I can barely even wrap my brain around it, but I’ll try to do it justice.
Despite growing up with a serious love of 
As iconic as the “Peanuts” comic strip was in the cartooning world for so many years (indeed, as it continues to be), there’s a lot of dissension over what sort of man Charles Schulz, the strip’s creator, was.
I’m so excited.
When I was a child (yes, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and we walked uphill four miles in the snow—barefoot!—both ways just to get to school and we liked it), my brother and I owned a modest collection of records.
Remember when I pointed out that 
I started to write something about the upcoming (last! suspenseful!) Harry Potter book and I just couldn’t do it. You can read about that everywhere. I wanted to offer something else.
As a general rule, I keep a tight rein on what my kids watch on television. This is very different than how I grew up; I was a latchkey kid for many years (as were most of my friends) and we watched whatever we wanted. (We also walked uphill in the snow four miles barefoot to get to school, but that’s a different story altogether.)