Literary grabbag

The only book I had found that inspired Faith to sit down and read the whole thing in one day had been The Boxcar Children.  The other books, no matter how excited she is about reading them or how much she likes them, she won't read more than the one chapter a day I make her read.  She has a whole stack of books she wants to read, and I tell her she's never going to get around to all of them if she doesn't read more than one chapter a day; but somehow that one necessary chapter becomes in her mind 'one chapter and no more.'

A few days ago, though, she picked up an old paperback of mine at my mom's house: The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald.  She read four chapters there, then came home and finished up the rest of it within 24 hours.  So where's the magic?  Nothing against Clifford B. Hicks, but it's probably just that she picked up the one to read for fun, whereas the other ones, even though she chooses, she has to read.  I'm not sure how to fix that, though; before I started making her read a chapter a day, she'd go all week without reading a new book.  If she'd picked Alvin Fernald from her reading shelf here, she'd still be on the chapter-a-day cattle boat to China.

In other classic children's literature news, The Rescuers has been reissued!  All the Miss Bianca books have been out of print for years; I read them from the library as a child.  The others are still unavailable, but the first one is now available in a beautiful hardback edition.  I ordered it from Amazon the moment I read about it.  (If you're wondering, the Disney movie, while it took its name from the first book is actually based on the second book in the series, Miss Bianca.  In the first book, they rescue an imprisoned poet rather than a cute orphan girl.)

The newest book Eric has been reading is Little Bear's Friend.  He's very excited about it because, unlike A Kiss for Little Bear, it's a chapter book, like the ones Faith reads.