Loose Ends

This will be the tenth and final blog entry for EDU 320. It's been an interesting semester, full of "big ideas" and really fun discussions. In the spirit of "wrapping things up" I am to talk about the book that had the most significant impact on me over the course of the semester. While I will say that I learned things from all the books we read, whether I enjoyed them or not, the book that I still think about often, the book that I found the most astonishing and beautiful, has to be Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

This book really made me re-think many things about how stories are told--I firmly believe that Selznick's approach is unique. Furthermore, the perfect intersection of form and content is something I will take with me to aid in my own creative endeavors. To write a story about a boy who falls in love with books and silent movies, in the form of a half book-half "movie," is so satisfying. The form and content of the book are indistinguishable, fully integrated. In that way, it is like a poem--a sustained poetic expression disguised as a children's book.

The way that all of Selznick's interests, from early movies, to automatrons, to magic, to clocks, to Paris, all come together is as magical as the automatron's squiggles forming an image. The fact that readers, especially children, can follow his associative leaps and imagery (again, the terms of poetry seem to fit perfectly) just shows the deftness of his craft work. The book is a metaphor for itself--it is brilliantly conceived.

But more than that? It is beautiful. It is unexpected. It is original.

I think I tend to devalue the current children's literary creations as being "not as good as what I grew up with"--but this book threw all that out of the window. If I learned nothing else in this class, it is that great artists and writers are still working towards children's literature. For a few writers, at least, artistic integrity is still more important than marketing. To sum up--this book gave me hope.