“He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.” ~Henry James
Here are some shiny things that caught my eye recently:
♦ All Hallow’s Read.
Today is the last Monday of October and the last day of book recommendations for All Hallow’s Read. I thought it appropriate to end where All Hallow’s Read began, with two recommendations written by Neil Gaiman: The Graveyard Book and Coraline.
Even though the grade level for Coraline is younger than The Graveyard Book, I think it is the scarier of the two novels. Certainly, Coraline is just creepier, and deliciously so. Buttons for eyes, scuttling creatures, kidnapped parents—what’s not to freak readers out? Coraline has been extremely popular, spawning both a graphic novel adapted by the great P. Craig Russell and a wonderful animated film from Laika. The official word:
“Coraline discovered the door a little while after they moved into the house. . . .”
When Coraline steps through a door to find another house strangely similar to her own (only better), things seem marvelous.
But there’s another mother there, and another father, and they want her to stay and be their little girl. They want to change her and never let her go.
Coraline will have to fight with all her wit and courage if she is to save herself and return to her ordinary life.
The Graveyard Book, which I’ve written about before (regarding its structure, naturally), is in some ways both lighter and darker than Coraline. The novel opens with the murder of a family, but most of the novel is October country—by turns sweet and haunting, and a little sad. Here’s the official description:
It takes a graveyard to raise a child.
Nobody Owens, known as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn’t live in a graveyard, being raised by ghosts, with a guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the dead. There are adventures in the graveyard for a boy—an ancient Indigo Man, a gateway to the abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible Sleer. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, he will be in danger from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod’s family.
You can watch a video of Gaiman reading the Newbery Medal-winning novel here.
