A Guest Post by Andy Griffiths
As a child I
was always attracted to books that combined pictures and words and contained huge
helpings of silliness, fun and adventure. I could always rely on Dr. Seuss and
MAD magazine for this, as well as the endlessly inventive Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
My grandmother
also had a copy of Struwellpeter, a
150-year-old collection of German cautionary tales that showed, in full graphic
horror, the unfortunate and often fatal consequences for children who failed to
obey the rules their parents clearly set out for them. One girl plays with
matches and ends up as a pile of ashes. A boy ignores his parent’s warning
about how the long red-legged scissor man will cut his thumbs off if he
persists with his habit of sucking his thumbs and—yep, you’d never guess—the
long red-legged scissor man comes and cuts his thumbs off. Yes, horrific, I
know, but so over-the-top I couldn’t help finding it all a bit funny.
As a result
of these very fortunate encounters with books, nobody ever had to lecture me
about the importance of reading. I already knew that there was absolutely no
predicting what might happen when you turned the page of a book and I read willingly
and voraciously. I had plenty of adventures in the real world, but books
offered another whole realm to explore and have fun in.
When I
became an English teacher in the late 1980s, however, I couldn’t help noticing
there wasn’t nearly the range of books perfect for reluctant readers that there
are today—which is one of the reasons why I began trying to write some of my
own stories.
One modern
book I encountered, however, which evoked the exact experience of my childhood
reading was Jon Scieszka’s and Lane Smith’s The
Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales. The irreverent playfulness
of the fairy tale parodies and the joyful inventiveness of the illustrations
suggested that I wasn’t the only one out there who took funny children’s books
seriously. I’ll never forget the surprise and sheer delight of reading the last
two sentences of ‘The Really Ugly Duckling’: “Well, as it turned out, he was
just a really ugly duckling. And grew up to be just a really ugly duck. The
End.”
Not too long
after I encountered Dav Pilkey’s wonderful Captain Underpants series with their
hilarious—and ridiculously long—titles. I think the thing I liked the best
about them was that not only were the plots fast moving and very silly, but the
text was presented in short bursts with a picture on almost every page … and
every now again the book would break into a comic strip. Reading is hard work
for an emerging reader, and the judicious and liberal use of illustrations can
help them absorb a lot of information at a glance, making the whole process
much more gratifying and enjoyable. Dav Pilkey’s books have the energy and
immediacy of an animated cartoon and this is no easy thing to achieve on the
page. Truly brilliant.
In 2008 I
encountered Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a
Wimpy Kid and it didn’t take me long to realize it was the work of somebody
intimately acquainted with childhood—the good, the bad and the ugly. Greg
Heffley does not always do the right or admirable thing, but he is always
honest. Kinney extracts enormous amounts of humor from the disparity between
what we—and often Greg himself—know is the ‘correct’ way to behave or ‘nice’
thing to say and the way he actually behaves. Like Dav Pilkey, Jeff Kinney
knows how to maintain an even balance between text and illustration, which
gives the books an enormous readability. And I love the fact that sometimes the
illustrations contradict what Greg Heffley is telling us, which credits the
reader with the intelligence to work out what is really true, and that Greg
can’t always be trusted.
I know if
I’d encountered The Stinky Cheeseman,
Captain Underpants and Diary of a Wimpy Kid as a child I would
have devoured them all alive, and it makes me very happy to know that these
books are out there making it easy for children to become life-long lovers of
reading … and fun. (And if they have a treehouse to read them in, then all the
better!)
Borrow The 52-Story Treehouse from your school or public library. Whenever possible, please support independent bookshops.
Mr. Griffiths, your treehouse books have done for my six-year old daughter what Scieszka and Pilkey and Kinney's books did for you. They helped her learn to love reading and books. We have read each of them multiple times. Thank you for infusing our bedtime routine with giggles and fun. She'll be so happy to learn there is now a 52-Story Treehouse to explore!
ReplyDeleteMy boys absolutely ADORE all of your Treehouse books and cannot wait to read this one. I told my oldest son about this post with The 52-Story Treehouse cover and he gasped, "It exists already? Let's go get it!"
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