I’m sending this off to a friend–I think it matches his description of a childhood favorite he’s been looking for for his eldest son–so of course I had to re-read it first. Books that I loved as a child fit into 3 categories: A) great literature, I love them even more as an adult and find more in them than I saw then (eg The Animal Family<\/i> by Randall Jarrell); B) still a good read, “comfort food” that I revisit half for the book itself and half for nostalgia (most of my childhood favorites); C) I can’t recapture what was so good about it, all the magic has vanished (no good example springs to mind right now). This is sort of B-; it’s not bad, but has some major drawbacks (condescension, a little cutesiness, plot problems, unsettling mix of SF and fairy tale–important events seem to be either dreams, hypnotism, or pre-determined somehow). It’s better in my memories than on the page, but I do love the sturdy little rocket, the nifty varnish that protects it in space, the oxygen urn that goes Phee-eep!<\/i> This book must have formed some of my ideas about inventions. I used to fantasize about creating a kind of solid light that would have the texture of those cubical light-brown erasers that crumble; it would be a cool light like a firefly’s, and you’d have to actually cover it to create darkness. Mr. Bass, the mysterious child-like man who turns out to be the descendent of Mushroom folk, is more cook than scientist, and his inventions (which he can’t re-create) have a hand-made, organic quality to them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m sending this off to a friend–I think it matches his description of a childhood favorite he’s been looking for for his eldest son–so of course I had to re-read it first. Books that I loved as a child fit into 3 categories: A) great literature, I love them even more as an adult and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}