An appreciation Final

Stuart Little is the kind of book that you love as a young child because of its adventure and plot and the kind of book that you can appreciate at an older age for it’s language, characters and real life connections

Stuart Little is the story of a mouse living in a world of people. That does not limit Stuart though. He makes sure that anything he wants to do gets done. Stuart Little is written in the early 40’s and emulates the time period through it’s language and ideas. The language flows and gives you the perfect picture of what is happening.
“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and elm trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields. . . .” (Page 100). This part of the book has a quiet flow. Though it is not quite necessary to the plot,  it helps set the scene for a quiet, sunny morning. That is something amazing about E.B White’s description and dialect. He uses it to set a scene and get you into the appropriate frame of mind. It is not always the perfect setting though.
“Snowball, the cat, enjoyed nighttime more than daytime. Perhaps it was because his eyes liked the dark. But I think it was because there are always so many worth-while things going on in New York at night.”(Page 67).
This as opposed to the calm setting on page 100 sets the scene more for a dangerous, less peaceful scene.

A lot of societal problems are mirrored in the book, such as the way people are doubted because of physical problems and limitations. There are many scenes when you get nervous, biting your lip as Stuart sets out to do something. He is daring and in many parts of the story I don’t think Stuart can do what he sets out to do.
“When the bus came into view, all the men waved their canes and brief cases at the driver, Stuart waved his spyglass. Then, knowing that the step of the bus would be too high for him, Stuart seized hold of the cuff of a gentlemen’s pants and swung aboard without any trouble or inconvenience what ever.”(Page 28).
Every time I am proven wrong because Stuart manages to work his way out of sticky situations. My love for the book does not come from the language or plot but from Stuart himself. We like to think that so much has changed between periods of time such as when the book was written and now. But have many things really changed? I can still see many are doubted because of physical problems. Reading this book I thought of myself as a little girl in elementary school.  Back then, everything came down to physical strength. The boys usually won games because they were taller and could throw harder. Why was it that when we put almost double the heart into what we did the boys still won every time?  Reading Stuart Little was important to me. I could not look too deep but I could scrape just past the surface of the book. Stuart was the knight in shining armor that proved size did not matter.

Reading Stuart Little the second time, I saw problems that had made their way into the book that had slipped unnoticed by the six year old who had read this book so many years ago. There had been so much less worry when I read the book the first time. Now it seemed different, sad. I could feel so much more pain whenever something bad happened to Stuart. When Marglo left Stuart, my heart stopped for a second. You could feel how much Stuart hurt.
“For three days everybody hunted all over the house for Marglo without finding so much as a feather…. Stuart was heartbroken. He had no appetite, refused food, and lost weight. Finally he decided that he would run away from home without telling anyone, and go out into the world and look for Marglo.”- (Page 73).

 I now think I know why I loved Stuart Little as a little girl and wanted to read it again. I wanted to see if it still meant to me what it did seven years ago. It was different, not entirely in a bad way, but just not the same book. Maybe as we get older we lose the ability to read for only story and adventure. Maybe being trained to think more deeply takes away from the story when we read a child’s book. Maybe we will never be able to read a book the way we could at six and seven. Maybe opening up to a random page and reading the third sentence would be so, so, so much different then the first time. I hope that every child out there can read as many books before they lose the ability to read without over thinking and “deeply thinking”.

An appretiation Draft 2

Ask me to go back. Far back to when I was little. When all that mattered was what we where having for lunch. When everyone was friends with evryone. If you asked me what I was reading then I would rattle of a few of my favorites, The Little Princess, The Secret Garden, Narnia, Trupet of the Swan, Love, Ruby Lavander and Charlotte's Web. Stuart Little does not come to mind the way thoes do, it takes a little longer like trying to remember what you ate for lunch two days ago, you know it just takes a minute. So why is it when I got the sign up sheet that said to put your name under the book you wanted to re-read did I find myself writing Kate Macrae under the Stuart Little. It was fast I got the sheet wrote my name and then the person next to me tugged it away before I could think.

The first time I read Stuart Little I read it for story and adventure, for which there is no dought in my mind that Stuart Littke is the book for someone who loves that thing. Stuart Little is the story of a mouse living in a world of people. That does not Limit Stuart though. He makes sure anything he want to get done gets done. Stuart Little does not stick to a specific story line the way all of my favorite books do. Instead it jumps from adventures of Stuart and his family made all the more intresting by the fact that Stuart Little takes place in Manhattan. Toward the end though the story does find a specific path that even then is inturupted by other short adventures. I can't say that I love that about the book. I can't say that It bothers me enough to not want to read on. It does keep the story intresting.

Stuart Little is writtan in the early 40's and emulates the time period through the language and conflict in the book. Some thing I love is that reading Stuart Little you can almost feel NYC all thoes years ago.The language is from a time when even slang (if there was any) was beautiful. Reading it makes me long for people to talk to me using beautiful words such as the ones Stuart uses through out the book. Only good books, and there is no dought that Stuart Little is a good book (just maybe not my kind of good book) alow you to submurse yourself and be provoked by the authors ideas. I can say that I appreciate this book.

Entry 7

When you read a book for the first time you will judge it and being human’s we usually want to have something (not everything) in common with other people reading what we are reading.  When I found out that we would be doing all this research I was worried.  What if what I thought was different from everyone else?  What if I was wrong?  Could I be wrong on my own ideas?  Was that possible?  As I started to research pm Stuart Little I realized that it was not opinions but more critic. 

E.B White has always fascinated me.  He writes in this amazing style, something I like about reading his books is you’re not sure what will happen but when it does you can relate it to his previous writing.  A good source on his life is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._B._White.

As I begain to do more reserch I was not finding to many opinions that I could not relate to, in facet I agreed with alot of ideas and thought in new ways about the book. An intresting aproch to the blog was made by this website http://www.abbythelibrarian.com/2008/06/book-review-stuart-little.html. I found thought It was harder to find links that talked about the book in other formats other then blogs (i.e newspapers, magazines, books) it was very easy though to find reviews on the two movies which both incude very little about the book. The NY times gave one http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9F0CE5DD1430F934A25751C1A96F958260.

I do think it would be intresting to countinue looking for information and other opinions on stuart little I had fun with this study and would like to see what the other people in my group came up with.

Entry 6

At the start Stuart Little was just Stuart Little a chidrens book, well writtan and clever but still a chid's book. One day during book club we turned back to an early page in the book (11) and were disscusing something, in my head I was asking myself questions on the opposite end of the point, and at home I relized what I had been thinking. On page 11 there is talk of Stuart going into a mouse hole (that is what the Little's thought had happened) but really he had just been stuck somewhere else. The idea of people of you love going somewhere or doing something and you not able to stop them or help them was scarey. I'm still not sure why this spoke to me but for the rest of the book I was making text to world connections a lot easier then I had ever made them.