Are the Tiffany Books "Children's Books?"

[Tonyblack]

Nicely put. Tamar!

One of the mail themes of the book is ignorance and how it can lead to hatred and violence. It's about the way that people in general can be manipulated into thinking a certain way and acting on that thinking in a negative way.

It's like when certain newspapers, governments or religious leaders manage to lay the blame for all their followers'' problems at the door of a particular group - be they immigrants or people of a different religion or whatever.

This doesn't just apply to modern times, but pretty much throughout history.

This is the importance of the founding of the school in the book - to teach people to think for themselves.

 

[The Mad Collector]

Good summary Tamar and Slantaholic you really need to stop reading what you want to read into the books as clearly you don't read what is on the pages

 

[Slantaholic]

Actually, it was a 15yo who said all that and spoilt it for me.

 

[Tiffany]

I can never understand why all this dissecting, detecting hidden meanings or moralising, of any book is necessary. I loathed that at school. I read a book, still do, because I enjoy(ed) reading it & the story line appealed to me. I don't care what people thought was the meaning of such & such passage. To me a book is a nice way to spend a few hours in another World. Other Sci-fi/fantasy authors but especially TP's books.

 

[=Tamar]

I can never understand why all this dissecting, detecting hidden meanings or moralising, of any book is necessary. I loathed that at school. I read a book, still do, because I enjoy(ed) reading it & the story line appealed to me. I don't care what people thought was the meaning of such & such passage. To me a book is a nice way to spend a few hours in another World. Other Sci-fi/fantasy authors but especially TP's books.

I like to read the books just as they are, too, but sometimes digging into symbolism can reveal more good stuff about a book. Sometimes it can help me like a book better. School classes are very dependent on the individual teacher; I've heard of some that were clearly obsessed, but I was lucky. My college prof who taught literary analysis simply said to look first at what the words actually say, and to be cautious about interpretation. Looking at the words is how I interpret most of what Sir Terry writes, and it has led to some helpful insights. Since he gets to choose his book titles (a fairly rare privilege in the SF and fantasy literature publishing world), his titles can be interpreted as well, and often the dedications reflect the themes of the books.

 

[Freebie]

I read I Shall Where Midnight - that's a Tiffany book, isn't it? I don't think I even noticed it was for 'younger readers'; more just another of the main Discworld books. In my defence, I got a very cheap copy from a bookstore because it was lacking its cover, so had it had the cover I probably would have related it better to its audience.

I wouldn't call it a children's book, as such, but certainly readable for 12-up? I don't feel he takes too much away in his writing for these books intended for younger readers to read, as well as the older reader. They still have that element of maturity in them (thinking of this book and Maurice)... to save me from rambling on, basically they don't patronise.

 

[simmonds91]

I suppose T Pratchett censors (bad spelling, i know, please forgive) some of his work? he doesn't mention murder in them perhaps? a bad example no doubt but he is such a good author I don't doubt he changes the books in such a way in that it is unnoticable by the common eye and by doing that it becomes a book for all ages (which is pretty much what he wants all his books to be)

 

[=Tamar]

I suppose T Pratchett censors (bad spelling, i know, please forgive) some of his work? he doesn't mention murder in them perhaps?

I could ask whether you have read any of his work... Sir Terry doesn't do explicit-gore-on-the-page but there are plenty of deaths and quite a few murders. By the way, you spelled censor correctly, but in my opinion you used it incorrectly; he might self-censor his own work as he writes, but the difference between his children's books and his adult books is much harder to put into words than that.
If you are interested, here is a link to some lists of deaths in the earlier books:
http://www.lspace.org/books/deathlists/index.html

a bad example no doubt but he is such a good author I don't doubt he changes the books in such a way in that it is unnoticeable by the common eye and by doing that it becomes a book for all ages (which is pretty much what he wants all his books to be)

If I recall correctly, Sir Terry has said that when he writes specifically for children, he can be clearer about the big issues - life, death, belief, love - because children don't object. It's the adults who want it all covered up with business and petty office politics, or words to similar effect. (Diana Wynne Jones said much the same thing about writing for children.)
He does say that it's much harder work to write for children, and that there's something he does differently but it's hard to describe in an interview. Some people say there are fewer plot threads in the first three Tiffany books. The fourth one is more YA level and it has more plot threads but it is still less complex than most of his adult books.

 

[ffateha]

Dear Tamar,

Would you mind telling me the source for this one, please? I am doing a research on Pratchett and I have read this somewhere but can't recall the proper source.

"If I recall correctly, Sir Terry has said that when he writes specifically for children, he can be clearer about the big issues - life, death, belief, love - because children don't object. It's the adults who want it all covered up with business and petty office politics, or words to similar effect."

 

[=Tamar]

Dear Tamar,

Would you mind telling me the source for this one, please? I am doing a research on Pratchett and I have read this somewhere but can't recall the proper source.

"If I recall correctly, Sir Terry has said that when he writes specifically for children, he can be clearer about the big issues - life, death, belief, love - because children don't object. It's the adults who want it all covered up with business and petty office politics, or words to similar effect."

I believe I read it somewhere in similarly specific form, but I haven't found it. However, I did find something similar, though less specific. In a transcript of an interview given in 1994, at:
http://misrule.com.au/wordpress/intervi ... interview/

he is quoted as saying:

Q: So you didn’t write the Truckers trilogy specifically with children in mind.

A: "I knew that I could deal with quite big, important things, and that meant it was going to be a book for children. Because if was a book for adults, you deal with things like the problems of going through the male menopause while being a university lecturer who’s been passed over for promotion. But for kids you can actually deal with big sky topics, and do the big brush. Curiously enough, it’s much easier to do that for kids, because they’ll cut right through the crap to the important stuff. So I knew it was going to be a book for children, but I, I though it would be… this is all post facto reasoning, I mean, I don’t actually think consciously like this when I’m doing it. But afterwards I can that what I’ve actually written was an onion skin book, so that you could go back to it a little later on, maybe, and see whole aspects to it."