{"id":2486,"date":"2013-06-29T13:31:01","date_gmt":"2013-06-29T17:31:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/?p=2486"},"modified":"2013-06-29T13:35:33","modified_gmt":"2013-06-29T17:35:33","slug":"goodnight-moon-or-why-horror-readers-should-read-childrens-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/goodnight-moon-or-why-horror-readers-should-read-childrens-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Goodnight Moon, Or, Why Horror Readers Should Read Children&#8217;s Books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Having been immersed in children&#8217;s books of all kinds my entire life, I tend to take for granted that people read them as children themselves, or at least to their own children. Even really smart people \u00a0who read widely haven&#8217;t necessarily read the children&#8217;s books that most lovers of children&#8217;s literature would consider core titles. Unfortunately, that means a lot of people miss out. You might not think it, but there are a lot of cultural references dependent on knowledge of a common literary history, beginning in childhood. And horror is a very intertextual genre, with cultural references aplenty.<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"&lt;a href=\">Goodnight Moon<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=monstlibra-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=0060775858\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" \/>\u00a0<\/em>by Margaret Wise Brown is one of those books I always thought everyone at least knew about, even if they hadn&#8217;t read it. There have been many parodies, It wasn&#8217;t that long ago that Michael Rex produced an homage to this classic titled\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/&lt;a href=\">Goodnight Goon<\/a><\/em>, with lots of monsters, creatures, and chaos. Of course you don&#8217;t have to have read the original to enjoy it, but you&#8217;ll enjoy it more if you understand what is being parodied (your kids probably won&#8217;t care, but you&#8217;ll enjoy it more). For your enjoyment, then, here is a video that showcases the book.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9yu_g5x3ZoQ?rel=0\" height=\"315\" width=\"420\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes, though, you DO have to be familiar with the original to have the referential title make sense&#8211; and to &#8220;get it&#8221; so you can say &#8220;wow, that&#8217;s cool&#8221;! \u00a0And it doesn&#8217;t work if you don&#8217;t know the context. In my travels across the Internet, I came across this short video, and it kind of wowed me with the way it took the familiar elements of the book and made them into a horror movie.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/6LIr2DdiXmA?rel=0\" height=\"315\" width=\"560\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I ran to get my husband and showed it to him and he kind of shrugged. I didn&#8217;t realize he was unfamiliar with <em>Goodnight Moon<\/em>. Not knowing the book took the meaning away for him&#8211;it was nicely done, but so what?<\/p>\n<p>It doesn&#8217;t matter what you read or watch&#8230; Life is richer, and in often unexpected ways, when you read children&#8217;s books.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Having been immersed in children&#8217;s books of all kinds my entire life, I tend to take for granted that people read them as children themselves, or at least to their own children. Even really smart people \u00a0who read widely haven&#8217;t necessarily read the children&#8217;s books that most lovers of children&#8217;s literature would consider core titles.<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/goodnight-moon-or-why-horror-readers-should-read-childrens-books\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34,1514,1513,1100,653,1515,1468,194],"class_list":["post-2486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childrens-books","tag-goodnight-goon","tag-goodnight-moon","tag-horror-movies","tag-horror-readers","tag-margaret-wise-brown","tag-michael-rex","tag-reading-choice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2486"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2507,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486\/revisions\/2507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}