Besides the obvious censorship, and rewriting the past being a bad thing. I can't wait to see what they do to "Brave New World", "Fahrenheit 451" and "1984". It'll be ironic and sad if they burn the old unedited Roald Dahl books.
But also have we reached cultural stagnation, that old media still out competes new ones by such orders of magnitude ?
This is a huge problem, when every year we graduate more and more people wanting to be writers, artists, etc. This will only get worse with books now being written by ChatGPT and art by Dall-E/Midjourney/Stable Diffusion.
Have we reached "peak multimedia" content ?
But this sort of thing has been happening everywhere since forever whether we are talking about Wikipedia, “history” books, or religious texts.
See https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-202...
Where is the next Dahl? Why is there no modern Beatrix Potter? Kids still love those stories and style of writing, which is less trite than most of the modern children's books.
It does feel like stagnation, with lots of content being churned out but none of it with great staying power. Instead the old stuff is regurgitated endlessly with less and less of it's original soul.
Probably crowded out of the market by the existing Dahl and Beatrix Potter books, which are plentiful and constantly in print.
> It'll be ironic and sad if they burn the old unedited Roald Dahl books.
..."oh but the market"
Uh... Roald Dahl is one of, arguably the greatest children's author of the 20th century. It's not like we're reprinting old pulp here because we can't write new stuff.
Frankly I think your hyperbole is misplaced. Dahl's works are republished, and they're children's literature, so it's not hard to imagine how mid-20th-century conceptions might be seen as a bit much for the target audience. No one's trying to prevent kids from reading the existing books[1], they're just trying to make a buck selling them to modern parents.
Does that make this a good idea? No, it's dumb. But it's hardly "yikes" territory either.
[1] Which would be the "censorship" you're talking about.
Do you have a child? There are all kinds of amazing children’s authors, loved by parents and kids, that have been creating books over the last 20 years.
Roald Dahl was notorious about hating people editing his works. Censorship via stealth editing is just extremely gross maybe even as bad as burning books.
If those works don't meet modern standards, let new books be made. It certainly is Yikes territory to me and apparently thousands of others on reddit and twitter.
I have a child which likes Dahl's books, tell me names of these amazing authors on par with him.
A highly creative culture would have very limited if any desire for it.
Good grief. That's simply not what censorship means. "Editting" happens all the time. Are journalists being "censored" when the published article doesn't match their words? In fact with translations, "editting" happens every time, by definition. How many times has the Bible been censored by now?
If you want hyperbole about interpreting The Decline of Western Civilization into internet argumentation: how about how no one cares about words anymore and wants to call everything a maximalist insult. "Censorship" doesn't mean anything anymore, it just means "someone did something I don't like".
Seriously, go to the library and see if anyone is trying to censor Matilda.
Your mention of translation is apt - it often is used as a fig leaf for exactly this kind of deception. They call it "localization", and defend it by offering a false dichotomy between it, and literal word-for-word translation.
But in this case they don't even have that thin excuse to hide behind.
It's just dumb. It doesn't have to be the end of the world, and we'd all be happier if people would stop with all the one-sided hyperbole. It's exhausting.
I only described their actions. You're talking about motivation. Though the publisher's motivation matters little when it's the "sensitivity readers" doing all the changes.
Difference is the Soviet had the honesty to censor while the author was alive.
And we all know what the deal is with her now.
Working 3 jobs just to pay rent, they don't have the time or resources to write.
I visit the bookstore with my kid regularly. She's 5. My older kids 11 and 14 do find plenty to read, but I disagree that there are plenty of magical modern children's authors capturing the 3 to 10 year old space. There are a lot of books, mostly dross.
And the stories... "I loved my cat/mom/dad then they died" I get it sad stuff happens and kids need to process it but these aren't books that are going to delight. "Your cat died so I got you a book about someone's cat dying"
And the stories... "I loved my cat/mom/dad then they died" I get it sad stuff happens and kids need to process it but these aren't books that are going to delight. "Your cat died so I got you a book about someone's cat dying"
You're right there are some gems but nothing serially good in the same way.
Puffin/Netflix are censoring the works they have acquired the rights to. They are not allowing republication of the author's original works (they hold the rights and are the only party allowed to republish). They are cutting and rewriting the original author's book for new editions. The Oxford English Dictionary defines censorship as “the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable or a threat to security”. This is censorship.
You can see it with successive movie adaptations: the decorations are the same, but all the messages get reversed, they focus on action, and they add hopeful endings.
I Want My Hat Back
This Is Not My Hat
We Found A Hat
The Rock From The Sky
They're beautiful exercises in minimal, precision watercolor. They're written with delightful economy, and have a rather Dahlian sense of justice and consequences.
He wrote them all within the last twelve years, IIRC.
For older kids, Pax (illustrated by Mr. Klassen in the edition we picked up) is a lovely piece of writing, vaguely like a cross between My Side Of The Mountain and Old Yeller, but less tragic than Old Yeller, with a deftly-handled thread about emotional awareness and responsibility for one's own choices woven throughout.
Oh, and the How To Train Your Dragon books, by Cressida Cowell, are wonderful, hilarious pieces of work about self-discovery, loyalty, friendship, and the hard, slow struggle to achieve mastery and skill in a world where people expect you to be something rather different than you are. Vastly, vastly better than the popular movies loosely inspired by them, and quite different - closer to a child-friendly Hitchhiker's Guide than the Hero's Journey of the films.
Great new classics are still being written - it's just that the winnowing function of passing decades hasn't yet run its course, so they're harder to find.
This is true, but I also think there are 'golden ages' for various genres of literature and I suspect we are not in a golden age for children's literature right now.
I don't think HP will become irrelevant any time soon.
Dahl's best-known book is about a family of 7 that can barely afford to eat. One of his other famous books is about how giants stalk through the night to kidnap sleeping children and eat them. A third one is about a child prodigy who is treated to the point of mental abuse at home, finally gets to go to school, only to encounter physical abuse - by the folks that are supposed to keep her safe!
If you think those stories can do more than terrify and scar children for life, I see no reason why you'd be dismissive of other works in which far, far less horrible stuff happens.
But the strangest part is, they will watch youtube videos of people reading books or playing videogames. I'm still not sure what to think about this.
Do you actually understand your own emotional reaction or are you trying to use a gross rhetorical trick here ?