Third poem from Where the Sidewalk Ends:
MAGIC
Sandra’s seen a leprechaun,
Eddie touched a troll,
Laurie danced with witches once,
Charlie found some goblins’ gold.
Donald heard a mermaid sing,
Susy spied an elf,
But all the magic I have known
I’ve had to make myself.
(unusually, this poem doesn’t have an accompanying illustration.)
I was really surprised to find that this is the top book of 1974 among Goodreads users, by a very long way (almost twice as many users as second-placed Carrie) because I had never heard of either book or author. It’s an immensely popular short collection of a hundred or so poems, aimed perhaps at the 10-ish age range. I suspect that the use of the word “sidewalk” in the title has made it less appealing to the many countries where that is simply not a word that is used, including where I grew up.
I quite like the title poem despite the peculiar terminology for ‘pavement’. I found most of the other poems much less impressive, more often just framing a smart phrase than digging very deeply into life and experience. I did like the illustrations. I’m struck that Goodreads reviewers, even though so many of them like the book, tend to say that Silverstein’s other collection, A Light in the Attic, is better. Anyway, you can get it here.
Second section of Part 3 of Carrie:
From the national AP ticker, Friday, June 5, 1979:
CHAMBERLAIN, MAINE (AP)
STATE OFFICIALS SAY THAT THE DEATH TOLL IN CHAMBERLAIN STANDS AT 409, WITH 49 STILL LISTED AS MISSING. INVESTIGATION CONCERNING CARIETTA WHITE AND THE SO-CALLED ‘TK’ PHENOMENA CONTINUES AMID PERSISTENT RUMOURS THAT AN AUTOPSY ON THE WHITE GIRL HAS UNCOVERED CERTAIN UNUSUAL FORMATIONS IN THE CEREBRUM AND CEREBELLUM OF THE BRAIN. THIS STATE’S GOVERNOR HAS APPOINTED A BLUE-RIBBON COMMITTEE TO STUDY THE ENTIRE TRAGEDY. ENDS. FINAL JUNE 5 030 N AP
As with A Passage to India, I think I had seen the film of Carrie many years ago but I certainly had not previously read the book. It’s every bit as good as I expected, with the horror gradually mounting, and the sense that this is the reflection of ordinary teenage meanness and bullying. The tick-tock switching between official reports and documents, and omniscient third-person narrator, also keeps you on your toes and maintains the momentum. This despite the fact that we are told that hundreds of people will die as early as a third of the way through the book.
The other thing that struck me is that Carrie is set in the future. Though published in 1974 (and presumably written in 1973), the action is firmly dated May 1979, with flashbacks to her parents’ relationship in the 1960s and flashforwards to the various official reports on what Carrie did. There is a sense of “it can happen here…” It’s also mercifully short, compared to some of King’s other work.
Of course, in 1974 the idea that a teenager would engage in the mass murder of their fellow students was outlandish fantasy. Columbine was still 25 years in the future. It’s actually within living memory that school shootings were not a thing that happened very often, even in the USA. Wikipedia tells me that 17 people have been killed in American school-related shootings so far this year including four yesterday, compared to 14 in the whole of the 1950s. Carrie unwittingly told us what was coming.
Anyway, you can get it here.
1974 was a good year for sff classics; the fourth book by my ranking is The Forever War and the fifth The Dispossessed. Between them and Carrie, in third place, is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which actually tops the LibraryThing scale).
