Dear Nell,

When I was a child and a blank slate, literarily speaking, I loved anthologies of all sorts—books of diverse mystery stories, books of nonsense poems, books that allowed you to dip in and out of a wide range of works from a wide range of authors. I was willing to take it on faith that nearly anything the compilers of such books chose to put in them was worth my time since they were smart and grown-up and I was just a dumb little kid. It was for the same reason that one summer, having finished all the books I brought with me, I happily read through Nicholas and Alexandra, a luridly inappropriate book for a 7-year-old, simply because it happened to be on the shelf of our summer rental and thus fair game for my emptyish head. 

When you get older, of course, you become more opinionated, less randomly promiscuous in your reading, and more likely to avoid genres or authors or eras that you know you dislike. Your reading time is limited, and you prefer to stick to things you know will fit more readily into your own sensibility. My old-person approach to a book like Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages, then, would be to dip in and pick the things I know I will enjoy while avoiding those that don't appeal (like much of the poetry in the book, I'm afraid). I've tried doggedly, for the sake of this discussion, to read everything, and in order, but that's not the way to tackle Bloom; it could drive you insane.

In this fat compilation, Bloom is essentially telling us what he liked to read as a kid, neither more nor less (as Humpty Dumpty would put in, in my favorite passage from the Alice books, thoughtfully included by Bloom). Fair enough. The reason he gets to do it and we don't is that he's Harold Bloom, arbiter of taste, and we're just schlieby people sitting around at home with our own unheralded, idiosyncratic opinions. Bloom was a different sort of kid from me, that's for sure. You asked—and this is the thousand dollar topic presented by Bloom's book, something we could talk about until we were blue in the face—what I would have liked to see included.

First of all, I would have scrapped his requirement that most of the works come from the 19^th century or earlier. "After the First World War," Bloom writes in the introduction you so rightly identify as somewhat opaque and frustrating, "various waves of what then was called 'Modernism' ended the visionary speculation and wonder that makes 'Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children' a harmony, at least in its editor's intention." I'm not quite sure what to make of this. First, not everything he chooses necessarily fits this criterion, anyway. And is he saying that no 20^th-century children's literature—no 20^th-century literature at all, in fact, since he doesn't limit his selections to works written specifically for children—has "visionary speculation and wonder"? What about E.B. White, Ogden Nash, James Thurber, Madeleine L'Engle, Philip Pullman, C.S. Lewis, Edward Eager, to name some just off the top of my head?

One of the other decisions he has made, it seems, is mostly to limit the works he chooses to fully formed short stories and poetry. (He does very occasionally relax this stricture, as in the Humpty Dumpty passage from Alice in Wonderland.) That's a matter of taste, but my taste would allow a much more liberal inclusion of representative or free-standing excerpts from longer works. For some years I have been giving as gifts to various children a compendium of writing by Roald Dahl (another left-out author) that includes long snippets from some of his greatest hits, and it has successfully led many of these children (at least according to their parents) to the works as a whole. Some of the writers most worth reading are not short-story writers, and it seems a shame to neglect them when reading them brings so much delight and so whets your appetite for more.

As I say, I wasn't thrilled with some of the poetry, but maybe I can talk about that tomorrow. For now, let me return your question to you: What would you put in your own book of favorites, for children or otherwise, whether preternaturally intelligent or just averagely dim like the rest of us?

All best,
Sarah