Percy jackson graphic novel spanish
he revealed himself to have the ingratiating informality strategically adopted by some of the best and most beloved teachers. Riordan is a former middle-school English and history teacher, and at the N.Y.P.L. There he learns the skills becoming of his lineage-sword fighting looms large-and discovers his own peculiar gifts: even when injured, he is miraculously healed and empowered by water. In the first book of the series, “The Lightning Thief,” Percy gets shipped off, at the age of twelve, to Camp Half Blood, a refuge on Long Island populated by his demigod peers. The atmosphere was one of high excitement and engagement, and if it is true that I have seen adult audiences in that venue similarly riveted by the presence of an author- Karl Ove Knausgaard’s rock-star appearance earlier this year, for example-I have yet to attend a literary event at which the presence of the author, or the mere mention of his most popular characters, has been met by uncontrollable squealing.įor those unfamiliar with the Riordan’s Olympian fictions-which is to say, people without children between the ages of seven and seventeen-their hero, Percy Jackson, thinks he is just a kid with a learning disability and a troublesome tendency to get kicked out of school, until he learns that his difficulties can be explained by the fact that he is a demigod, the offspring of Poseidon and a mortal woman. The first, “Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” has sold upwards of twenty million copies worldwide, and more than three hundred of his young fans filled the Celeste Bartos Forum at the library, where Hyperion, Riordan’s publisher, had placed promotional T-shirts and temporary tattoos on every seat, and had ranged stacks of signed volumes for purchase. This debate came to mind earlier this month at the New York Public Library, when Rick Riordan, the author of the best-selling Percy Jackson series, was in town to promote “The Blood of Olympus,” the latest and final volume in his second cycle of novels drawing upon Greek mythology.
James is the first step toward Shakespeare,” he concluded.
He enlisted the example of his own children’s reading habits, and those of his young students, to argue that there is little evidence to suggest that readers will make progress “upward from pulp to Proust.” “I seriously doubt if E.L. “If the ‘I-don’t-mind-people-reading-Twilight-because-it-could-lead-to-higher-things’ platitude continues to be trotted out, it is because despite all the blurring that has occurred over recent years, we still have no trouble recognizing the difference between the repetitive formula offering easy pleasure and the more strenuous attempt to engage with the world in new ways,” Parks wrote. The opposite argument-that the kind of book a child has his or her nose buried in does make a difference-has been mounted elsewhere, notably by Tim Parks, in an essay that appeared on the blog of the New York Review of Books. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.” A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them.” Well-meaning adults, he continued, can easily kill a child’s love of reading: “Stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21 st-century equivalents of Victorian ‘improving’ literature. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories.
Fiction is a “gateway drug” to reading, Gaiman said. “I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children,” he argued, adding that it was “snobbery and … foolishness” to suggest that a certain author or particular genre might be a baleful influence upon young reading minds-be it comic books or the works of R. In the lecture, which was reprinted in the Guardian, Gaiman came out in favor of what might be called the “just so long as they’re reading” camp. About a year ago, the novelist Neil Gaiman delivered a lecture at the Barbican, in London, on behalf of the Reading Agency, a not-for-profit organization that promotes literacy and reading for pleasure among children and adults.