The Western Corner of the Castle is a guide to the western tradition of quality children’s literature, providing detailed reviews of picture, chapter and young adult books to parents, inspired on the one hand by the 1000 Good Books List at Classical Christian Education Support Loop and on the other by the dearth of children’s book blogs promoting the same type of material, or indeed any books which do not fall in lockstep with the current educative belief system; a system which seems to be more about scoring progressive political points than promoting (for instance) good writing. If you’re concerned that the quality of available books is getting worse and worse, that the vocabulary is shrinking, the illustrations are grotesque or that the subject matter has become repugnant, you will have to look to the literature of previous eras for an alternative; a set of books for which the kindest word the experts use is “problematic.” These older novels and their writers have turned into controversies simply for upholding traditional western values, and it is no surprise that they begin to leave libraries and schools and are even erased from their own awards. They are here on sufferance, just until they’re so far out-of-date that few children can parse the meaning of their language and then they will be quietly discarded – following in the wake of once-popular writers such as G.A. Henty or even Thomas Bulfinch, who now only homeschoolers want. They have no champions, certainly not in the ALA.

If any of the above resonates with your own concerns then you are the target audience for this website. The educators and publishing houses which have had control over generations of children and their reading habits have produced demonstrably poor results in both literacy and behaviour and I for one have no interest in what they claim kids should be reading. What you will find here instead are heritage books for a growing child. Finely illustrated picture books in a multiplicity of mediums demonstrating to the smallest child the grandest scale of art and ideal. Myths and legends, saints and heroes which were our common cultural currency only a few generations ago will appear in their many iterations alongside stories of many decades and for many age groups which uphold the beauty and variety of our language, art, culture and history – in defiance of those who say we have none.

Besides good fiction from many eras, this blog will also cover traditional children’s poetry and a wide variety of educational books. Each review will come with a parental guide, focusing on the values of the work in question – how the book handles violence, which characters are presented as role models, noteworthy themes, morals, educational properties, etc. However, my guides DO NOT function as a logbook of inappropriate language or content. There are other blogs which perform this function. I am interested in the whole book and its thematic possibilities, not tallying individual words. Furthermore, there will be no attempts to police the language of writers long dead – diversity, the new yardstick of “excellence” for educational outlets, is not required to make a book valuable for our children.

Just as there will be no castigating of books for failing to live up to the standards of the current year, there will be no criticism for failing to live down to the standards of current reading levels. Many adventurous books that children and teens once gravitated to are welcomed on this blog as respectable fare for young minds – from Robinson Crusoe and the novels of Dickens to The Scarlet Pimpernel, they will be recommended alongside more recent young adult offerings. It is worth noting that if you as a parent are trying to set yourself against the modern culture, you should be at least sympathetic to homeschooling (even if you can’t embark on it personally) and I will be considering the books for this blog from that angle in particular.

Time periods covered will stretch confidently over the course that stems from Aesop in antiquity to the present day, avoiding the growing amount of material that obviously lacks artistic and moral value – this is not a hate-blog and such low-hanging fruit is not worth aiming at, though I will be looking for the cut-off point at which certain awards and honors no longer guarantee quality (if they ever did). I have a natural bias for the old-fashioned, out-of-print and antiquarian, along with books from my childhood in the 1990s, but I will strive to acquire books from every decade. Posts will be once a week for starters. We’ll see how it goes.

If we want to foster literacy we need to look back at the successful models of the past and how they accomplished the task. We need to up our game, not lower the bar and a traditional children’s library is a foundational element in this undertaking.