Welcome Back to the AM 80s Book Club
Rounding out our inaugural trilogy of audio discussions on childhood reads, Jen, our guest Brian Kramer, and I talk about a night at the museum that does not involve dinosaurs or Ben Stiller.
Full disclosure, this book was neither published in the ’80s nor read by me in that decade, but there’s a reason it’s my pick for our Intermittent Analog Mix 80s Book Club™️, so bear with us here.
As you’ll hear in the audio below, I was the atypical child nerd who did NOT habitually and thoroughly bury myself in books during elementary school. (I was busy making up elaborate lives for our Barbie dolls and playing Hollywood gossip magazine with my sister — complete with Polaroid photoshoots and hand-drawn, hand-bound issues — thank you very much.) I did, however, habitually and gleefully read to my kids for as long as they would let me, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was one of the gems I enjoyed for the first time via those read-aloud sessions.
It’s the story of a couple of siblings from Connecticut who run away to New York City in a most unconventional way, and while I don’t recall ever seriously contemplating running away as a child, if I had, this is how I like to think I’d have planned it. Like 11-year-old Claudia Kincaid, I don’t particularly like roughing it, and I do quite like museums and a mystery.
Listen in on our convo — spoiler: like Mrs. F’s files, the reviews were mixed …
Related notes:
As promised, a few of the book’s illustrations:
The book has prompted so many questions from museum visitors that the Met has devoted newsletter stories, website real estate, and programming to the story’s narrative.
“Ripped from the headlines”: A real-life typewriter installed outside the Olivetti showroom on 5th Ave. features significantly in the Kincaid kids’ adventure. As this ozTypewriter blog post details, Life magazine captured hidden camera images of passersby using that same typewriter in 1955.
