Astrid

Now that Christmas is coming, I hope many children receive children's books as gifts, including some classics. If you'd like a recommendation, it would be great to revisit the wonderful Pippi Longstocking, a character created in the mid-20th century who maintains her modern and progressive values intact—in other words, more relevant than ever given the current state of affairs.

The publisher Kókinos has released several adventures of the red-haired girl with braids in Catalan. And now, to please her adult fans, they're giving us the book My Lost World (For now, only in Spanish), a collection of texts by Pippi Longstocking's creator, Astrid Lindgren, about the power of reading, the privilege of writing for children, and some memories from her own life.

To fully immerse ourselves in Astrid's world, the book opens with a photograph of the author as a venerable old woman, perched in a tree, clearly illustrating her character and the source of her character's eccentric and amusing behavior.

Astrid Lindgren was a creative and courageous woman, committed throughout her life to defending human rights in general and children's rights in particular. In fact, as explained in this book, when she was invited by Frankfurt booksellers to give a lecture in 1978, the content of her speech was so combative that she was asked to change it for fear of the reactions it would provoke. The Swedish author politely replied that if she couldn't read the speech exactly as she had written it, they shouldn't expect her in Frankfurt.

The speech, titled "Violence, Never!", vehemently condemned violence against children, including in the home. A year after Lindgren delivered this speech, Sweden became the first country in the world to pass a law banning corporal punishment of children in all settings, including the family.

A My Lost World We found this speech and some delightful memoirs like "It All Started in Kristin's Kitchen," about her beginnings in the world of writing, or a narrative about the extraordinary love story of her parents, Samuel and Hanna.

We also found some juicy anecdotes about the popular Pippi Longstocking, featuring readers and editors from all over the world, and a lot of information about her childhood upbringing, which allows us to better understand the powerful personality of her fictional character, who has done so much to show girls that they are brave and capable of anything they set their minds to.

According to Astrid Lindgren, her mother's educational method was innovative: obedience was out of the question, but she never demanded anything unnecessary or impossible. She scolded them very rarely and never for reasons such as being late for lunch or coming home with muddy clothes. Frankly, a century later, and given the current state of affairs, it seems like a simple but fitting formula.

So here's my suggestion for the holidays: give Pippi Longstocking books to the little ones and discover their author, Astrid Lindgren, in My Lost WorldLots of fun and plenty of common sense is a combination that can't fail.