“If it isn’t official, then it can’t be real, now can it?”
When I first saw Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society on a shelf in Barnes & Noble, my first thought was, “Great, another New York Times Best seller children’s series.” In general, great art—the possession for all time—seems to me to gain more approval as the generations pass, whereas the accolades for the piece that is designed for a favorable hearing start loud and dwindle with the attention spans that it has helped to erode. So I usually avoid bestsellers until they are a few decades old. It is summer, though, and the…