The Oldies Problem

While we here at Diamond in the Window don't own a car (the beauties of living in Brooklyn), we do sometimes use cars (we're zipcar users). And when we do use a car, there arises the question of the radio station.
I know that there is a lot of excellent new music being made, all the time. And I know, too, that for art to exist, it needs people to support it. And I wish—how I wish!—that I were the sort of person to push my own boundaries and take more risks in what I take from the world around me.
But.
Far too often, I end up somehow, again, on CBS 101.1, "Songs you can sing along to," belting out something from the early eighties behind rolled-up windows.

It seems to me that somehow something in my—what is the word for palate, but for all five senses? Something in my taste-judger got set in stone around 1979, and however much I might pretend to view things differently, deep inside, when I see Frye boots, or hear Aerosmith, or eat Mystic Mints, that something inside just resonates.
And so it is with books. When I pick up The Long Winter, or Ballet Shoes, or The Cricket in Times Square, (and of course The Diamond in the Window), I lose all perspective, distance, and critical judgment, and I just fall into it. Totally and completely. And don't get me wrong, this is a joyful experience. It is, in some way, the most basic pleasure of reading to me—I disappear, and the story magically becomes real while I fade to the background, able to live, invisibly, somewhere else.
But, just as it nags at me now that I might be missing the next amazing Radiohead (which someone had to drag into my ears against my general stodgy proclivities) by singing along so complacently to on CBS, I don't entirely trust the way I bring my literary past into my children's lives with me and dump it on their beds. Or in their bookshelves. Or whatever.
So here is my fear: That I am so entirely enamored of the books I loved as a kid that it is to the exclusion of better, newer books that would be theirs. Not that I block their access to the outside world of books, but it may be true that I don't foster it as much as I might. Is there a problem with the idea of comfort books? (And then there's the inevitable weird dated racism/sexism/class-ism that is a bit too prevalent to be considered only "teaching moments.") I'm not sure.


What they're reading now:
Child No. 1: The Battle of the Labyrinth
Child No. 2: Watch Me Throw the Ball!