CCLP Reads: From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg (1967)

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is a genuinely fun read. It's also set in the year it was written, so 1967, which means that little things like cameras in museums probably just didn't exist at the time. Which is just brilliant. Thanks to an anonymous comment on my Reading Ideas post,

This is the last book I read for my Classic Children's Literature Party and I'm finally able to write about it! Work has been chaotic the last week.

Anyway, the story is about two children, Claudia and Jamie Kincaid, who decide to run away from home to New York City. Claudia, being the planner she is, doesn't want to just run away from something, but to something, so she plans for them to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And that's exactly what they do. While there, they undertake to solve a mystery of a new statue recently acquired by the museum, that may or may not be a Michelangelo. There adventure is full of twists and turns and random meals from the automat and the ability to live in New York City for almost two weeks on just around $24, most of it in change from Jamie's tendency to hoard his savings.

I love this book. Not because I read it as a child, but because one of my favorite movies when I was a kid was the 1995 film version of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler starring Lauren Bacall as the infamous Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. It's a brilliant film, such a fun story and so well done.

The book is equally as engaging and a really quick read. It's one of my sister's favorite books from her childhood which is probably why we watched the movie, I'm guessing!

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

They became a team, a family of two. There had been times before they ran away when they had acted like a team, but those were very different from feeling like a team. Becoming a team didn't mean the end of their arguments. But it did mean that the arguments became a part of the adventure, became discussions not threats. To an outsider the arguments would appear to be the same because feeling like part of a team is something that happens invisibly. You might call it caring. You could even call it love.

She lay there in the great quiet of the museum next to the warm quiet of her brother and allowed the soft stillness to settle around them: a comforter of quiet. The silence seeped from their heads to their soles and into their souls.

If you think of doing something in New York City, you can be certain that at least two thousand other people have that same thought. And of the two thousand who do, about one thousand will be standing in line waiting to do it.

Claudia especially wanted to make herself important to the statue. She would solve its mystery; and it, in turn, would do something important to her, though what this was, she didn't quite know.

And so they went to bed. But lying in bed just before going to sleep is the worst time for organized thinking; it is the best time for free thinking. Ideas drift like clouds in an undecided breeze, taking first this direction and then that.

They dressed and walked to the little chapel and knelt and said The Lord's Prayer. Jamie reminded Claudia to say she was sorry for stealing the newspaper. That made it officially Sunday.

When the tour was finished, Claudia was no expert on the United Nations, but she had discovered something: saris are a way of being different. She could do two things, she decided. When she was grown, she could stay the way she was and move to someplace like India where no one dressed as she did, or she could dress like someone else - the Indian guide even - and still live in an ordinary place like Greenwich.

The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you. It's the same as going on a vacation. Some people spend their time on a vacation taking pictures so that when they get home they can show their friends evidence that they had a good time. They don't pause to let the vacation enter inside of them and take that home.