Happiness is sharing books

Image: doublecluck.co.uk

Once a month, I help to organise the children's book group at my fantastic local independent bookshop, Big Green Books in Wood Green, North London. It's on the last Saturday of the month (although next month it's the second to last), and all keen readers 9-14 are very welcome. I love doing it, it makes me enormously happy to eat biscuits and talk about a book with keen, intelligent readers. This month we read Undead by Kirsty McKay.

The children choose the books, which is fantastic as they lead me to read books I often wouldn't read otherwise. Undead is not a book I would ordinarily have chosen to read, but it is hugely enjoyable. Bobby has just moved from the US (where her mum has been working) back to the UK. Just before term starts, she goes on a skiing trip to Aviemore, Scotland with her new classmates. It's a disaster. She's marked out by both her American accent and by her proficiency in skiing, and has had a thoroughly miserable time. So, when the coach taking them back home pulls into a service station, she decides to stay on the bus. A boy in her class, Smitty, is banned from leaving the coach too as he has been caught drinking. The rest if the group rush for the cafe (and the man dressed as a carrot giving out free juice), and so far- so awful. Until they see a figure racing through the snow. It's blonde mean-girl Alice, with horrible news. Everyone is lying in the cafe, dead, including the teachers. However, they don't stay quietly dead. Soon Bobby, Smitty, Alice and the only other survivor, geeky Pete, are escaping their zombie classmates in the Scottish countryside, with no adults, weapons or mobile phone reception. Will they survive? 

We loved this book so much that next month we're reading another zombie book: Charlie Higson's The Enemy.

Sharing books is a wonderful thing to do. Reading is a solitary pleasure, and that for me is a delight- my working life is intensively people-focused, and much as I enjoy that, I need time and space alone to recharge my batteries. However, I get so much delight from books and reading, I want to pass it on to other people. I do that through my job- lecturing student Primary teachers in the teaching of English- and in my personal life. I've pledged to share 20 books this year to help celebrate Bookstart's 20th anniversary. I hope that you will, too, through recommending books to friends, family and work colleagues, through tweeting book recommendations (perhaps with #bookstart20 hashtag), on your Facebook page or in person. But please do. It will help Bookstart to secure future funding, to continue providing packs of books for new babies.

Image: guardian.co.uk

Cats and More Cats

A reminder: the Ash Mistry and the Savage Fortress giveaway ends on 19th March!

I am a cat lover. My family has always had cats, and I have a lovely, rather elderly cat called Spike.

Here he is doing what he does best: sleeping on the back of the sofa.

Recently I have read three books about cats. I briefly met Tom McLaughlin at the Big Green Bookshop where he was doing an event for the children. A group of small children were waiting with rapt attention for him, so I got hold of a signed copy of The Diabolical Mr Tiddles. It is wonderful.

Image: amazon.co.uk

Harry longs for a cat, and when he finally gets his heart's desire, he names his new friend Mr Tiddles. He loves his pet and pampers him, giving him delicious food, attending to his comfort and entertaining him. Mr Tiddles wants to repay Harry's care, so starts bringing him increasingly extravagant presents, including cake, a train set, a rock star guitar, a grand piano and finally a horse! Harry becomes suspicious, and follows Mr Tiddles through the town. I can imagine the double page illustration of the town with Mr Tiddles' route in a dotted red line being a favourite with young readers. The route takes in a museum, a space centre and even a Western ranch! - which begins to give us a clue where these presents come from... And we finally catch up with Mr Tiddles outside a very important building, where an important person helps to resolve the story. I urge you to make sure you look at the end paper of this lovely picture book; it really made me giggle. The illustrations are incredibly detailed, with a lovely old fashioned cartoon quality without being grotesque. Highly recommended for 3+.

Image: amazon.co.uk

Comedian Natalie Haynes' first novel for children, The Great Escape, will not be her last I hope. 12 year old Millie is rather fed up. Her dad has just lost his job as a computer programmer, and is helping his friend out with his window cleaning business. Millie goes along with them to wash the windows of a laboratory to avoid being looked after by a nosy neighbour, and is astonished to see a cat escaping from the lab. She is even more astonished when the cat talks to her. It appears that the lab has been fitting the cats with voice boxes, and Millie, her friend Jake and his pre-teen hacker brother Ben must carry out the detective work to find out why, stop the testing and rescue the cats. Max the cat is suitably sardonic, and the book is very funny. While Natalie Haynes clearly has strong opinions about animal testing (the book won an award from animal rights charity PETA) this is not a polemic, but a witty, exciting adventure mystery. It would be a great read for 9+. This book does seem to be out of print, but is widely available from online stores.

Image: penguin.co.uk

I don't think I have ever had as many positive tweets about a book as I have about Barbara Sleigh's Carbonel. First published in 1955, it is the story of Rosemary, who lives with her widowed mother in a boarding house. They don't have much money, and Rosemary's mother supplements her pension by taking in sewing. During the summer holidays, while her mother is sewing at the house of the wealthy Mrs Pendlebury Parker, Rosemary decides to set herself up as a cleaner to help out financially.  Because she knows she won't be able to take one out of the house, she buys a broom from an untidy looking woman in a market. She buys a cat from the same woman, and is shocked to discover that not only is he a talking cat, but the Prince of Cats, enchanted by the untidy woman- Mrs Cantrip, a witch. Rosemary has broken part of the enchantment, but not all of it, and she and Mrs Pendlebury Parker's nephew, John, set out to break it.

This is still a great read. Part of the joy of the book is the freedom that 1950s children had: Rosemary and John buy and cook sausages on a gas ring and take the bus to a local cathedral town to find Mrs Cantrip's cauldron, as well as other unsupervised adventures. Sleigh's descriptions are also a joy; she describes Rosemary's plaits as flapping like "the blades of an old pair of scissors" as she hops up the kerb. As @mokuska reminded me, Carbonel is in the great tradition of grumpy magical helpers, like E. Nesbit's Psammead, and he reminded me of the magical characters of another favourite mid-20th century children's fantasy writers, Elisabeth Beresford. I wrote about her here.

This novel was followed by two more about Carbonel: The Kingdom of Carbonel and Carbonel and Calidor. Sadly they seem to be out of print but are listed at a reasonable price in the usual online shops. I have read Carbonel aloud to children of 7+, and confident readers of that age and above would enjoy reading it themselves.

World Book Day

Last night I was lucky enough to go to the very swanky offices of Slaughter and May in the City of London, to hear Anthony Horowitz give the Sir Simon Hornby Memorial Lecture for the National Literacy Trust on World Book "Eve". In a typically iconoclastic address, Horowitz posited that we are not having the "right debate" about library closures. While making it clear that he does not support the closure of "a single library anywhere", he pointed out that not only are adult borrowing figures at an all-time low, but the most borrowed adult author is James Patterson, the unfeasibly prolific author who has just signed a contract to produce 17 novels in 3 years; a feat he achieves by working largely with co-authors who write the first draft of his novels. Horowitz suggests that the Public Lending Right is not aimed at such writers; so perhaps there should be a mechanism for successful writers to pay it into the public purse to support literacy.

Horowitz was equally bracing on World Book Night (Saturday 5th March), which he felt could be in danger of being simply "nice, bookish people giving books to nice, bookish people". I was excited about the idea of World Book Night- registering to give away 48 of your favourite book- until I saw the titles. Now, these are some wonderful books, don't get me wrong- but my particular interest is in children/ young adult titles, and only Pullman's Northern Lights and two "crossover" novels: Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Yann Martell's The Life Of Pi are listed. I've read all of these, and loved them, but they are already best sellers and well known. I wanted to use the occasion to metaphorically grab someone by the collar and in the style of the Ancient Mariner, rant on about an amazing title that I had read recently and loved. Then I read this, by Nicola Morgan.

Coincidentally, 6th March, the day after World Book Night, is the third birthday of the totally wonderful Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green. It is my local bookshop. Wood Green is in Haringey, North London. It is a borough where 22% of children- close to 1 in 4- grow up in severe poverty (i.e. where the weekly income is less than £134 for a single-parent family with one child or £240 for a two-parent family). Wood Green High Road has a number of closing down (or closed down) shops, pound shops, charity shops and chain stores: not the environment where you might expect to find an independent bookshop.  It is however very close to the more well-heeled parts of North London, such as Muswell Hill or Highgate, both of which have excellent independent bookshops that I had visited regularly. Crouch End (a far wealthier area) lost Prospero's Books last year.

Waterstone's Wood Green closed down with 9 days notice in 2007 (replaced, predictably, by a chainstore selling cheap clothes), and Tim and Simon, former Waterstone's employees, opened their shop in 2008. It's a great, friendly place to buy books, and is a truly community bookshop- it holds quizzes, book groups, baby and toddler storytimes, a board games afternoon on Sundays... I could go on. I have seen Carl Barat, former Libertine, playing live there; I met Phill Jupitus there, as the Tottenham Choir sang carols in the shop on one of the snowiest Saturdays of the year.

And then came this blogpost. It seemed that we'd become a little complacent and had got used to the shop being there. So I decided that on World Book Day I would give a book as Nicola Morgan suggested, since I'll be at a birthday party on World Book Night (although my present will be books, bought at the Big Green Bookshop- family and friends, please get used to this!) I bought the breathtaking Unhooking The Moon from the shop:

I registered it with Bookcrossing.com, then I wrote a note, explaining that it was a gift. I slipped a 10% discount leaflet for the bookshop inside, hoping that it will encourage someone not familiar with the shop to visit. I went to Caffe Latino, an independent coffee shop in Wood Green (where one of Big Green Bookshop's book groups meet), and had a latte. I was planning to leave the book on the table:

But instead I decided to leave it in the newspaper rack:

I hope that one of the many customers in the caffe will pick it up and take it home for their children, or maybe read it themselves and enjoy it. It's a marvellous read. And they'll visit the bookshop and support it.

Anthony Horowitz believes that independent bookshops are vital for children's literacy, as are school libraries, with properly qualified librarians. Please consider donating a few pounds to Literacy Trust, who do vital work in promoting literacy in schools but have lost 100% of its government funding (£1 million). Please use your local independent bookshop, or if buying from Amazon, click on the new from tab and buy from an independent bookshop. Because if we don't use them, they won't survive. Buy fewer books, but from independent shops, and use your library more.

Zoe from Playing By The Book is organising a book donation scheme for Christchurch families who have lost everything in the New Zealand earthquake. This seems to me to be a great way to help- I'm sure you can remember as a child the devastation of losing a favourite toy or book. It must be so much worse to lose them all. Please have a look, and contact Zoe if you'd like to help.