awww....

I spent the weekend with in-laws and their new baby (two months old and really far too cute). The awe-inspiring thing? They are actually reading the Ultimate First Book Guide and thinking seriously about books and reading. Amazing - and deeply touching. Why? Maybe as editor I feel almost as if the books slide off into a vague 'elsewhere', where they look pretty on shelves but don't get used. But this baby? Oh, no, his reading will be shaped by the book and the info inside it. Like I said, awe-inspiring indeed!

And as a 'leaving work for maternity leave' present, everyone at sister-in-law's workplace bought a copy of the book they remember loving most as a child. The whole collection was popped into a hamper with some pretty baby stuff and smellies for the mum. What a lovely idea...

Cheltenham II

As Leonie said, a lovely Cheltenham weekend, with unaccustomed sunshine but everything else just as we'd left it after last year's festival (which doesn't feel a year away...). And yes, our event with Anne was really fun, a very frank discussion (I don't think Anne does any other kind, now that I think about it) ranging widely over books and reading and schools and bookshops and children and age ranging and libraries, to a lovely, engaged audience of parents, teachers and others...

As always, as Leonie suggested, there is for us a lovely social aspect to these festivals too - while the UBGs allow us to work with great people, it happens remotely and we very rarely actually get to meet them in person, so events like Cheltenham allow us to sit on a stage with some of our longest-serving contributors, to have coffee with Caroline in the Writers' Room, to have breakfast with Anne at the hotel, etc. Anne, incidentally, has been a great supporter of the UBGs since we first started talking about them all those years ago, and she's done us a new introduction for the revised edition of the 8-12 guide, which goes into production in eight days!

I also chaired a couple of other panels while I was there, which is always fun, and Jane always gives me some real treats. One event this year was on picture books, with three illustrators whose work I love - Emily Gravett (I've posted enthusiastically on her before), David Lucas (whose books include the delightful Halibut Jackson) and Polly Dunbar (creator of the enchanting Penguin); the second was on thrillers for teenagers, with Tim Bowler, Cathy MacPhail and Sophie McKenzie (UBG contributors all). I'd never read Sophie before this, but did read Girl, Missing in preparation for the event and it's excellent - gripping, sympathetic, moving, well plotted. Looking forward to reading her second (Blood Ties) before too long. Both have been recommended for the forthcoming revised edition of the U Teen B Guide, btw.

Currently reading and enjoying Tim's Frozen Fire, then moving on to a few other books for the new UTBG - Triskellion and Seventh Tide are next...

D.

PS How exciting to hear that Neil Gaiman is coming to do some events in the UK! My friend Naomi Alderman (who is a huge fan of his) is interviewing him on stage on Sunday 26th in north London, and I've already booked my ticket. Saw him speak last year at Hay and he was very good, and anyway just to be in a room with the man who created Coraline... (Scary scary scary book...)

Cheltenham

What a week! Mad things at work (real work, in the actual library) and a mad weekend away at the Cheltenham Literary Festival for UBG work... I have to admit that Cheltenham was the best - the festival is always gorgeous (especially when the town is basking in unseasonally glorious sunshine - I didn't wear a coat all weekend), beautifully run (thank you Jane Churchill, wonderful organiser of the Book It! children's festival) and probably my favourite of the yearly book events. I even managed to sneak out to the racecourse theatre (yes, there is one) to see Russell T Davis and John Barrowman discussing Dr Who and Torchwood... laugh? I nearly fell off my seat!

Our event was on Monday, and somehow Jane had persuaded Anne Fine to share the stage with us. Yes, we felt totally not worthy, as Anne is not only one of the few truly great writers for children, but is one of the sharpest and most intelligent observers of the way reading is treated in this country. Luckily for us, she also happens to be a great person to share a stage with! We signed afterwards - and spent a while marvelling at the table that held Anne's back catalogue... can anyone else have written so much, so successfully and for so many ages?

It was all great fun, and afterwards Caroline Lawrence was in the green room too, so we spent a while catching up and being amazed that the Roman Mysteries series is almost reaching its end! What are kids going to do now? Let's hope Caroline's next series will be just as long and popular.

Once our event was over (and the adrenaline rush had faded) there was shopping to do and a train to catch. Danny and I shared an otherwise almost deserted carriage home, and read / dozed our way back to the real world.

Sorry sorry sorry...

Two months without a post - shameful.

My excuse is that I've been away and busy, but it's not a great excuse, I realise...

(Susan has a much better excuse - since last posting she's had a baby - Emily - who arrived at the start of August! One more child to road-test books for the UBG, pleased to say...)

For me, August was spent in China, which included a few days at the International Translators' Federation congress in Shanghai - among other sessions I heard a few on children's books, including the Norwegian translator of Harry Potter, an academic from Turkey on Turkish versions of E. Nesbit (not something I ever in my life expected to know about), and a brilliant presentation by B.J.Epstein from the Univ of Swansea on translation of allusions in children's literature (with examples from Lemony Snicket). You can find out more about her and her work at her blog here.

Didn't read any Chinese children's books while in China, but there and since getting home have had a few great pleasures reading, among other things, Perrault's fairy tales (when did I last read those?) which are incredible - often very funny, and quite appalling sometimes and exciting and odd. What fun.

Also greatly enjoyed in the past weeks Ann Kelley's The Bower Bird, John van de Ruit's Spud, and currently onto Keith Gray's excellent Ostrich Boys. I like all Keith's books, but this is especially sensitive, funny, thoughtful - definitely worth a read. Next will be the latest books by Tim Bowler, Sophie McKenzie and Cathy MacPhail, for an event I have coming up (about which more below).

These three are all going into our new teen book guide, which we deliver to the publishers in a few months. Building on our 2006 UTBG, this has over a hundred new entries, and new contributors including Frances Hardinge, Joanne Harris, Grace Dent, Anthony McGowan, Tanya Landman, Patrick Ness, Jenny Downham, Chris Riddell, Jonathan Stroud, Jenny Valentine and many more. As ever, a great pleasure and privilege to be working with so many people whose own books we admire so much!

Some event dates for the diary, while I remember - Leonie and I have a morning at Worthing Library on November 28th, and an evening at the Lewes CBG on January 28th. But before that comes Cheltenham, of course (if it's October it must be...); I have two lovely events to chair:

--12th October, 2:30pm - Big Picture event: David Lucas, Polly Dunbar and Emily Gravett. Of these I've only met Emily a couple of times briefly (most recently at a great party at the Kensington Roof Gardens to launch Puffin Post), but looking forward to meeting them all properly there. If you read this blog regularly you'll have heard my enthusing about Emily's books in particular but they're all illustrators & writers I think are marvellous.

--12th October, 5:45pm - event for teenagers, with Tim Bowler, Catherine MacPhail and Sophie McKenzie (all, I'm pleased to say, UBG contributors!) talking about writing thrilling fiction for teens...

And then...

--13th October, 10:15am - Ultimate Book Guides event, with me and Leonie and Anne Fine, which will be loads of fun. Anne is one of the most stalwart of UBG supporters, and has just done a new introduction for the new edition of the 8-12 which is just about to go to press (hooray!).

That's it for now - won't leave it so long before the next post...

D.

The Kids' Lit Quiz

We won!

Amazing as it sounds, the team of boys from my school won the final of the world Kids' Lit Quiz! It was incredible hard-fought, with the Arnold House team winning by a narrow margin. All boys too - and I was sure the all girls or mixed teams would have the edge!

In case you don't know, as well as working on the UBGs I work three days a week as librarian in a small prep school in North London. It's fun, it pays the bills and I get to work with great kids. We're entered the quiz for the past few years, never getting any further than the London heats, but this time, we won the London ones, then won the UK finals in Newcastle and now we're the World Champions too! Am I proud? Goodness me, yes!

The whole event was great great, and though Oxford wasn't exactly at its best in the seemingly incessant pouring rain (we did our best to reassure the Chinese, New Zealand and South African teams, that yes, the sun did shine here sometimes - not sure they believed us though) the kids had a really good time, and got to do some really excellent things including having high tea on the High Table at Christchurch college - where they filmed the dining-hall scenes for Harry Potter. In all we were in Oxford for five days, staying in Keble College, with the final on the Thursday in the Oxford Playhouse and a gala dinner in the town hall afterwards. Friday was a tour around London and our boys stayed on home-ground while everyone else went back to Oxford for the weekend.

The quiz, which is organised by a New Zealand professor, Wayne Mills, is brilliant. It promotes reading, friendship and healthy competition. If you're at a school that doesn't take part - get your librarian interested. The finals next year will be in South Africa - what more incentive do you need!

Past events

Just realised looking back that I didn't report back on the two events I trailed in my post a few weeks ago. Will be brief, just to say...

(1) Ilford. Rather than an audience of adults we had mostly under-5s, which is really pretty scary if it's not what you're prepared for. So after half an hour of valiantly shouting over all the crying, running around etc. we gave up and we (well, mainly Susan) resorted to 15 minutes of The Wheels on the Bus, Twinkle Twinkle, If You're Happy and You Know It, etc. Quite unexpected.

(2) St Albans. Nice dinner event organised by Jayne Truran of the St Albans CBG. I was speaking alongside Justin Somper, Meg Rosoff and Linzi Glass. My own talk was I think not good enough, in part as I was battling through a nasty headache the whole time, but by and large very glad to be there, and always nice to see Justin and Meg and Jayne and to meet lots of new people. Justin read a freshly written piece from the next Vampirates book, and Meg told an excellent story about a potato which I've been repeating at every opportunity.

D.

Catching up...

My, but we've been a little quiet recently... Don't know where all the time's gone...

(Sorry about that.)

Leonie has had a particularly busy few days which were GREAT but I'll leave it to her to tell you why... And Susan and I have been busy as ever too, though rather delinquent on the UBG front - we all met up last weekend at the annual garden party but managed not to talk about UBGs, children's books etc. *at all*. We're supposed to be finishing up work on the revised teen guide very soon and we're not even nearly there, so we'll have to sort ourselves out pretty sharpish...

Meantime - while we haven't been doing UBG work - I've been falling behind on my reading too. But have in odd free moments been continuing the treat I started last month of re-reading the Narnia series, many books of which I haven't read since I was a kid. In fact, apart from Lion... and Magician's Nephew this is my first time returning to any of them. And it's thrilling to discover I still think they're so good. I don't know why I expected to be troubled by them, but so far (five of seven) I've just been loving it all - the writing, the imagination, the whole world of it is tremendous. It's full of details I'd forgotten, there's humour and all sorts of other unexpected things (none of them to do with bothersome religious analogies, etc.). Pure pleasure.

Also just read The Prince of Mists, the first in a YA fantasy series by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, who wrote the vastly successful Shadow of the Wind (second most successful Spanish book of all time - first was Don Quixote) - it's really very good, reminding me at its best of Susan Cooper, though I haven't yet been able to work out why precisely... It's not available in English just yet, but the whole four-book series has been bought for Orion for publication from 2010, so something to look forward to. (Or to track down right now if you're a Spanish-language reader, of course.) Looking forward to the rest of the series. Am away all of August so packing lots of fun things like these in my suitcase. I wonder what else I should take...

Hmm...

Incidentally, I've been speaking lately to Jane Churchill - who runs the children's programme at the Cheltenham Festival - about this year's events; there's going to be one specifically UBG-related event which is going to be unusual and really fun, and many other exciting things besides. More details as soon as all confirmed...

D.

PS New Emily Gravett in two weeks! Hooray!