Once again, half term is here and as working parents both my wife and I are hugely, HUGELY grateful for our parents stepping in to look after Charlotte while she's off school.

In fact we'd be utterly lost without them, and we both know this. Children's books trumpet just how special grandparents are, loud and proud and we always make a beeline for books that celebrate the groovyness, wisdom and seemingly endless energy that grandparents have.

For example Shirley Hughes' sublime "Alfie and Grandma" - Alfie goes to stay with Grandma at her gorgeous cottage. They're wonderful friends and embark on lots of adventures together, rescuing lost pets and stomping through the mud. There's always a grand time to be had. Shirley's book reminds me of staying with my own Nan when I was a short-trousered tousled little fellah a bit like Alfie himself, so books like this are lovely to share with Charlotte - completely idyllic.

We also love "Grandma" by Jessica Shepherd. This is sometimes a bit of a tough read, we lost our own Nan to dementia a couple of years ago and there's still a huge hole in our lives left by this amazing and inspirational woman.

Jessica thoughtfully and sensitively handles the subject with aplomb, and in particular underlines that Grandma is still Grandma, and still well loved.

It really is a beautiful and heart-wrenching book and it's not exactly a huge surprise that it was one of our Book of the Week choices (click through the link for the full review).

Of course, Grandads also get a look in - and along similar lines to Jessica's book there's also the brilliant "Really and Truly" by Emilie Rivard and Anne-Claire Delisle...

The story of a much-loved Grandad, "Really and Truly" once again handles the subject of dementia in a thoughtful and actually quite a hopeful way.

As the story progresses, young Charlie watches his once imaginative and quite mischievous Grandad slide further into decline. But with patience and a lot of love, Charlie once again sees a bright spark of recognition in Grandad as he tells him the sort of tall tale that Grandad once loved to spin himself.

Our review (and the book itself) came along at the time we were watching both of Charlotte's great grandmas succumb to this horrible disease but like Charlie, there were golden moments when Great Grandma and Great Nan showed the same spark of life, of recognition and of delight when they were having a good day and could recognise us on visits.

Lifting the mood slightly, two books by Harriet Ziefert and Amanda Haley celebrate the sort of japes and adventures Charlotte will undoubtedly have been enjoying with her Grandad and Grandma this week...


"40 uses for a Grandpa" and "41 Uses for a Grandma" are brilliantly fun, and of course every parent will be all too familiar with what it's like when you pick the kids up from Grandma and Grandad's house and they're sugar-fuelled hyper-energetic bundles of manic energy and joy.

These books are hilarious and amusing and we love the sheer enjoyment of having a good giggle with them as we read through.

It's no surprise that so many children's books centre around grandparents and these are always the sort of stories that are great to snuggle down with when your little ones are missing their GGs.

Above all else, and if they do sneak onto the blog to see what we're up to, we're so lucky, so honoured, and so glad to have Grandma and Grandad, and Nanny & Dodo in Charlotte's life. She loves spending time with you and we know she'll be looking forward to the next holidays to roll around double-quick! Thank you so much for all you do!

Klonoa 2 - Lunatea's Veil (PS2) - 'Retro' gaming at its finest

Despite my best efforts, I've fallen back in love with videogames and Charlotte's also starting to find out what all those mysterious boxes tucked under the telly are really all about.

I've been 'in it' since the days of those 'blip blip bleep' sports games you'd hook up to your old black and white TV (yes folks, we weren't posh enough to have a colour set until way into the 1980s), then worked up through the lovely old 'wooden-veneered' Atari 2600 - through to the heady days of typing

10 Print "Hello Bogeyface"
20 goto 10

...on all those demo microcomputers in WH Smiths.

The interesting thing about seeing videogames through a fresh pair of eyes are that Charlotte doesn't automatically have any of that cynicism I've developed, nor any of that slight snobbery when it comes to older retro games. Whereas most modern videogame discussions get caught up with the ridiculous willy-measuring (pardon the phrase but that's pretty much what it is) about which console is the most powerful, and why PC gaming is still the 'elite' just because you can drive games to eye-numbingly ridiculous resolutions if you spend the equivalent amount of cash that a small family car might cost you, from Charlotte's point of view games need to do two things.

1) Be fun. Be an enjoyable way to spend an hour or two. Not feel like a waste of that time

2) Tell a story

The last bit is very interesting. I'm dutifully trying to introduce her to the classics before letting her loose on more modern fare (though she still loves Minecraft and would - if we let her - spend all day building crazy structures or mating animals or aimlessly wandering the blocky wastelands in search of goodies).

I picked out Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil recently - a game that by anyone's standards really defined that perfect era where platform games were brilliantly puzzling, taxing and achingly beautiful to behold as well as being wonderfully playable. Namco's weird dog-cat-thing was never better than in this game, but to Charlotte the most interesting parts were the story bits (the bits I, er, usually skip through very rapidly to get through to the actual gameplay with my usual hoary old gamer impatience).

She wanted to know what happened to Klonoa before he was washed up on the mysterious island he then has to work his way through. Why his two helpers chose to aid him in his quest. What he had to do, and why he had to do it.

"WHY!" - We all know how kids are once they get a questioning frame of mind going. Alas, I couldn't really offer much assistance other than to wonder whether other parents notice that their kids fall into one of two categories (oh humans, how we love categorisation!)

Those that play for the sake of playing, and those that want to be entertained with a story.

The reasons I've started to slip back into the whole kit and caboodle (in a slightly less obsessional way than when I was a complete game-head at the height of the 80s, 90s and 00s) is - admittedly - partly because of the completely different way Charlotte approaches stuff I now realise I've been taking for granted, and partly the lure of something new - Virtual Reality.

The Playstation Virtual Reality headset (PSVR) aims to bring VR to 'consumer level' gamers for the first time. VR isn't new, and it's been sitting with PC gamers for a while - wowed by what systems like Oculus Rift and Vive can do if attached to a PC gaming rig that could, if left alone for long enough, probably become sentient and destroy the planet.

I've used VR stuff at work before, mostly just to see big 3D extrapolations of CAD drawings or in limited use in research groups but beyond monkeying around with Google Cardboard a while back, this is the first time I've properly had a go at anything VR-flavoured for gaming.

The results - well, they were pretty jaw dropping to be honest. The PSVR is far from perfect, but the sense of immersion is eerie, entrancing and in some cases horrifying (remind me never EVER to play that Kitchen demo from Capcom when I'm in the house on my own. I'm not quite ready for PSVR horror titles just yet!)

Most of the games I found alluring weren't the usual shooty-bang or driving games, but games I know Charlotte will love when she's older. "Wayward Sky" is one such game...


It probably doesn't look 'all that' to most seasoned gamers, but having a story unfold that literally feels like you've got a tabletop in front of you, with animated figures walking around on it and that weird VR feeling that you're actually THERE really affected me in a way I hadn't expected.

I also loved Tumble VR:

Like a weird puzzle game hybrid of Jenga and block-stacking, it again makes you feel like you're sitting right in front of a table full of shapes, able to pick each one up and place it delicately to build a tall tower, or in other puzzles, to direct the path of a laser to its goal.

Of course, these aren't the games you'll hear lots about in any PSVR teardowns but they are games that (along with the PSVR itself) made a cynical old gamer into a true believer that there are still surprises left in store with videogames.

Now all that remains to be seen is whether children's games can evolve past being as dumb as a box of rocks (that's a subject for another day methinks). Could the videogames industry start to learn lessons from children's literature and stop talking down to kids, treating them as curious and clever little people in their own right? We shall see!

As Charlotte was taking part in her school's open day recently, we decided to have a sneak around the senior school to see what sort of facilities they had if we decided to keep her there until she was at school leaving age.

I've constantly found the school's focus on sporting achievements really frustrating. We get regular newsletters trumpeting pupil's sporting prowess, or the school winning an inter-school championship for various sports and activities, but as a bit of an artsy creative bod, never anything in the newsletter about pupils winning writing competitions, art competitions or having their artwork more widely recognised.

In junior school, art lessons are fairly limited to the usual 'heres a piece of paper, here's some paint, paint a tree or something' (at least that's the way it seems from the stuff Charlotte brings home). We love to draw and paint and create at home and we're all over any new books that have a creative slant.

It struck me as odd that art lessons are fairly 'basic' when kids are younger with their minds more receptive to a bit of gentle guidance on techniques, or even on pushing their artistic abilities into more esoteric forms.

Thankfully it looks like they do far more in senior school and in fact during our very brief tour we saw some incredible work, and some amazing projects taking place. My musing is why does this happen at a point when most kids are given the option to choose what they carry on studying - and often at the point when most kids will drop art subjects in favour of subjects that are perceived to be more marketable when it comes to choosing a career.

What encouragement is there for children who may want to turn their passion into a career and are creative and talented enough to take things further? Sure enough, the school seemed very proud of the work being displayed, but speaking to a trio of pupils who were demonstrating their phenomenally fantastic ceramic work, it felt like they'd already acknowledged that they wanted to carry on - but were under no illusion that it would be a tough path to tread compared to fixing on a career in banking or (god forbid) IT.

My wife (probably quite rightly) claims I'm biased in favour of the creative arts, because that's the study background I chose. I couldn't make a success of it, mostly because I was (am) rubbish and didn't actually get to take on any formal art training until late at school, and then later in life in a career break. By then it was probably too late to actually make a proper go of it but I sometimes wonder if things might've been different if there'd been a better path laid out in early years and then through middle to early senior school.

I guess the only advice I could offer the girls was that now, more than ever, the world needs creative arts and despite the government's best attempts to kill arts funding off stone dead, and discourage that sort of 'messing about' in schools, the more you try to stamp something creative down, the more people will want to take up the baton and make it work and make a career out of it. Go them!

More and more these days, parents are under huge pressure to perform. The expectations placed on the shoulders of new parents are almost as colossal as having to shoulder the bulk of the entire earth at times as you see the perfect parents depicted in your Waitrose magazine, hiring a quaint little yurt somewhere in the middle of nowhere for the entire summer, or being paraded on TV through any number of cheesy faux-reality shows.

There is at least one place that parents get a chance to shine, to perform, to rediscover a talent that they may have believed was lost for good.

Reading aloud.

Quietly ask yourself when was the last time you HAD to read aloud, that is read something out to someone else as clearly as possible. Maybe you have to do this regularly at work, or perhaps the last time you read anything out loud was at school. Most talented writers will tell you that they regularly read their own work out loud, purely to gauge how it sounds in their own voice rather than just their inner voice.

Reading out loud to a child isn't easy. In most things children demand perfection and Charlotte is no exception. She regularly (quite brutally) criticises my doodling and drawing. She's scathing about my Skating (the flipping CHEEK of it!) As for fashion sense? Probably not even a good idea to go there. But I think I won the tiniest victory when it came to reading out loud.

We're working our way through the books featured at the top of this article. Yes, good old Harry (bless him), juggling the weighty tome of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" isn't easy at the best of times, but to read a book like that aloud takes a bit more effort than you'd think. I remember breezing through the book when it was first published, around the time when Potter mania was at its peak and just about everywhere you looked, you would see people toting their own copy of that red and gold cover, desperate to find out what happened next in the wizarding world. For what it's worth, the big thick book could've done with being a good few chapters shorter (christ, doesn't it DRAG at the beginning) but once the boy wizard is back at Hogwarts it's full steam ahead.

Finding my reading voice for the Harry Potter books has been a challenge. When Charlotte's diet solely consisted of picture books, with a smattering of shorter chapter stuff if she wanted it, it was easy to dip into a book, rattle it out a few times gaining more and more practice each time, and perfect each reading turning it almost into a sweet little performance piece (I still say that this is probably the only reason I wasn't booed horribly off the 'stage' when Charlotte and I read a selection of our favourite books out loud at Mostly Books once).

With the bigger thicker stuff, you more or less get one chance to find your rhythm and pace, and to find the right voice for the narrative, and if you're really feeling flashy, for the various characters that crop up in the story.

I've been told off for reading Hermione as a tad too prissy and posh, I've been pilloried for reading Ron as a sort of lackadaisical mumbler and I've been really given grief for reading Harry as a slightly moody sulky teen (which, by the time you get into "The Order of the Phoenix", you really do see more and more from his character).

Some people do not find reading aloud easy. I'm one of them, and I am naturally not the world's clearest speaker. Even when I'm reading aloud in the confines of our own home, to my beloved daughter, I still feel like everyone else in the world can hear and can judge.

Surprisingly though, it is one of those 'tasks' that comes with being a parent that is a joyful one, and one that reaps its own rewards when an exciting chapter drives your reading on and imbues you with newfound enthusiasm and energy for something that not nearly enough people get to do in the normal course of their lives.

Reading out loud is great, do it more. Win at it but also readily accept that it really isn't as easy as it sounds.

As Father's Day approaches at the speed of light, and once again many dads cringe inwardly at the thought of a novelty mug or a pair of socks, a new study has been published laying into UK dads as spending the least amount of time on shared childcare compared to any other country in the developed world (or at least the 15 countries that featured in the study).

The Independent covered the story with as non-biased a headline as you're ever going to read, and the report stated that UK dads spend just 29 minutes of time with their children for every hour their partners put in (naturally the report didn't cover same-sex marriages but when do they ever!)

Apparently dads fare slightly better on the domestic chores stakes, where we come 5th out of 22 countries surveyed as part of the Fatherhood Institute's "FIFI" (Fairness in Families Index) study. So what are devoted dads to make of these figures?

Sadly it still feels like there's no argument to be made here. Dads are, time and again, seen as the sleeping (or snoozing in front of the telly) partners in a relationship when it comes to childcare and there are a wealth of reasons (not excuses, reasons) for this. Some children are decidedly mum-centric, and are excessively demanding of their mums for one reason or another (In Charlotte's case, it's probably because mum is the 'Sensible' one and dad is a complete gonk most of the time, heart of gold or no).

We have always struggled to maintain a fair balance in our childcare duties and when Charlotte was very small, we split babycare duties as equally as it's possible to split them (obviously there's not much you can do as a dad when it comes to feeding time and your nipples don't work but boy-howdy I could change nappies at the speed of a formula 1 pit-stop by the time Charlotte was old enough to begin potty training).

An extreme example but if there's one change any parent can make for the better, it's to switch their bloody phone off during 'child time' - It drives me MAD seeing parents doing this.

Even now we take it in turns for bedtime duties, alternating days. At 8 years old Charlotte can do most of the things she needs to do before bed but always needs some parental supervision to make sure teeth are brushed, faces are washed and of course there's no way on this earth we'd miss out on bedtime storytime and of course we both kiss / cuddle her goodnight. So where does the disparity in time actually come from? In our case I'd probably estimate that it's closer to 45 minutes than 29 and that's with a supreme effort on my part to ensure that I do as much as I can. I only get to pick Charlotte up from school once a week rather than twice, I don't directly drop her off in the mornings but during our tiny amounts of spare time I'd say I just about manage to catch up (of course the blog doesn't write itself so there's a lot of book time). There are just those moments when only mum will do. This doesn't mean that Charlotte is missing out at all, so the report seems to try and paint a rather black and white picture of a problem that in most cases just doesn't exist through some lack of attention or bone idleness.

The phone thing though. That is the one area where just about any modern parent could make a vast improvement. Each and every time we go anywhere, whether it's to the local sports centre or for a day out I lose count of the amount of parents (not just dads, both parents) who stare vacantly at their phone screen while their kids are merrily getting up to all sorts mostly unchecked or with a cursory and lax whiny "Tommy, stop dipping your little brother in that vat of sulphuric acid" before their attention is diverted straight back to that vastly important social media update about some mate's new barbecue or pair of shoes.

I wonder if the Fatherhood Institute has ever considered conducting a study of the difference in parental attention in families who switch off the phone as soon as they get home, and leave it switched off (I now do this as a matter of course because I realised just how bloody RUDE it actually is to be sitting there using your phone while your child is busying themselves doing their homework or in those rare moments actually playing and being a child).

It is an interesting article but as I said at the top of this blog post, it is extremely difficult not to see that there are improvements to be made. So this father's day when your child presents you with a card they've poured their heart and soul into drawing for you, and lovingly bestows upon you a gift they've chosen themselves, make the day theirs rather than yours and reap the rewards of spending a day of quality time with your child (and FFS SWITCH OFF THE DAMNED PHONE!!!)

When I'd stopped laughing, and wiped the tears from my eyes after reading Simon Cowell's opinion on children's books (see the Bookseller article) I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone with that big an ego. Someone who has such an unshakeable sense of their own worth that they think they can turn their hand to anything, and be a roaring success at it.

Obviously, Mr Cowell's success in the music industry is undeniable. From humble beginnings as a sort of weird synth-playing dog act, he's moved up in the world and now holds the music industry in an iron grip.

I can safely say that I've never actually contributed to Cowell's net worth myself, but zillions have, and each time a new series of X-Factor or Britain's Got Talent starts up, or whatever the US equivalents are, there's a huge amount of press and it feels like the whole country gets wrapped up in it.

Can he really muscle into the children's book market?

Of course he flipping can't. Because Simon Cowell has made the mistake so many other celebrity authors (or would-be authors) have made.

He's started out with the assumption that writing for children is easy. The poor, deluded fool.

What's worse, he's made the sweeping generalisation about children's books that will prove to be his undoing. He describes them as "Boring" which is his first mistake. That smacks of a person who obviously has not read nearly enough children's books.

At last count, Charlotte and I have read (at least) 2500 books that we've written up for review. We've read countless more that haven't found their way onto the blog. We've seen books of every shape and size, books that are beautifully subtle in the delivery of their stories and their messages. Books that are darkly tinged and live on in the memory. rightfully becoming classics. Books that cause such an outpouring of love and affection that collectively, booky folk are in total synchronisation with their opinions on them and when they meet in person, they almost hug each other with glee at the mere mention of them.

Can you honestly tell me, with a straight face, that Mr Cowell could write an animal book that impressive straight out of the gate?

I couldn't. Nor could I write a book that instantly impressive either, because I'm under no illusions about what it takes to create something that kids will take to their heart, read with relish, and perhaps even obsess over a bit.

Merely being famous does not guarantee that the balance of sale will be met purely by association. I get the feeling that Cowell has set himself up for a fall before he's even put pen to paper. Savaging a genre that people openly love and write enthusiastically about has to be one of the stupidest moves you could make if you want people to approach your work without an initial bias against it.

When it arrives, when it finally makes it through a sympathetic editor, when an illustrator takes on the job of trying to imagine Simon's book world and visualise it (assuming - hah - that the idiot really doesn't think he can do the illustrations himself because kids have such a low expectation when it comes to the pictures in their books), when it's finally published I'd really love to read it and try to write about it without wanting to completely tear it apart. It might miraculously be good (I remember the low expectations I had about Russell Brand's first children's book, which actually wasn't atrocious and Brand was VERY lucky to land the awesome Chris Riddell as illustrator).

If it is good, I'll probably be strangely upset because it will just prove something I already believe. People like Simon Cowell just seem to get away with being that monstrously egotistical AND successful whereas folk who quietly beaver away writing, drawing, trying their very best to get a book out there and read, and published, often fall at the first hurdle. There really is no justice is there.

In this week's editorial, I've received some divine inspiration from the fabulous @chaletfan (Daisy Johnson) who has come up trumps again with a fabulous blog about why she doesn't review certain books).

We're voracious consumers of books, but as detailed in our review submission guidelines, there are books we cannot (and will not) touch.

Without sounding sniffy or mean, we just haven't got the time or the capacity to read or review self-published books any more and this inevitably leads to emails that basically ignore that polite guideline and start off with:

"I love your blog and your reviews, and I've read your review submission policy BUT YOU WILL LOVE MY BOOK, HONESTLY!"

Which, of course, get read - but also very quickly get deleted. I know, it's frustrating when you email someone and they don't reply. Believe me, we've been there.

It's not just self published stuff though. Like Daisy there are times when we could be sorely tempted to review something that we both thought sucked. Was rubbish. Appalling. We could launch a diatribe on the book being the core of what's wrong with the children's publishing industry, how it's blatantly cashing in on a current trend or meme, how it's basically a complete rejig of a traditional story that's been done and done and done to death but...quite honestly, we're not nasty people. Neither Charlotte nor I are the sort of person who would take someone else's work and give it a brutally honest and damning review. just for the sake of getting some kicks out of upsetting someone who has put a lot of effort into a creative piece of work.

What would be the point?

So this week's editorial is a purely tongue-in-cheek list of things we won't touch - ten reasons why we've passed books up for review (which is, I should add, an infrequent occurrence but still worthy of a brain-fart of an article all the same).

1) Age inappropriate content. 

Middle graders are (officially) awkward, there's no bones about it. They're technically too old and sniffy for picture books (or so Charlotte tells me, despite still loving them a lot) and they're too young for YA. But we've reached a point where eye-rolling and sighing greets any book that's even vaguely babyish. So rather than write something along the lines of "Charlotte absolutely hated this because she's so over the pink fluffy bunny running errands for huggy mummy" it's just easier to skip to the end, give the book an honourable mention (if any mention at all) and leave it at that. You may notice that with some recent picture book reviews we've opted for a brief synopsis of the book with some details instead.

2) You used this font on your cover: 

 Oh god. Why. WHY!! I mean Comic Sans is bad, everyone knows that but the Chalkdust font is a terrible font. It's the bird-poo-sandwich of fonts. It's the font that thumbs its nose at all that is right and good in graphic design. Really, just don't use it.

(Ironically we used that font when ReadItDaddy first started, purely because it was one of the only 'fancy' fonts installed on my home machine at the time. I have flayed all the skin off my fingers in penance but as soon as I spot this on a cover, I personally run a mile).

3) Your "Hilarious laugh-out loud" comedy book isn't funny.

In no way at all. It's like that bit in the episode of "One Foot in the Grave" where Victor is writing a comedy screenplay, cackling away to himself about his comedic genius then shows his work to his wife Margaret who remains stony faced while reading it, then proclaims it to be the worst thing she's ever read. Yup, that. So we can't review something that's intended to be funny if we have to fake it, sorry!

4) Cover art and design made us retch. 

The cover is your chance to sell your book. It doesn't matter if it's a picture book, non fiction book, chapter book, middle grade page-turner. The cover can make or break a book at that most important point of sale where folk are browsing through a book store and spot something that catches their eye so even if your book isn't illustration heavy, please please please hire a decent illustrator (and there are so, so many out there) to make the cover throb with creative genius!

5) Too many farts, too much puke, way too much weeing, and an inordinate amount of pooping.

I know we've said this before many many times but it's like there's an entire sub-genre of children's books that belongs under the category of "I laughed when I farted / pooped this morning, so I'm sure your kids will laugh when my central character poops or farts!"

Kids have sophisticated levels of humour that go way beyond merely finding someone trumping out a small green cloud amusing on any level (actually, that is pretty funny at times. I didn't say that though, OK?)

 Now, if you can write something where the central character parps, poots or pees in a manner that is intrinsic to the central plot and puts in a few twists (like they somehow poop a rainbow) that might be an original approach that would make us take a second look. Basically though if your aim is to gross us out, you'll have to try really really hard. We've just about seen it all in kids books and that stuff just doesn't work on us any more.

6) Author profile pic that looks like something from "True Life Murderers" or some other late-night freeview scrub-channel proggy.

Hey we're not the prettiest people in the world (well OK Charlotte might be but I'm like a wrinkly cross between Phil Mitchell and a Baked Bean), by no means but we do at least try and have a profile pic that doesn't make us look like we want to feast on your entrails or tie your entire family up before torching your house because you wouldn't read our children's books. Potentially if you send us a review request, and we google around and the only photo of you that we can find looks like this...


...we'll probably pass on giving you our home address, kthanks. Smile. Laugh. Look like you're happy to be doing what you're doing. But if we look in your eyes and see a field of skulls, we're moving on.

7) It's for a good cause (but it's still a really awful book).

This is a very hard one to describe and it's also a bit of a taboo subject when it comes to reviews. Sometimes a book has a golden heart of intention that is admirable and important but in a few cases the book has still been pretty terrible. So you, as a reviewer, are faced with a bit of a quandary. Do you give an honest opinion of the book, knowing that it could potentially put off people who would buy it, contributing to a charity and benefitting countless others?

Or do you suck in that gut, suck up that opinion and write a gushing piece of praise despite internally seething about the book being sucky?

Also, do you renege on your review policy when someone comes to you with a touching and truly heartbreaking tale of a book they've written themselves to try and make a bit of money for a good cause that's personal to them and a bit of coverage on your blog would help put the word out?

Not easy really. In the very few cases where we've been faced with this decision we've opted to pass but still feel a bit crappy about that. Sorry.

8) Love the author, loathe this particular bit of work. 

Another tricky one. We've been very lucky to have met (both virtually and in the real world) some truly wonderful and talented book folk. We develop a deep love of their work, and get on like a house on fire with them on Twitter / Facebook or even in the flesh. Then a book comes out that feels like it's been pushed out to cash in on other books' glories. Pop quiz hotshot, what do you do?

See, this is slightly different to the previous quandary because if you think you get on well enough with the person you could be truly honest and say "Look, you KNOW I love your work. You KNOW I love you to bits but that last book? Man, that was a stinker! What's occuring?"

It's probably not a great idea though but hey, if you're ever 'in' like that with a creative, more power to your elbow if you feel you've got the moxie enough to tell them. The world's a critic after all and opinions are like bottoms - everyone's got one but there's not always a necessity to use yours for talking out of.

9) You're creeping me out on Facebook / Twitter.

Sometimes folk will use guerrilla tactics on your social media presences to get under your radar and make their presence known to you. You are the mouse. They are the cheese. They keep favouriting your tweets, complimenting you on your witty banter or your hilarious sharing of kitten videos. They even like your artwork (poor, delusional fools!) Before you know it you've friended them or followed them and the very next thing you get via your message / direct message stream is:

"HEYTHEREHOWYOUDOINISELFPUBLISHEDTHISBRILLIANTBOOKABOUTALITTLEBUNNYWHOGOESONANERRANDFORTHEIRMUMWITHHILARIOUSCONSEQUENCESIDREWALLTHEILLUSTRATIONSMYSELFINCRAYONANDIGOTATATTOOOFYOUBASEDONYOURPROFILEPICTUREONYOURBLOGANDIWANTTOLOVEYOUANDMARRYYOUANDWECANHAVEABABYANDCALLHIMDAVROSORKORKYPLEASEREVIEWMYBOOKANDTELLMEWHEREYOULIVESOICANPARKMYCAROUTSIDEYOURHOUSEANDWATCHYOUOPENYOURMAILPLEASETHANKSBYELOVEYOU"

Alright, that's a bit of an extreme example but harsh cynical old reviewers know that unwarranted interest in your comings and goings via social media are sometimes more than a bit creepy. I love being followed, I love being friended but I've got to get SOME idea of what you're about before I do that. Also, refer to Item 6 above. If that's your facebook or twitter profile pic, I would rather follow Satan into the very jaws of hell wearing petrol soaked Y fronts than follow you back. Or if you dress up as a clown. Sorry.

10) I honestly don't think I could do your book justice in so few available lines of text. 

We once didn't review a book because it stank of fish (see Chaletfan's blog we linked to in the first paragraph and our comment underneath).

We once didn't review a book because it came accompanied by a packet of ham (we're vegetarians and still aren't quite sure what piece of PR genius led to a book being promoted by sending along bits of dead pig as a promotional gimmick).

Once though, and only once we didn't review a book because no matter how we gushed about it, praised it, drank it up thoroughly, read it, re-read it, and truly became completely head over heels in love with it, we couldn't put together a decent review for it. It was, in our mind, a book of the lifetime let alone a book of the week. It was like that sequence in "Contact" where Ellie goes through the wormhole and mumbles "Should've sent a poet - So beautiful!" and left it at that.

It still burns me now that I couldn't write it up in an adequate enough way and I still can't. I fleshed out a review in Word (probably after umpteen attempts) and it ended up being nearly 5000 words long. No matter what I did, I couldn't reduce the review down to blog-acceptable word counts without it sounding trite. I couldn't express my love for that book nor Charlotte's and subsequently when we read other reviews of the book in newspapers and other blogs, it almost felt like others had similar struggles, and didn't seem to encapsulate what made the book truly phenomenal either.

The book was shunned by just about every award going that year. I never see that book cropping up in "All Time Top 100 Children's Books of the last 100 years". It sits on the shelves at home, its cover looking a bit battered and worse for wear because we've pulled it out and read it so many times to the point where the poor thing is a physical wreck.

So perhaps, just perhaps, it's possible that your book is just too damned good for us mere mortals to write about ourselves. Consider that if your book mysteriously gets missed from our reviews. Consider that.

(AND NO, WE'RE NOT GOING TO TELL YOU WHAT IT IS SO PLEASE DON'T MESSAGE OR EMAIL TO ASK!)

Once again, severe cuts to public services have hit the headlines and once again we find ourselves shaking our heads in disbelief that library services are again in the firing line, inevitably and eventually leading to closures where libraries have already been squeezed to death.

Several organisations (such as http://www.librarycampaign.com and http://www.voicesforthelibrary.org.uk) have been actively campaigning to save our libraries from further cuts, and to try and make successive governments understand the importance of libraries and why - as the headline quote (not mine alas) states - cutting libraries in a recession is like cutting health services in a plague.

Most booky folk will already know that your children can become members of your local library as soon as they're born, and take away armfuls of lovely, lovely books. Libraries are vital for those on a low income who wouldn't have access to a wide variety of reading material in any other way.

Discovering whole new worlds through books (fiction or non fiction) is most definitely a key part of a  child's development and one of the best investments in terms of time that you as a parent can make.

When you read headlines about the constant testing and pushing that children are subjected to in the name of education, you have to wonder how education ministers systematically fail to make the link between reading (and learning) for pleasure and a child's educational development.

Without meaning to turn this into one long political rant, the current government seems to be worse than others at promoting the idea that education should become an extremely 'classist' and divisive area through the systematic degradation of 'learning for all' in favour of 'learning for those who can afford it'.

Because of this, libraries are like a lifeline when folk can't afford their own books, and won't get that vital first step up the ladder of a (hopefully) lifelong desire to further their knowledge.

Children are curious, children aren't just little memory banks waiting to have information stuffed into them by force to be retrieved through soulless testing at a later date. In my opinion, there's absolutely no point whatsoever in treating kids like that, certainly not at the age they're subjected to it currently.

We use our library to discover books we might have missed, books we wouldn't normally see and a whole host of non-fiction books that cover such a hugely wide range of diverse subjects that we couldn't possibly ever exhaust them. Until, that is, the fateful day that our own library buckles under the intense pressure of just trying to keep their heads above water and ends up the latest victim of cuts. Abingdon Library was (and still is) key to the way Charlotte's love of reading was nurtured, and of course key to how this blog came into being. Without it, we would have still bought books but being granted that wider choice and being able to choose armfuls really got Charlotte's reading journey off to a fantastic start.

There's a chilling passage in John Christopher's "The Guardians" where Rob Randall makes his way into the only library left in his home town. A dank, dusty and long forgotten building, books long fallen out of fashion. Rob goes to the library to borrow books to escape the drudgery of "The Conurb" - the vast cityscape he lives in. Escaping to worlds created by Alexander Dumas and Jules Verne, Rob's books become a symbol in the story on how we need that vital escapism as well as the opportunity to sate our thirst for knowledge. Will all libraries end up like the neglected building in that story? Not if we shout loud enough and add our voice to the campaigns.

Please take a moment to visit some of the links in this article and below, and please do comment and add your own library campaign links:

Library campaigns on 38 Degrees

Save Our Libraries tags on Twitter

Public Library Campaigns

This week's editorial is actually a sneaky excuse to re-review a book that was a Book of the Week winner way back in 2012.

The reasons we wanted to trumpet about this book all over again are numerous but there's one very important reason why even now, some four years on and with Charlotte rapidly moving on from picture books and moving towards more independent reading on her own, we just cannot get enough of Rebecca Patterson's sublime "My Big Shouting Day".

It is, without a doubt, the greatest children's book in the world to read out loud.

Loud being the operative word here, because Rebecca's acute observations of toddler behaviour are brutally spot on. Bella, the little girl in this story, is like a mad ogre on the rampage. Waking up one morning and definitely getting out of bed the wrong side, Bella proceeds to spend the entire day like a seething ball of rage.

Bella is having what we parents often politely describe as "A mare of a day"

Nothing is right for Bella, everything is wrong. Her food is wrong. Her little baby brother's seemingly innocent behaviour is wrong. Shoes are wrong. Going shopping? WRONG! Bella makes no bones about telling the entire world AS LOUDLY AS POSSIBLE just how wrong everything is.

There are so many genius observations in this that you almost want to cuddle the book and cuddle Rebecca for recognising all the things that parents put up with when their toddlers are on the rampage. Mum in the story somehow (mostly) remains an ocean of calm, quietly and patiently dealing with Bella's behaviour. Bob (probably the most adorable younger sibling in children's picture book history) seems completely bemused by Bella's behaviour, an innocent bystander wondering just what all the fuss is about.

Other peripheral characters are also rather amusingly drawn into the story as Bella's boiling point is swiftly reached and we get to one of the greatest spreads in the book...

This is the point where grandparents usually make a helpful comment like "Ooh, someone's tired!" - NO KIDDING!

I love reading books out loud to Charlotte, and we read this one an awful lot. I just can't help it - as a piece of performance art, stepping into Bella's shoes (assuming you can find them after she's thrown them off in disgust) is cathartic and soothing. Getting just the right balance of shoutiness and anger into your reading is ridiculous fun, and of course it helps serve as a bit of a guilt trip for your children if they suddenly recognise that at times, they are Bella and they have big shouting days of their own (Charlotte does virtually every saturday morning at the merest mention of going out for the day, or at any time piano practice or maths homework is mentioned).

Rebecca followed up "My Big Shouting Day" with another book featuring Bella ("My Busy Being Bella Day") and has written many other children's books that are brilliant and well observed. But for us, "My Big Shouting Day" is that perfect example of a children's book that just works on so many levels that you just can't help - well - shouting about it!

"My Big Shouting Day" by Rebecca Patterson is published by Jonathan Cape Picture Books. 

This week's editorial has been inspired by awesome Zoe over at Playing By The Book - a book blog that sets the bar higher than high for the rest of us lowly blogger folk to follow.

Zoe has put together an awesome list of tips on how to become a successful book blogger for Quarto Kids, so stop by that post and have a read...!

Cheekily I thought I'd follow up Zoe's post with a few musings and observations of my own. We've been doing this for 6 years so perhaps some of our collected wisdom might help you get a great start in book blogging too.




1) Libraries are awesome - use them! 

The number one tip I'd give anyone thinking about starting a book blog of any kind, whether for kids, adults, MG or YA, is to get your butt down to your local library and make use of their generous loans. Most libraries will let you borrow ARMFULS of childrens books at a time. This is how we started, and we still dip into our local library from time to time to seek out books that are out of print, books that fall outside our catchment zone from generous publishers sending us awesome stuff to review, and of course there's no better place to hunt down brilliant non fiction than a library, is there?

2) Get the kids involved otherwise what's the point?

Book bloggers are fantastic folk who give up their own spare time to discuss books, in some cases rate them, and in the majority of cases give some useful feedback straight from the mouths of the ones who really matter when it comes to children's books - their kids! The last one is vitally important really, because there's no better feedback for an author or illustrator than hearing direct from their target audience that a book is ace (or poo).

Children give great and quite often brutally honest opinions and you know if you get a firm thumbs up from them, you are definitely on the right track. It doesn't take much effort to make some mental notes when you're reading books to them, with them or getting some feedback from them on what they're reading independently - use that in your posts and they'll rock!

3) Be aware of what you are, and don't let it go to your head. 

Congratulations! You are now a bona fide book blogger. You are one of several million individuals on the planet who use their spare time to write about books, but always be aware of what you are. Rocking up to a book launch or festival, swanning in with your entourage and expecting everyone to instantly know you and know of your blog is (from an outsider's viewpoint) quite amusing to watch. By all means if you have the chance to introduce yourself to an author or illustrator, do so with a bit of humility and if possible let them lead the conversation a bit. If they haven't heard of your blog or haven't seen your 5 star review of their latest work, don't be offended because the chances are that seldom few authors will ever see what you write. Likewise, don't make a pest of yourself on social media - it's a very quick way to getting blocked by that person if you think tweeting every single review directly at them is going to win them over.

4) See other book bloggers as friends as colleagues, not as "The Competition"

Everyone - and I do mean everyone - has a different approach to book blogging. Some people have tons of time to devote to beautifully crafted and lengthy missives with full illustrations and photographs of the books they cover. Some (like us) keep things punchy and direct (mostly because this isn't anywhere near a 'day job' and never will be!)

Ultimately though there's room for everyone and all the myriad different approaches they take. Visiting other people's blogs, making comments, joining in with blogging communities and networking with other book bloggers is actually a huge part of the 'reward' and you will meet some truly wonderful folk through book blogging. So never try to see it as a race to see who can get content out first, who can nab an author exclusive or who can attain the most books without their house bursting apart. You'll definitely earn a lot more respect from your readers and fellow bloggers.

5) Take time off

We're our own worst enemies when it comes to this one but now and again you do need to step back and just enjoy books for the sake of enjoying them. There's nothing worse than sitting there in a panic about a review schedule and a whole stack of unread and unreviewed books. Take time to enjoy what you and your children read and for goodness sake, don't start getting stressed about the things you haven't done - be proud of what you have done instead!

6) Don't be afraid to reinvent your blog in tune with the way your children's reading tastes change as they grow up

Some bloggers have a distinctive blogging 'voice' which fits with the type of books they review but there's definitely nothing wrong with changing that voice from time to time. It's always a good idea to give your blog a spring clean, to freshen things up and (if possible) to hire an awesome illustrator to come up with new headers and logos to really spruce things up. Likewise it's always a good idea to accurately reflect your own children's reading tastes and how they change - particularly if you want to ensure your blog is shouting from the rooftops in their voices rather than yours.

7) Last but by no means least - Love what you do and if you don't, stop doing it!

Seems like the most no-brainer advice in the world but if your children no longer want to contribute to your blog, and you find it all a bit of a drag, stop doing it. There's nothing worse than reading a blog that smacks of someone merely copying and pasting press releases into a post, lazily slapping an image on it and calling it a day. People will visit a book blog for advice, for your opinion and sometimes (and again this is something lost on a lot of bloggers) to ultimately be entertained by what you write. Use your mouthpiece effectively but if you find the whole thing a chore, that'll show up in your writing and switch people off.

There you go - 7 more nuggets of useful info if you're considering starting up your book blog. We'd love to hear from anyone just starting out so do drop us a comment if you can!

This week's editorial has been inspired by a few things and dips back into a subject that STILL bakes the hell out of my spuds every time it crops up.

Age ratings for books.

Yes, I know, by now you're probably inwardly groaning and expecting some long drawn out rant about compartmentalisation and pigeonholing but stay put, there is a point to this ramble and it might even help other parents make the right decisions about what they let their kids read.

The first thing that inspired this post was seeing a girl probably about 3-4 years older than Charlotte reading Andy Weir's excellent book "The Martian". Obviously with the movie just hitting DVD / Blu Ray, it may have been that this girl had seen the movie and wanted to fill in the gaps by reading the book. The movie carries a 12 rating, probably quite rightly so because of some distinctly icky bits early on when Mark Watney is coping with a particularly nasty injury - and later in the movie when Mark uses some pretty colourful language (mostly edited but best to err on the side of caution).

It got me thinking. My girl loves space, she loves reading about and seeing anything to do with Space and NASA and she's also beginning to develop a real love of science fiction. In some ways, "The Martian" would be as utterly enthralling and absorbing to her as it is to me - and yet I couldn't let her near it at the moment purely because the novel also features the colourful language and some pretty gnarly descriptions of Watney's day to day life.

Most of all there's the concept that - unless you're a big poophead of a spoiler and give away the ending to your child - they won't know Watney's fate (and let's face it, even if you DO know what happens in the end, you're going to want to experience the highs and lows of this fantastic story yourself). Dealing with death is still seen as something we should shield children from as much as possible, probably quite rightly so but it would have made one hell of a talking point in this particular case.

So there it will sit on the shelf (in both book and movie form) until she's 'old enough' - whenever that is.

The second part of what inspired this blog post was something I should probably get a bit of a rap across the knuckles for and again goes into 'age rating' territory. Remember Gilbert Sheldon's most awesome moggy creation "Fat Freddy's Cat"? Stupidly I have a copy of the anthology collection kicking around at home. To all intents and purposes it looks like a nice colourful comic collection, and alas Madame C got hold of it and read right through. The bit that my wife took objection to was actually a strip about Freddy taking the cat to a 'therapist' who had decided that the best way to cure the cat's behavioural difficulties would be a good solid jolt of electricity!

Bear in mind that the strips are A) designed to be fantastical, hilarious and B) they're very much from an era when political correctness was a hitherto unknown phenomenon. I (quite rightly) got verbally chastised when Charlotte gleefully relayed this funny story to her mum and so another book gets put well and truly out of reach until...well she's old enough.

By no means is this a justification but it set me thinking back to being 8 years old and trying to remember the sort of things I'd read by then. I was an avid consumer of the newspaper - and if there's one thing that plays on the mind more than anything else, it's the harrowing and horrible stuff happening in the real actual world, sometimes right on your doorstep.

I also used to sneak a lot of books out of my relatives' bookcases. By 8 I'd read books by Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov but I'd also read books by James Herbert, Clive Barker and Stephen King. I also used to soak up any reading material about the paranormal or about mysterious phenomenon such as UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts etc (in fact on the latter subject, the old Lion Methuen ghost collections were terrifying and actually designed for kids back in the 70s. I couldn't get enough of them!)

With my responsible parent head on, I'd hate for Charlotte to read or see anything age inappropriate. Sometimes it's extremely difficult to make that judgement call and it's definitely not a call to make on the basis of my own childhood (or anyone else's for that matter). My wife errs on the side of caution, with an almost 'Victorian' approach to what's acceptable so she quite rightly takes a very firm line on what Charlotte is exposed to (Not sure why "Mamma Mia" is largely ignored though - a happy singalong movie about mystery fatherhood with some fairly racy content in places, well racy by 8 year old standards anyway).

Back on point, age ratings still feel like something that you as a parent should individually assess and evaluate (and that puts a lot of faith and trust in your judgement - no small thing) so whenever the subject comes up it still jars that the insinuation is being made that you need a rubber stamped age rating on your reading or viewing material because without it, you could bring the author, the illustrator, the movie makers or the publisher to court and sue their rotten butts off (is that really the only reason we ever see a whiff of this stuff in the first place?)

Alright, we're almost there - I did warn you this might go on a bit. Here's another tangent to veer off on. What the heck is wrong with 8 year olds? No no, I don't mean the kids themselves, why are 8 year olds largely ignored as a whole age group when you look at the way children's books are broken up into age categories. You have birth to 3, 3 to 5, 5 to 7, 9-12 and from there onto YA.

See the gap? Where do 8 year olds fit in? Too old for picture books, seen as too young for middle grade? I see this time and again in book listings and publisher catalogues and it baffles the heck out of me.

Don't get me wrong! It was nice to be asked!

A weird thing happened this week when a lovely PR person wanted to get in touch by phone to arrange an appearance on BBC's "The One Show".

Let that sentence trickle down into your visual imagination for a second if you will...

A portly potato-headed mumbling scruffbag of a dad sitting on a very uncomfortable-looking sofa with Matt Baker and er...wotsherface on live TV in front of, oh, dozens of viewers.

I've known sheer terror. I've been in a car crash and experienced what it's like to be trapped in a glorified tin box rolling along an ice-covered road, tumbling over and over like a demented arctic roll before landing - completely wrecked - on its wheels (I only remember one thing about the aftermath of the crash. Quietly turning off the ignition and stepping out of the wreck, somehow miraculously escaping with a scratch on one ear and a bitten tongue).

The noise is one of the most terrifying aspects of a car crash as well as the anticipation of injury or death, and I heard that noise again as I read the short paragraph and pictured the scene if A) I was crazy enough to do this and B) more practically, if I had TIME to do this. Thankfully B meant A never really spun up its motors and so I politely declined.

The lovely PR person persisted, offering an interview on Radio Oxford to talk about books. Now, this is slightly closer to being a possibility but again potato-headed mumbling scruffbag dad (with the perfect face for radio, I think even my mum would agree) would have to somehow turn wildly enthusiastic "talking ten to the dozen" speech into something coherent that explains to the listeners just why we love books so much that we can't stop writing about them, and why reading with your children (even at Charlotte's age) is vitally important.

When writing about books, I can stop and think about the point I'm trying to make. Blogging offers a comfortable buffer between the idle thought processes of a forty-something bird brain and the imparting of experience or (meagre) knowledge about the subject at hand.

It also goes without saying that this isn't a one-man show either. Doing any sort of interview or press without Charlotte would feel a bit of a cheat, because this blog comes from her as much as it does from me. Her reaction to books, her choices for book of the week, her changing tastes and views on what we see and most importantly her view on why she loves books so much and has come to think of reading as a pleasurable pursuit rather than a chore.

I wonder if it's even at all possible to distil and summarise why reading with your children is important, without sounding like some twee smug middle-class idiot.

It seems so obvious to me, that I can't even begin to put myself in the mindset of someone who doesn't feel it's important and doesn't understand why it's important. I just can't do it.

I don't think I know anyone who could fail to grasp the link between children who are engaged in reading for pleasure from an early age, and a rapid development in their language skills, comprehension or knowledge of the world around them, not to mention having one of the coolest ways to spend a few hours that doesn't involve mindlessly grinding through some poxy free-to-play tablet game or getting your brain sucked out of your ear by some worthless slice of televisual entertainment.

How could I possibly sit in front of anyone (whether it's a TV audience, a radio audience and presenter or you standing in front of me) and put it any better than that in mumble-o-speak? I doubt I could. But heck, it was very nice to be asked.

Our last Editorial of the year, and it's on a subject that really has (quite rightly) been in the spotlight for most of 2015, mostly thanks to a fantastic campaign by Sarah McIntyre (Pictures Mean Business) to ensure that artists get equal billing on picture book covers and other printed items featuring their work.

We've covered this a few times on the blog but this blah is more about the often tricky prospect of being paid once you've come up with a fantastic piece of art that someone's willing to use, but not always so willing to front up some cash for.

I'm just an amateur scribbler but through work I've had a few opportunities to stretch my meagre talents and come up with graphics or illustrations for various projects. These are always things I'd need to work on outside of normal working hours in my own spare time and recently I took on a couple of jobs like this to design a new logo and some branding elements for an ex-colleague.

The brief was (predictably) vague and yet the 'customer' (who right up front admitted absolutely no knowledge of how art is taken from a concept to a finished design) had their own ideas of what they wanted to present to the folk who would end up using the logo and items on their website, in their printed materials and for their communications.

I've only completed a couple of jobs like this before and had done my research into what were acceptable charges for the amount of work, the variations in design and branding that would be required for a multi-use scenario, and of course the sticky legal issues around copyright and re-use.

As soon as the subject of payment was broached, it was like bringing down a set of steel shutters.

"Paid? What do you mean paid?" the customer stammered.

"I will be working on this in my own time, using my own resources so I've come up with a reasonable set of charges for the work" I answered.

"But I thought you'd do it for free, I mean your design is going to be seen by a lot of people! It might bring more work your way!"

At this point, most illustrators and artists are rolling their eyes and probably remembering similar conversations they've had throughout their careers. That old chestnut has been doing the rounds ever since Ug first daubed a crimson splodge on his neighbour's cave wall and his neighbour not passing over the promised juicy Mammoth steak claiming that his cave is visited quite often so Ug's work will achieve some sort of infamy.

Exposure won't pay anyone's bills and if you ask most artists whether exposure - even for fairly large corporate clients or companies - has ever done them any good, you'd better be prepared for a fairly abrupt response.

Of course, stupidly, I had already started work on the branding and logo project before thrashing out remuneration up front. I'm a keen amateur, not a hard-nosed professional so in hindsight (and certainly with any new commissions) this should have been discussed in the first meeting. The customer in this case dug their heels in and started to make all the usual piddly excuses about there being no budget, me not being a professional, the work being good but not THAT good - which was the point where I folded up my designs, closed my laptop and bid them adieu wishing them all the very best of luck finding someone else who'll do a quite substantial amount of work for nothing.

So I'm left with a few more pieces to add to my portfolio, and of course a lesson learned. As we've previously stated on the blog it's as tough a gig to get paid for your writing as it is to get paid for your artwork, but there's still a rather crappy assumption that artists gambol around in a state of heightened bliss always looking for any opportunity to waste hour after hour putting work together that ultimately won't be paid for (sure we all produce items of work for ourselves but if someone wants that work and wants to use that work to make money, they'd darned well better ensure you get a slice of that action in some way).

Things are getting better, and the supportive artist communities on social media are very quick to leap on any instances where someone's publicly taking the pith (particularly when an artistic opportunity is 'dressed up' as a competition, therefore somehow negating it from needing to be funded in any way if your submitted competition artwork is chosen and used thereafter).

When it comes to children's books, particularly picture books, Sarah is right - pictures mean business and the entire industry would grind to a halt if creatives downed their pens and brushes. Treat them with respect as professionals as you would the guy who comes to unblock your loo or the guy who services your car because that's what we (they) are.

Next year, the BBC is embarking on a year-long campaign to encourage more people to read - which you can read a bit more about here: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/bbc-launches-year-long-campaign-get-nation-reading-316569

It goes without saying that the campaign has the best of intentions, aiming to inspire people (and more importantly children) to pick up a book and dive inside. Reading through some of the planned activities I rode a rollercoaster of being excited about or nonplussed by some of the things mentioned as coming up in 2016.

Firstly, fantastic to see that this will tie neatly in with the celebrations of Roald Dahl's centenary year with dramatised adaptations of Dahl's "Boy" and "Going Solo" books (which sounds fantastic). So up at the top of the roller coaster shouting hooray for that one.

But is Dahl the limit of what we can expect for kids (not that I have anything against Dahl per se - I guess it could have been far worse, a year long celebration of David Walliams' books for example!)

Where are all the fantastic contemporary authors and artists who should also be championed? Can we hope that the planned CBBC "Awesome Authors" programmes at least include a good brace of our favourite book folk? Fingers crossed.

Now to the main grist of this particular editorial and the reason for the fantastic and happy image in the header, and something that's been bugging me for a heck of a long time.

Creativity needs to be at the heart of any campaign encouraging folk to wrap themselves up in a good book. I feel that creative and artistic kids probably already feel like second class citizens in schools under the pressure to become literate and numerate but surely no great strides can be made in improving child literacy if only done so for academic achievement or as a means of meeting a government guideline on reading age and ability? We're back to that old argument about 'turning kids off books' for life if they're only being served a diet of dry old classics purely used as a measuring tool rather than something that will enhance and enrich their lives.

Charlotte is lucky that she gets a good balance of both logical and numerate thinking & super craft skills from her mum and daydreamy artistic creative stuff from me (I'm practically number blind but am a rabid bookivore so the balance is probably a bit skewed at times). Watching Charlotte draw is one of life's genuine pleasures and listening to her when her imagination has been fired up by a book, character, comic or story is again a genuine pleasure and something that I know makes a huge contribution to her appreciation of books and reading.

We can also directly see the impact her imagination has on her school work (particularly literacy / reading). When recently watching and listening to her working through an exercise in producing a set of sentences using verbs, she came up with ideas that weren't just simplistic and functional, weren't just box ticking but showed she had a genuine understanding of how to 'storify' her work and how to make language work for her.

It also comes across in the way she speaks, and the way she is curious about unfamiliar words and grammatical nuances of English that have come through soaking up a huge diverse range of very imaginative and stimulating books.

I'll be watching how the BBC's campaign unfolds very closely (and reporting on it here as much as possible). If one thing comes out of the year, I'd love it to be recognition of the fact that we will never achieve the goal of getting more children into reading if we push and force rather than encourage and inspire.

I'm sure most ReadItDaddy readers wonder if I ever do anything else but moan about books but this week's editorial is a little different. It's a celebration of two things (well three really, the third being that patience does pay off with a possible option on a fourth thing which is a generic "sod's law" thing) so let's talk about teachers.

Teachers are, for a relatively short period in our lives a huge influence on us (unless you're married / are parented by one) and sometimes you'll bond with a teacher in such a way, that you'll remember them for aeons after you sat fidgeting in their classroom, picking your nose and flicking it at Karen Snow rather than paying attention to what's going on or being said.

Bounds Green Infants School was my first 'big' school, a huge rambling building that looked more like a Victorian workhouse than a school. It had outside toilets for the boys - inconveniently placed at the other end of the playground (no, I'm not kidding!) There was no grass to speak of, just hard tarmac all round - and the classrooms were those huge open-plan spaces that folk in the 70s thought would become the norm.

The teacher I'm thinking of wasn't even my first teacher. My first teacher was a scary lady called Mrs Taylor, who (like a lot of teachers in the '70s) looked a bit like she'd been lifted from the pages of a Grange Hill novelisation. Strict, no-nonsense and pretty terrifying.

My second teacher though, she was something else and I took to her more or less instantly. Miss Cox (we shared the same surname at the time for one reason or another) was like a spectacular blend of Morticia Adams (long before 'Goth' was even a thing), and Noosha Fox (OK get your google fu on for that reference because if you weren't a child of the 70s you sure missed out by not knowing who she was, and what her awesome band's music was like!)

By the time I fetched up in Miss Cox's class, I was something of an anomaly. I read voraciously, blitzing through books like a thing possessed. The only problem was the books themselves. Back then I was fed largely on a diet of Peter and Jane books...

"No, Peter. No, Jane. I will not play with you!"

All schoolkids go through a phase when they're on a reading programme of sorts, and ours was the Ladybird Key Words Reading Scheme which for me was like reading with the handbrake on, dragging a solid iron anchor, while tied to a block of concrete. The books frustrated me and because of my frustration I wouldn't read them properly. The previous teacher thought there was something wrong with me academically, but Miss Cox nailed the problem straight away.

"You can't read these books because you don't want to read them" was her summary. "I'm going to try you on this..."

The book she gave me to take home (unheard of at the time) was John Gordon's "The Giant Under the Snow". It was a bit of a scary moment, being given a book with very few illustrations in it and a LOT of tiny words, a book not meant for a 5 year old. Looking back on it, if the incident had happened now it might've ended up with Miss Cox explaining herself in front of the head teacher or being booted out of school by a 'concerned' PTA board, but what actually happened was that I took the book home. And read it. And re-read it. And read it again until I thought my eyes would fall out.

The floodgates were opened. I returned the book to her and she quizzed me on it. I'd read that damned thing to death so I swatted away each and every question she had about it so she knew I'd read it. She KNEW and it was like hitting all the right bumpers on a pinball machine.

Miss Cox switched me from The Ladybird Key Words Reading Scheme (Sorry Ladybird, nothing personal!) onto a steady diet of books like "Stig of the Dump" and "The Hobbit" and "The Silver Chair". Whenever the book newsletters came round (other 70s schoolkids probably remember these book newsletter things that your parents could order books for you from) I skipped the picture book stuff and went straight for whatever the latest Methuen or Puffin Readers were, in the section at the back of the newsletter meant for the older kids.

The second part of this post concerns trying to get hold of a copy of "The Giant Under the Snow" some years later. My childhood copy had sadly got lost in any one of a zillion house moves. We moved around a fair bit as a kid but moving from London to Oxford, we lost so many things including a hell of a lot of books. From the age of 9 right up to my 30s I hunted high and low for a copy of John Gordon's "The Giant Under the Snow", sadly out of print and sadly (in pre-internet days) extremely hard to find copies of. Every time we went anywhere I'd always scour charity shops or secondhand book shops just in case I spotted that flecked blue cover and that amazing image of the giant and his leathery skeleton cohorts, and of course that menacing Sirius Black-like dog.

The book stuck with me, as much as the memory of Miss Cox did. Every time I tried to order it or even borrow a copy from a library it seemed to magically elude me.

My doggedness paid off though and I still can't quite remember the sunny day mooching around a car boot sale that I found the copy that's nestled inside our book case at home, but I remember spotting it, practically KISSING the poor sod running the stall, and handing over money and walking off blissed out not even bothering to wait for change.

They say you never forget your first love. I would bet that most people won't forget the first time they truly fell in love with a book. The irony was that, after all those years of searching, the bloody thing got reprinted the year after I found a copy (but the original cover is still miles better than the leafy green celtic nonsense of the reprint so I guess there is that, at least!)

A movie version of the book has been mooted for a couple of years now. Not sure how far the project has got but they'd better treat "my book" well or else!

So that inspired this week's editorial. Two great things, a hugely inspirational teacher who really truly changed my life (and I dearly would love to know what became of her) and a book that did too. Both things that are an essential part of being at school, and I truly hope our school kids never have to do without either.

November is "National Non-Fiction Month" and this week's editorial is inspired not only by the upcoming celebration of children's Non-Fiction titles - but by a fairly innocent looking Tweet from author Nicola Morgan: https://twitter.com/nicolamorgan/status/657296292671000576









It's been widely reported many, many times that reluctant readers - particularly boys but definitely both boys and girls - are quite often more interested in non-fiction than fiction. I can't quite remember how it first came about that we made huge efforts to stimulate Charlotte's reading with a good mix of fiction and non-fiction titles but it was certainly quite soon after we'd joined our local library for the first time.

For children, libraries can often be the only place they'll be exposed to 'learning books' outside of school but for most kids, it's also the place where they are in direct control of what they read - and what non-fiction titles they pick up alongside story and picture books.

That's hugely important, and from the outset it's really quite something to see a child going through the non-fiction section in a library's stacks and seeing what they pull out.

Charlotte's love of history and science stems directly from the way we gently coaxed her towards digging out books in the non-fiction section - often gloriously illustrated and packed full of facts, these books tell their own stories to children and definitely in the case of history books, are often as full of amazing characters and 'plot twists' as any story book you can name.

I doubt many teachers would actively discourage a child from reading non-fiction for pleasure (so I'm rather intrigued by the background to this tweet). After all, a huge part of a teacher's role is to engage their class with the subject matter at hand - so if a child displays enough interest in the subject to want to explore it outside school as well, what's not to love?

Unless...there's some bizarre theory that non-fiction should not be 'dumbed down'. It should be wholly academic, perhaps some might say even 'dry' so it does not muddy the message it's trying to impart. Perhaps it's that we're now so petrified that our children won't learn if they're having fun that children's non-fiction is somehow frowned upon?

If that's the case, again I'd have to disagree and point out that you'd have to search high and low to find a non-fiction title these days that 'dumbs down' its subject - simply because kids will not put up with that in their non-fiction reading matter just like they won't put up with poorly written (or illustrated) fiction (and gawd, how many times do we have to point this out to would-be children's writers - that children are not there to be babied or patronised with hollow stories that don't inspire them or satisfy their curiosity?)

It does seem that it's long been the belief that a certain amount of 'talking down to' is required when you're broaching certain topics and subjects with kids (again whether in fictional or non-fictional titles) and I'd have to once again vociferously argue that this truly is not the case. Kids are like hungry sponges when it comes to facts and figures. You wouldn't try to wash with a sponge that was only given a tiny drip of water would you?

Do celebrate National Non-Fiction Month again this November as many book folk will be doing so! Mix it up a bit in your own children's reading materials for that month and I promise you, you'll be very pleasantly surprised by the results! Go seek out brilliant books by publishers like Usborne, Flying Eye Books, Wide Eyed Editions, Thames and Hudson, Chronicle and so many others who are truly producing the brightest and best non fiction books for kids these days.