THE AMBIDEXTROUS LIBRARIAN

THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO (PATRICK NESS) This book has been on my "to read" list for ages .  I finally read it.  Sweet hallelujah.  For other Librarians out there who may be reading this, you know what I'm talking about; the sheer pleasure of managing to ACTUALLY FINISH A BOOK from the ever growing pile.  I feel like I should have a drink to celebrate. And so, the talented Patrick Ness.  We recently acquired The Rest of Us Just Live Here  for the collection (another for the "to read" list), but I thought I would start with The Knife of Never Letting Go  because it has awards slapped all over it, and it's been around for ages and y'know, people generally rave.  Published back in 2008, it's been around a while now.  And it's a sort of near-future sci-fi dystopian tale.  Interestingly it was dystopian before  The Hunger Games  opened the floodgates. Todd Hewitt is a boy about to become a man.  He was born into the...

THE CAT WITH THE COLOURED TAIL (GILLIAN MEARS) I'm a Librarian, so there is a high statistical probability that I am also a cat lover (yep, it's true).  I gravitate towards cat themed stories with the same level of uncanny intuition that primary school girls have for horse and pony stories.  It's a gift. When one of my colleagues suggested we obtain The Cat with the Coloured Tail , I naturally thought it was a fabulous idea.  It arrived a couple of weeks ago and has already been borrowed once; when I put it back on display I was reminded that I should really take it home and read it one evening. And then Gillian Mears died. Gillian Mears - Sydney Morning Herald I knew of Gillian Mears; you can't be a Librarian and not know of  Foals Bread,  and I have The Grass Sister sitting on my bookshelf downstairs.  But I had not yet delved into her children's fiction, and so on the news of her passing I felt it was time to read what was to be the final fru...

LITTLE REBEL CHILDREN'S BOOK AWARDS 2016 Subversive, intelligent children's books.  Could I find a better topic to talk about? The Little Rebels Children's Book Awards ( administered by the UK's Letterbox Library as part of the Alliance of Radical Booksellers )  are a relatively new thing, having been around for only a few years (since 2013 it seems).  Is this because it is only recently that authors have felt the need to tackle big societal issues in children books?  I pondered this for a while and then realised that Dr. Seuss would argue with me (and win) on that point. Let me start by saying that although I think the title "Little Rebels" is awesome, I am actually going to say that I think there should be nothing deemed "rebellious" about reading literature that encourages us to think and form our own opinions.  In fact, I dislike my own description of the nominees as "subversive", but I'll maintain that adjective to argue my...

GOTTA #LOVEOZYA I actually went and did a little "Professional Development" the other day, dragging myself into the city to attend a Teacher/Librarian do that Readings Hawthorn hosted.  The evening consisted of four fabulous Australian YA authors talking on their latest middle years and YA offerings (and there was also wine!). I didn't really know what to expect, but I certainly didn't expect to walk out of there feeling as inspired as I did.  It was awesome, and really quite uplifting. Emily Gale and Leanne Hall tackled the difficulties of writing for those odd middle years - not really a kid, but not quite a teenager.  If you can cast your minds back (I found it hard) it's a time when your folks are expecting you to act more mature, and you're feeling more mature, but no one is really giving you any credit or independence.  How do you reach that readership, and as an adult write something that doesn't sound either too simple, or like you're ...

#somethingwickedthiswaycomes It seems I may have been dwelling these last few days on innovative ways to get people reading.  After the comments I made in my previous post about possible future iterations of "the book", I stumbled across this example whilst aimlessly surfing the Googles: Macbeth is #killingit  (link to Booktopia) Yep, it's #Macbeth.  And apparently #Macbeth is #killingit. This is somewhat stretching my idea of what I was talking about in my previous post, i.e. innovative ways to engage kids in reading.  I dunno, this just seems somewhat... lame.  I mean, on the cover Lord and Lady Macbeth appear to have their heads substituted with emoji.  With. Emoji.  And they are checking in to their various locations and presumably hash-tagging their adventures whilst snap chatting the latest #epicdeadbody or #crazylady.  Students can see though this guise pretty  quickly, they are very wise to these adult attempts to ap...

SUNSHINE, DECKS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS So, that's another year out of the way! I hope you enjoyed the school holidays.  I certainly did.  For me, it wasn't so much bookish as practical.  I cleared some land, levelled it, landscaped it and made a deck.  Not much time for reading in between all that but it was therapeutic to get out in the sun. Because all this practicality left me little time to actually read, I decided to focus on something a little less wordy, but no less relevant - the graphic novel.  Now, I did read a few but they are a little too adult to be termed YA so I probably won't review them here (one was an excellent memoir of growing up in Yorkshire when the Yorkshire Ripper was on the loose - highly recommended, but not particularly YA friendly). Devouring these graphic novels made me realise that literature comes in so many forms these days.  Traditionalists may find it easy to dismiss the graphic novel, but having read several excell...

TALES FROM OUTER SUBURBIA (SHAUN TAN) When I was at high school, I drew a picture of the shopping centre that was across the road from the school. It was one of those 80's-designed affairs with an empty open-air square in the middle; furnished with uncomfortable metal seats painted in faded primary colours, uneven cheap pavers and geometric planters full of thin, sandy soil, cigarette butts and the stringy brown remains of palm trees.  And of course there were empty shops. That's a given.  When I drew the shopping centre, I made the shop-front display windows completely black.  The colours I used were all dark, there was no people or movement.  I didn't think of it at the time, but my Art Teacher said it was a creepy drawing, there was no life to it, and there should be because it's a picture of a bloody shopping centre.  I don't know why I drew it like that, but that's how that place felt to me; it made me uneasy.  Shaun Tan's pictures and narratives ...

WONDER (R.J. PALACIO) This book lives up to its name.  Totally.  I had heard about it and seen it kicking around at my previous school, and then the Grade 5 teacher at my current school requested it.  Good choice - all school libraries SHOULD HAVE THIS BOOK.  Yes the CAPS is for EMPHASIS. August (Auggie) was born with some pretty serious facial defects.  He gets stared at - like, most of the time.  And it's not "nice" staring, it's staring in shock and horror, can't-believe-what-I'm-seeing staring.  Auggie for the most part has learnt to ignore it, but it still gets under his skin, and still makes him dread going into situations with new people. So the idea of going to school for the first time? Utterly terrifying.  LOTS of new people, everywhere, and he is stuck with them for hours a day, and they will all stare, and comment, and pretend to look away, and talk about him behind his back.  Auggie knows exactly what it will be like and...