Let’s Talk About Sex

Yes, let’s. Or let’s read about it, anyway. I was a bit slow on the uptake, but Daughter pointed out that we used to have this book when she was younger. And I do recognise it. I think in those days I saw it as a way of getting most of the necessary information across to someone who may not have been so receptive to spoken words as to pictures.

The pictures are good in this book stuffed full with facts about sex and everything that belongs with it. I’m surprised the book hasn’t been X-rated, but maybe you can’t do that with a book. And it is a children’s book. But it’s not just suitable for the young children I had in mind long ago. It’s just as good for older ones, and I’m tempted to say that sexual ignorance being what it is, it’s right for adults of all ages, too.

Fifteen years after it was first published, it’s been updated, and now includes information on HIV and Aids, and also how to use the internet safely.

This book is funny and has just the right amount of information. Candid, without overdoing it. Wish I’d had something like it back in the olden days.

Let’s not go into what I found when searching for a cover image to use with this.

And it’s got to be a less controversial topic than yesterday’s.

From DaVinci to Jordan

I have said some not so nice things about The DaVinci Code, haven’t I? I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned Katie Price and her literary pursuits, but there is a first time for everything. Consider it done.

There was one last lesson learned at Random last month. In my chat with Philippa Dickinson she pointed out that they had made much money on books like the above. And it’s not just that publishing companies like making money. We all do. But with the profits from bestselling –  if light – books Random, and others, can do great things.

Basically it’s the Robin Hood idea. You take money from the big sellers and use it to publish narrower taste books. Not all books make any money for the publisher. And although they are lovely people, they can’t publish and publish and not mind the lack of income.

So with this in mind, from now on I will try to cheer as I see the other kind of books for sale, because they are busy paying for the books I want to read.

I hope I will never say anything bad about Dan and Katie, ever again. I may do, but it will be a slip of the keyboard. Honest.

Black Stars: Malorie Blackman

This useful short biography of Malorie Blackman was waiting to be reviewed quite some time ago, but after coming with me to London when I interviewed Malorie, my copy of the book somehow just disappeared into the bookcase as though its job was now over.

I was reminded of it by a recent comment on the blog, where someone asked for information about Malorie’s early life and how she started writing.

And that’s exactly what you get in Verna Wilkins’s brief biography. It’s intended for young children, so the style is very simple. There are short chapters on Malorie’s childhood and teenage years, and finishes when she gets her first book published. It has a short interview at the end.

The bibliography of Malorie’s books would have been more useful if it had been up-to-date when it was published in 2008. The most recent book in the list is from 2001, and Malorie has had many books published since then.

It’s part of a series about black people who have succeeded in what they do, and this is sadly more necessary than I’d like to think. Malorie is a true black star, and luckily she’s not the only one. But there ought to be more.

Three today!

We’re getting on. It’s not quite old age, but three is a reasonably impressive age for a whim. Sorry, intended to say blog. And I don’t mean to boast, but I can remember the last time I was three. Actually. Not that I recall yesterday terribly well, but that’s another thing altogether.

Today being a Saturday I can take it easy, too, and celebrate most of the day. On Saturdays you don’t call in to see me as much as you do on the other days of the week. It would seem that you lot don’t go to church on Sunday mornings, but on Saturdays you definitely do things offline. Shopping? Football practice?

(Above is a photo – by lovely holiday neighbour Tina – of where I’m not, right now. But if I were, someone would have to shovel first.)

Now that I think about it, I won’t have the stamina to celebrate. I’m on nose drops, on account of my general fondness for breathing, and I feel tired. Very tired. As it tends to say in the medical guide troubleshooting thingy, I’ve most likely got a cold.

While on the fascinating subject of nose drops, I gather that Stieg Larsson was addicted to them. Interesting. Or mainly weird.

Godmother Rosoff sometimes asks how my life has changed in these three years. I suppose she feels guilty. It has changed completely. I used to clean the house occasionally. I wrote letters to people, sitting at my desk in the study. Now I sit at the kitchen table blogging and boiling eggs, with dust up to my knees, and I rub shoulders with lots of lovely people. And I’ve got the postman on his knees.

What could be nicer?

Here’s to another three years! The nose drops are on me.

(Hoping for Spring. Preferably tomorrow.)

Chains

This book has waited faithfully for me to have time for it, and now that the paperback is freshly out I’ve at long last sat down with the book. It’s as great a read as I always thought it would be. Chains also provided that kind of strange connection with the book I read just before it. Laurie Halse Anderson’s story is set in New York in 1776 and Isabel is a young black slave. It’s tempting to think that it wouldn’t be long until things were better for the slaves, but reading Sara Paretsky’s Hardball which features black people in Chicago in both the 1960s and today, you wonder why so little has happened to improve people’s lives.

For a European Chains makes interesting reading simply for its American history lesson aspect. You think you know, but there is so much that I didn’t know at all. At the back of the book Laurie has ten pages of facts, which unlike many such pages are both interesting and pertinent. I would have appreciated a map of Manhattan, though.

Isabel and her little sister Ruth are sold to a new owner at the start of the book, and taken to live in New York. Their lives and living and working conditions are grim. They were under the impression that at the death of their former owner they were to become free, but this little fact is overlooked. The war between the British and the Americans divides New York and its people, but what Isabel finds is that neither side wants to be nice or fair to slaves.

Their owner is loyal to the British King, but Isabel finds herself helping the cause of George Washington through the people she meets. She keeps thinking she will achieve justice one day, but how can that happen?

This is a good length story at 300 pages, and it moves swiftly so that you just want to read on and on. I worried in my usual fashion that it was beginning to look like a must-have-a-sequel kind of book towards the end, but it doesn’t, in actual fact. It could have one, but that’s different.

Very, very good.

Drop Zone

The witch is not your average Andy McNab girl. Not in the slightest, although she has a lingering fondness for Alistair MacLean, and they are a little related. Andy does that thing which I approve of, which is to write about what you know. And he really does seem to know about skydiving, as well as covert operations and weapons. And stuff.

He writes macho books with plenty of action in an easy to read style, which ought to be ideal to get boys of all ages to read.  I enjoyed his new book Drop Zone more than I’d expected, and that’s despite reading with a cynical mind. So, if you want male adventure and a light read, you can do worse than to try Andy’s book.

Drop Zone is about Ethan, who is 17 and who lands a really different summer job at a skydiving centre. It doesn’t take long – naturally – for him to go from helping in the café and in the shop, to doing skydiving himself. From ’simple’ skydiving it’s a short jump to joining the skydive team and their rather more secret tasks for MI5.

The skydiving and the centre is totally believable. The covert operations less so, but what do I know? Whether realistic or not, it’s exciting. It’s a page turner, and Ethan’s exploits could well be a model for uncertain teenage boys to follow. I’m never sure whether army ideals are good to thrust on impressionable young minds, but the alternatives are often far worse.

More acquisitions

The Random acquisitions meeting didn’t solely deal with what the neighbour wrote. In one hour the Random ladies and their honorary Random male went through a tremendous number of numbers and things. I felt as though I was attending a cattle auction. You know, the kind of place were people in the know call out odd numbers and everyone else looks like they understand exactly.

I suspect they did. And after an explanation I almost do, too.

As these Random people (I’m getting to the end of my Random tales, so must get in a few more Random ‘puns’) told me, it was an interesting and varied meeting. They rushed over a lot of topics on the agenda, with Philippa Dickinson firmly in control.

‘Could we change the title of the book?’ They could, and it sounded a lot better. ‘How quickly could we publish this?’

Font size and number of words to the page? Can we have more money for this? How to persuade the big chain that they’ll want this book. January would be a good month to publish this in. Will need an extra attractive cover for this one. Film rights?

Keeping up with what happens on YouTube, for which you may interrogate young people near you. Maybe publish a book about this one? How soon? And another in-house idea on a fact filled book on a popular subject. A lot of homework has gone into these suggestions.

More money now, or maybe pay some later? There is apparently something called a ‘refresher advance’, and perhaps they can persuade so-and-so to write a new introduction in return. And this person from television; will he/she actually deliver the goods while there is still interest in the project? And they’ve asked for more money.

So the lesson on how to acquire new books is a good one. It’s not just the neighbourhood hopefuls, scribbling in garrets (or Starbucks). Publishers start books, too, and they persuade big names to write something special, hoping they’ll deliver. You adapt an adult bestseller to a children’s version.

It really is like cooking.

What first?

It was agony. A pleasant-ish kind of agony, but I’d been putting it off. And off. I’m the mother of a grand procrastinator, so must have got it from him. I delayed for as long as I could, by discovering that February didn’t start the day after the 28th of January. But when the relative book calm of Christmas gave way to a new springtide of  reading material I had to act.

The nest of tables helped. I lined them up and one was for January books, however late, and the next for February books. Lots there. The last one was March with a side order of the future next to it.

Then I removed the ones that are either ‘not me’, or felt unlikely to have time found for them. The rest I juggled according to personal desirability, and I referred to notes of what is going to be published when. Another re-juggle caused by promises made or some other vague reason.

So I have a reading order again, which may well last all week if I’m lucky. Then I’ll start piling upwards once more. If someone else takes a book to read without managing to put it back in the very spot they found it… Likely, considering that they generally don’t put books back at all.

After this operation I had to go and remember that certain books are expected, but still en route.

For me it’s not so much what the postman brought during the week, but how the pile builds up. Was quite impressed, however, by the black jiffybag that turned up last week. I think it may have been inspired by the contents, rather than an indication of a new trend.

The ‘house arrest’ pile behind the door is doing well. I’d welcome suggestions on where to store them next. Don’t want them mouldy when my time comes.

I’m off to read!

Hardball

I already feel bereft. I’ve spent the last few days reading Sara Paretsky’s latest novel, Hardball, and I feel as if my friend VI came to stay for the weekend, and that she’s now left again. Though we had a good few hours together on Saturday, allowing me to sit in peace and relative quiet, finishing the book. I don’t get nearly enough evenings like that.

And the only reason I read it so soon, was that the moment the book arrived I knew it had to come before everything else.

So what is it about Sara’s books? Is it her or VI we love? Both, maybe.

This is VI getting into hot water again, with various important people and upsetting her police contacts and friends. What’s different this time is that her own family is involved in several ways. Her young cousin Petra turns up in Chicago, and stirs things up rather magnificently. And the good reputation of Tony Warshawski, VI’s father, is threatened with being tarnished.

The plot moves between the race riots in the mid 1960s and Martin Luther King, and today with the survivors of those riots as well as the political campaign of someone who has set his sights on the White House. This is territory Sara knows well, having first arrived in Chicago in 1966. You can tell things have been experienced at close hand, and there is no doubting Sara’s opinions of today’s political shenanigans.

Another aspect is – if not new, then escalating with each new book – the lack of privacy. GPS keeps track of us everywhere, and it requires superhuman effort to stay under the radar. We know, but still we don’t fully realise how almost all we do is traceable and gives away far more than we think. As I’m writing this, Daughter is changing to a new email account after getting hacked. And I’m still waiting for the FBI after being in contact with Sara herself.

But at least Sara got in a mention of NCIS, our shared passion, in this book.

(Hardball is already out in the US, and will be published in Britain on February 18th. Sara will be here on tour, with an event at the Purcell Room in London on the 18th, followed by appearances in more places during the next few days. None of which is especially close to me, so what shall I do?)

What the neighbour wrote

You know what it’s like when you work in publishing. Or maybe you don’t, because like me you don’t publish books. It’s like being a doctor and always being consulted on that twitch in your left little toe.

Anyway, you’re out sweeping leaves, or whatever, when you’re approached by this person in your neighbourhood who says they have written a novel and would you read it? (Remember, you’re a publisher here, not a doctor.) You sigh, smile politely and take the manuscript home to read. Because you can’t say no.

Well, at the acquisitions meeting I went to at Random last week, there was a ‘book’ with a background like that. Surprisingly for our imaginary leaf sweeper, it turned out to be not bad at all. It may actually get published. But I don’t think anyone should expect that their novel will suddenly improve simply because there lives a publishing world person just down the road.

I was allowed to read the last fifty pages of this novel, so that I would know what was being discussed. Others had read the first hundred pages, so not everyone had seen the same part of the story. But most were cautiously in favour of doing something with it. I have my own thoughts on this one, but when it’s a bestseller, please remember that I was in at the very beginning.