At least there were some children’s books

It’s the Guardian top 100 bestselling books of 2012 I’ve got in mind. Maybe I’m wrong to feel pleased there are 23, or 24 if you count The Hobbit, children’s books in the top 100. It’s children from the Hunger Games age group down to the Julia Donaldson age level, with The Wimpy Kid and David Walliams in the middle.

There are rather a lot of Wimpy Kids and David Walliams books on that list, at the expense of more individual fiction. But if the books have been bought, they have most likely been read too, because that’s the kind of books they are. And that has to count as A Good Thing, surely?

The Hunger Games film caused hundreds of thousands of books to be bought, and if the Bookwitch Towers experience is anything to go by, they were definitely read, and very quickly, too. Not by me. The film was enough. But I recognise that fervour, awakened by a cinema visit. I saw Five On a Treasure Island before reading the books. Almost before I could read, but that didn’t stop me. And look where it got me.

Even theatre can cause book buying, as evidenced by Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse. I would guess the books are bought by adults, but most likely read by children as well. Or was it ‘just’ the film effect again?

Whereas I am – reluctantly – conceding that it might be mainly adults who bought and read John Grisham’s latest Theodore Boone, simply because they are Grisham fans. Or possibly because they didn’t realise it’s a children’s book.

But what of Terry Pratchett’s Dodger? It comes in the top twenty children’s books in the 100 list, but has not made it into the children’s top twenty. Might that be the adult fan reading everything by their favourite author again?

The fact that Jacqueline Wilson is not in the top twenty, is an indication of how well the film industry sells books. (Did I just say that?)

What makes me happy, is that at least a couple of million readers benefitted from the top twenty titles. I hope they will also be reading other books, lower down in the sales league, and that they will continue reading. Always.

A true story for Christmas

You must ‘click through’ and read this! Even on re-reading the true story by Eva Ibbotson (from the Guardian) I found that my eyes developed some inexplicable dampness.

It’s about libraries, war, refugees and more. Eva Ibbotson is no longer with us, and our libraries seem destined to go the same way. Wouldn’t it be lovely if stories like this one could stop library closures, while also opening our hearts more to those who have had to leave their homes, through no fault of their own?

Here is to knowledge and reading and friendship and languages, in and out of libraries!

The Code Name Verity interview

Don’t read my interview with Elizabeth Wein!

I know this is an unusual way to advertise an interview, but if you haven’t read Code Name Verity – aka the best book this year – it will spoil the book for you.

You want to read CNV. You know you do. So read it and then hurry back here for a fun interview with an author who admits to knowing her book was going to be great. (Those Americans are so modest…)

I loved meeting Elizabeth last month, and my strongest feeling afterwards has been that ‘I simply must read Code Name Verity again.’ Please join me.

(Sorry the photo is a bit blurry. Elizabeth was laughing. She did that a lot. And perhaps I was shaking a little.)

2012′s best twelve

For the 12th day of the 12th month of 2012 (I love this kind of thing!) I give you my list of the very best books. All twelve of them. (I know, there are really 13, but two for the price of one, sort of thing. Yes?)

All the books I have reviewed have been good, and it’s hard to pick the best. Except for the bestest of the best, because that one stood out by several miles, even back in January. And once we’ve got the twelves out of our system, next year I will have to go for a more restrained list. Always assuming people continue writing great books. Please do.

As always, I only include books published during the year. And here, the VERY BEST is:

Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity

Swiftly followed by some alphabetically listed and very marvellous runners-up:

Philip Caveney, Spy Another Day

Joshua Doder, Grk and the Phoney Macaroni

Daniel Finn, Call Down Thunder

Sally Gardner, Maggot Moon

Nick Green, Cat’s Cradle

Barry Hutchison, The Thirteenth Horseman

Wendy Meddour, A Hen in the Wardrobe, and The Black Cat Detectives

Gillian Philip, Wolfsbane

Terry Pratchett, Dodger

Celia Rees, This Is Not Forgiveness

Teri Terry, Slated

That’s it, dear readers. It was a good year, both generally, but also specifically for producing Code Name Verity, one of the best ever.

Oh Tannenbaum

My apologies for upsetting the trains again. Last month as I was gallivanting about in Fife and places, I caused it to snow, and this time round there appears to have been floods in one or two areas. I never intended any of this. Really sorry!

Anyway, there I was, carting a Christmas tree round St Andrews, getting a little tired from having my hands quite so full. The tree and I went into a bar and sat down, waiting for its rightful new adoptive mother. Eventually she arrived, and we ate pizza while watching staff lay the tables for a wet Christmas ‘dinner’ later in the evening. Seems it’s a trick they pull on new students.

It wasn’t just trees I delivered. I brought Daughter her very own copy of Code Name Verity, because she’s currently into war books, and there IS NO WAY I will let her have my copy.

For my own needs I had four books, which I calculated ought to see me through the day. Finished two and read a little poetry from the third, leaving the fourth to another day. By the time I had passed Perth for the second time I felt I needed to stay awake and alert enough not to go to Glasgow by mistake.

That’s for today, that is. Glasgow, but not as a mistake. On the right day it’s a delightful place to walk through. You walk out of Queen Street station, turn right, and when you get to the church you turn left, and then right by the Tardis, and walk until you’re at Central station.

I’ve got another book for that journey. I mean the trains before and after the walk through Glasgow. I rarely read on the walk itself. (I love the way the online ticket booking system apologises for it not being possible to reserve a seat for this part of the trip. Can’t you just see me barrelling through the city in a comfy chair, reading something good?)

The Memory Cage

I’ll be honest with you. Books about Alzheimer’s are not top of my list. Which is stupid, because it’s not as if the topic makes them all the same. Some will be good, others might not be. This one – The Memory Cage – by Ruth Eastham is absolutely fantastic.

Sometimes I suspect that the brownie points you hope to get by tagging a book with a certain topic could backfire. I will most likely still avoid Alzheimer’s books. I won’t expect the next one to be as fascinating and funny as Ruth’s.

Grandad is trying to kill the family, if only by being so lost that he doesn’t always know what he is doing. He’s doing it for the best. But it means that Alex’s mum and dad are about to put Grandad in a home, against his wishes.

Alex desperately wants to help the old man to remember and to help him stay at home. But Grandad has a lot of painful memories, many of them very well hidden indeed. It doesn’t help that Alex has some of his own, having been adopted from Bosnia when he was younger.

Both of them have been to war, and there are brothers everywhere. Brothers matter. Love them, fight with them, miss them. This is a family with plenty of hidden skeletons. The whole village is full of wartime skeletons, and not just in the graveyard.

There is so much love here. Hate too. But Alex realises he needs to make a scrapbook for Grandad to help him remember who he is. Who Alex is, even. And sometimes it’s not best to let sleeping dogs lie.

At this rate I will have to create my own memory scrapbook. Just to keep me going. We all have skeletons of some kind. But more than that, we have lots of good things to remember, too. And plain ordinary memories.

This is a wonderful story!

Noor

It was just by coincidence I noticed the article about Noor Inayat Khan on the Talking Cranes’ website a few months ago. I felt it was intriguing with a female Indian spy during WWII, and thought I might blog about her at some point, but then never did.

I was aware there was a collection for some kind of memorial, and I suspect it was not by chance that the bust was unveiled by the Princess Royal in time for Remembrance Sunday.

Noor spoke perfect French, which is why she was sent to France with the SOE. Unfortunately she was captured fairly soon after arrival, and executed by the Germans. So many lives and so much talent lost.

It was only by more chance reading that I found out Noor also wrote stories. Her Twenty Jataka Tales appears to be out of print at the moment, but could be worth looking out for.

Your granny or mine?

I was offered to share someone’s grandparents on facebook on Sunday. It was very kind. As ‘everyone’ mentioned their grandparents and the war on Sunday morning, I felt a little left out. More so than normal, because I have no such memories to share.

Of course, that’s something to be grateful for. No one in my family went to war and suffered. The most exciting thing I know about WWII and my family is that Mother-of-witch gave up sugar in her coffee, because of the rationing, and how she had a slight accident walking home in the dark one night, due to the black-out.

And Uncle spent some time in uniform, somewhere in the north in preparation for an invasion. Luckily that never happened, but since both Norway and Denmark were invaded, the threat was real enough. There were also enough German soldiers inside Sweden to cause concern.

But apart from the dark and the rationing, life was fairly normal. And for my grandparents, even food wasn’t too much of a problem, as they had relatives who farmed and who sent extra food.

Mother-of-witch was a teenager when WWII broke out, but thinking about it now, I realise that her siblings would have gone to war in some form, had war come to Sweden. They were much older.

Whereas my grandparents were far too old by then, and it would have been WWI they’d have fought in, had the country been at war. So thinking that thought through, perhaps my grandfather would have gone to war and died. In which case I wouldn’t be here now. Except he had been invalided at work, and since he worked on the railways, he would presumably have continued there, instead of being a soldier.

I know that where I used to work before emigrating, I would have stayed ‘on my post’ in case of war. Any involvement with voluntary military organisations was prohibited, as we’d be required to do what we were already doing. One colleague who did do airforce volunteering, was told to keep quiet about it. I suppose the threat of war wasn’t seen as very great.

And – I’m almost ashamed to admit this – in Sweden Remembrance Sunday this year was actually Father’s Day… More a case of unwanted ties and cake, than poppies and memories.

Secrets and Shadows

Neutral Ireland tends to be overlooked when we talk about WWII, or maybe even forgotten. I remember reading Joan Lingard’s The File on Fraulein Berg which, although set in Belfast, still brought home the enormous difference between north and south of the border. The fact that they had lights on in Dublin, and things to buy in the shops.

Joan’s book was about two girls who thought the German teacher at their school had to be a spy. Brian Gallagher’s Secrets and Shadows is almost the same, in a way. Set in Dublin, Liverpudlian refugee Barry and the local but nevertheless bombed-out Grace, suspect Barry’s Polish PE teacher of being a spy. The man asks too many questions, and is simply too pleasant.

This is a good story, showing the effects of the war in Liverpool, explaining why Barry ends up going to live with his grandmother in Dublin, and also that being in Ireland wasn’t always totally safe, because bombings did happen. Grace and her mum have to live with her grandfather, which is how the two children meet and become friends.

Then there is the spy chase, where Grace and Barry take to observing and following Mr Pawlek, and finally breaking into his house (which is far too big for one man).

The question is whether they find anything to prove their suspicions, or if they have made a mistake. Very exciting, and as I said, just that little bit different for being an Irish story. Nice piece of time travel too, seeing how people lived then.

Remember

I couldn’t help noticing that Thomas Keneally has a new book out about WWI, about two sisters who are nurses. It’d be easy to think that this is a bit of a cliché, because so many WWI novels feature nurses. But that’s what you have to have, if you’re going to put your female characters in Europe during the war.

I’d already dug out some of my WWI nurse books, because it’s time to remember that they exist. It’s not a topic I’d expect to find in new books right now, but it’s not as if these are all that ancient.

My first one was Linda Newbery’s Some Other War, which I bought as it was re-issued about ten years ago, although first published in the early 1990s. Linda came to Offsprings’ school, just before Remembrance Sunday, so very timely. She introduced me to Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, also about a nurse.

Linda has two more books about the same characters; The Kind Ghosts, which starts during the war and ends after it. The third book is The Wearing of the Green, set in Ireland. After this I always get confused, because I tend to think her Shouting Wind trilogy is set in WWI. It isn’t. It’s one war later, about a descendant of the two main characters in Some Other War. So that’s two sets of trilogies about the same family, over many years.

The second nurse story is Theresa Breslin’s Remembrance, which Linda strongly recommended. Similar plot, in a way, with girls going off to war as nurses, and with a love story somewhere, as well as being about the village left behind. Realistic, and enjoyable, if you can say that about so much suffering.

My third nurse is only pretending. Marcus Sedgwick’s The Foreshadowing has a female character who is too young to go to war, and she’s not a trained nurse. She has ‘only’ dabbled a bit at nursing at home, before she runs off to Europe, hoping to save her brother’s life. She can ‘see’ things, and she has seen her brother’s death in her mind. With one brother already dead, she’s desperate not to lose her other brother as well.

So, there are similarities, but only because the war was fought in a limited geographical area, and the nursing of soldiers won’t vary much. We are now a long way away in time, but through these books it’s possible to feel something of what it was like.

We have no soldiers left to talk about it, but we mustn’t forget.