Bringing it down to 40

The idea for some kind of Desert Island Books has been with me for years, but I’ve not got round to doing anything about it. Yet. Relax, I’m not going to start now, either.

But as the panic over pruning my library was beginning to slosh around in my brain, someone posted a link to a rather interesting article. Geoffrey Best in History Today mused about his book collecting, and then the reverse; the process where he’s had to get rid of one category after the other.

It makes for sad reading, actually. (Much sadder than the chap in the paper the other day who sold off his wine collection…) On re-reading the article I noticed two things. One was that as this was a collection, Geoffrey had not read all the books. That made me feel less inadequate. I sometimes believe I’m the only one who can’t keep up.

The other was that his potential final goal wasn’t for five books. It was for one.

Shudder.

His first awful ambition was which books to choose for when you can only keep 40 books. He arrived at this figure when visiting someone in a home, where he looked around and worked out that 40 might be the limit.

I reckon 40 might be possible. Hard, but doable. You’d need good criteria for how you pick, and that probably depends on who you are. I’ve always marvelled at the choice of the Bible and Shakespeare in Desert Island Discs. Obviously they had to become standard issue once almost everyone felt they had to ask for them, whether because they genuinely loved them that much, or felt they wouldn’t be seen on a desert island without them…

Yes. Quite.

While I don’t know what I’d choose, I’m fairly certain it would be neither of those.

And while I thought the end goal was five books, I toyed with the idea of How I Live Now and Code Name Verity. Both favourites, both quite short. So perhaps you can’t do it that way?

Right now I am also having some problems with working out if I’m going to be sitting on an island or in some old people’s home. Would it be more of a blessing if – when the time comes – I am past reading, to save me doing the final prune, or am I better off with any small pile of books?

Will the grandchildren visit the old witch and bring books?

Best of Scottish 2012, or ‘An awfy dreich day in Dundee’

In the end it didn’t matter that I went to Dundee the wrong week. I was able to ‘sort of’ be there yesterday, anyway. It was WBD. It was time for the Scottish Children’s Book Awards at Caird Hall, filled with a thousand children (so there might not have been room for me). And they very kindly filmed the whole shebang and made it available online. Thus I watched it all from the comfort of my own desk.

They had that Chae Strathie in to do the host stuff. Apparently when he didn’t win last year he sulked until they offered him this job instead. He was very noisy, but he was a competent MC. Perhaps a few too many ‘yoohoos.’ That’s all.

The shortlisted authors were lined up on stage and then sent off again. Seems they have some kind of authors’ enclosure where they are kept. There was a band with such an odd name I can’t tell you what they were called.

For the Younger readers category they had written little theatre sketches based on the three shortlisted books, which were performed by school children. I am fairly intolerant of this type of thing, but have to admit this was first class stuff. Very well done.

Jonathan Meres won with The World of Norm: May Contain Nuts. His thank you speech turned out to be his shopping list; tea, milk, etc. (But at least he was English… I was beginning to think you had to have a beautiful Scottish accent to even make it onto that shortlist.)

Scotland has a minister for children! Aileen Campbell was there, and made a good speech about the importance of books and reading. I suspect the Scottish government might have more sense than Westminster.

For the Bookbug category we got story time, and then the Children’s Laureate sang her book, and finally John Fardell drew pictures of scary monsters. He finished with a giant rabbit with horrible teeth, before winning the Bookbug prize for The Day Louis Got Eaten.

To make life easier for the Older readers category, Barry Hutchison became Elizabeth Hutchison, so he wouldn’t feel like the odd one out, sitting as he did, between Elizabeths Laird and Wein. They had to answer questions. Ms Hutchison has no shed, which is sad. (S)he likes horsepie best. (Dundee delicacy?) Ms Laird told us to run downhill if ever attacked by elephants, which is something that has kept me awake at night, so I’m very grateful. Ms Wein opted to go to the South Pole in the company of a ‘Norwegian who knows what he’s doing.’ Sensible woman.

While this was happening, Chae wore an outlandish gold jacket, two sizes too small. And then they danced, Gangnam style. I’d have to say Ms Wein did that far better than her namesakes. (She is an American, so clearly you don’t have to be Scottish to be there.)

But it helps, because Barry Hutchison won that category for The 13th Horseman. His speech was mercifully short. (He’d had a busy day the day before. Maybe he was worn out.)

Chae finished off by saying he loves us all.

Love you too, Chae. Great event!

*I borrowed that dreich quote from Barry. I’m sure it wasn’t really dreich, but I just love that word! Maybe the weather cried because I wasn’t there?

Bookwitch bites #94

I am the proud owner of a signed copy of Basu ni Notte. And I didn’t even know that it was called that, because I don’t read Japanese. (I know. It looks rather like Italian.) That in itself will tell you that my reading of Basu ni Notte has not gone terribly well, either, since I don’t read Japanese, and the book is in Japanese. Picture book, but still.

So I stand to benefit from the new reading guides issued by the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award people. They have just come up with twelve guides for books by ten recipients of the ALMA, one of whom is Ryoji Arai. He shared the prize with Philip Pullman in 2005. That’s when I was crazy enough to go to Gothenburg just to hear Philip speak. A side effect was meeting up with this Japanese author and illustrator.

He supposedly didn’t speak English, but he did – a little – when it came to the crunch.

No language troubles at all with Marion Lloyd. As you can tell, I’ve not ‘bitten’ anyone here for a while, which is why I am offering you old news. Or not news so much, as a link to what I thought was a very nice blog post by Susie Day about this super-editor when she retired.

I don’t know why we seldom write really lovely articles about people before they retire, or worse, die. I want to know now. Except I don’t know what I want to know, because you haven’t written about those fantastic people yet.

And speaking of fantastic and reading, I eventually enticed Daughter to read the best book of 2012. None of us have got round to much reading during the recent eating season, but once the suggestion was made, she found it hard to stop until she was done. She, too, liked Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein.

I have no expectation of reading hundreds of books during 2013, but a few would be nice. I need to start collecting for the next ‘best of’ award. But as Cathy Butler said in her blog post about reading speed, we are allowed to be really slow. It’s not better to be fast.

Although it would be handy.

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?)

Authors, authors everywhere

I already had two authors, plus one Son, on the go for Monday, when a third one said she wouldn’t mind meeting up. But that was not to be. The afternoon could only be stretched so much, and I was already overstretched.

First on the agenda was lunch with yet another Perthshire author. Elizabeth Wein left an incinerator meeting in Perth in order to eat a corned beef sandwich with me in Stirling, telling me all about her most marvellous book Code Name Verity, and showing me pilots’ stuff from the war and secret silk maps and everything. And I learned that Maddie lived just round the corner from me.

It’s as if it was meant.

We had a nice, if noisy, lunch in a traditional café (because of the war) and we talked, talked, talked. Elizabeth admitted to an interest in vintage underwear. Just so you know.

After lunch I had to hop on the train to Edinburgh, for some freshly baked cookies at Son’s and Dodo’s. The Lapsang Souchong was so smokey it set the smoke detector off. Or it might have been the cookies in the oven.

Grabbing my M&S sandwiches (sorry, I seem to talk a lot about food) I got on the 49 bus to the Royal Terrace Hotel, where Nicola Morgan was going to talk about brains.

I had been looking forward to sitting in the bar with Nicola and the other two people there, but contrary to Nicola’s modest expectations, her event sold out and I had to share her with loads of other people who also wanted to learn about the teenage brain. Pardon, the adolescent brain.

As it was, I sat at the back (Nicola had reserved me the most perfect seat in the corner, with my name on it and everything) munching goats cheese sandwiches as discreetly as possible, listening to Blame My Brain, which was so much more interesting even than I had expected. (I almost felt the Resident IT Consultant should have come too, and not just been used as a taxi service at the other end.)

There is an explanation as to why teenagers appear to be unable to be more articulate than to say ‘uhh’ at all times. Even old Shakespeare noticed this.

I will return with more details on the prefrontal cortex front later this week. Just now I will leave you with a brief mention of the dainty little cakes Nicola had on offer afterwards. Some of us drank tea and ate cake (oops, eating again) while others bought books.

It was a nice walk back to Waverley, passing a pretty old church at the end of the cobbled street, and with a lit up path meandering up Calton Hill. If I’d known what I was doing, and if I had not had a train to catch, I might have investigated some more. As it was, this turned out to be my second foray into unknown book related territory at night in one week.

The 2013 Carnegie longlists

When the Carnegie longlists were made public on Monday, I was too busy with reviews to blog about them. Besides, I thought it would be good to let everything sink in a little.

It was quite nice to see that the Daniel Finn book I was reviewing right when I received the notification of the longlists had made it on. If not – I mean if I hadn’t read it just then – it would have been yet another book I’d neither read nor heard of.

I’ve been counting. Not an easy task because the longlists are long; I think 68 for the Carnegie Medal and 64 for the Kate Greenaway Medal. Then I counted some more, to see if I’d read a reasonable number of them or not. I must admit it’s more towards the ‘or not’ end. 21 and 6 respectively, of which one features on both the lists.

It’s too early to have witchy feels. But I reckon that An Illustrated Treasury of Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales by Kate Leiper and Theresa Breslin would be a pretty worthy winner.

When I reviewed Code Name Verity at the beginning of the year, I did say it was one of the best books ever, so I would obviously have no objection to Elizabeth Wein winning the medal. Several more of the 21 will make it on to my 2012 favourites list. They are all fantastic books. More of the longlist lie waiting in a fairly orderly fashion. Some will get my attention, and others won’t, despite their certain excellence.

Others, I have heard of. And many I’ve not. The question is why not, because they are hardly the Mills & Boon equivalents that I give a wide berth these days.

Taken together, the longlisted books are about as many as I have the capacity to read and review in a year. Seeing as I have read many others that haven’t made it on to the lists, despite being quality books, as well as recent enough, means the world is full of good reads.

See you for the shortlists in March!

Old ladies

Isn’t it odd how you find you are far more prejudiced than you always thought you were? Annoying to discover, but also more common than we think.

Back in the olden days, when train travel and train tickets weren’t quite what they are now, the Resident IT Consultant had an annual season ticket for his daily commute. One bonus of this was a free day return for two, anywhere in the country. And rather than going somewhere nice a couple of hours away, he needed to get better value. He worked out it was possible to travel from Brighton to Edinburgh and back in one day.

So we did.

One of the things we did in Edinburgh was to look round the Georgian House, which proved far more fascinating than many grander mansions. The room steward in the kitchen was an elderly woman. The kind you like, but immediately write off as an elderly woman.

It was only as she reminisced about some event a year or two earlier, that I heard her say she had graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1924. Being young and stupid my immediate thought was ‘wow, she’s been to university?’ My next thought was, ‘well, why ever not?’ The Resident IT Consultant fared better, being related to an early lady doctor, whereas I come from simpler stock. If you were old enough to go to university in 1920, you wouldn’t have, if you follow my drift?

This came back to me as I caught part of an interview on the news recently, when they talked to a female Spitfire pilot, of which there were quite a few during WWII. Of necessity she’d need to be as old now as my Georgian steward was then. It’s just that you don’t think about this as being possible.

Yes, as I found when reading what is still the best book of 2012 – Code Name Verity – there were female pilots in the war. But in the war they were young… Now they’d be little old ladies.

I am deeply ashamed of my thoughts. I am on the way to becoming a little old lady myself.  At least I hope I am. It would beat the alternative, as they say. It’d be nice to think that when the not-too-far-off time comes I could have something to dazzle young ones with, but I doubt it.

Unless that day trip to Scotland counts.

Pre-mcbf midweek miscellany

Fearing I might not be able to bite you this weekend, I will give you a mixed bag of stuff today instead.

Fear. Yes. It’s the done thing. Meg Rosoff blogged the other day about all the dangers of going to the library. Is it safe now to admit to having omitted to fit a stair gate when Offspring were at their most vulnerable? I am a coward most of the time, but there are some things I feel you just need to risk, or we risk (hah) losing sight of common sense. I eat old food, too.

And I am afraid I daren’t say anything about this rather excellent shortlist for the Scottish Children’s Book Awards 2012. The three books for older readers comprise one author whom I admire a great deal (Elizabeth Laird) and the other two just happen to have written what must count as my bestest books (so far) this year, even outside Scotland. That’s Elizabeth Wein (odds that an Elizabeth wins?) and Barry Hutchison. And I see that even more favourites narrowly missed the shortlist. They clearly need a longer shortlist. Or more awards.

The younger shortlists (you know what I mean!) are also full of jeopardy, with people being eaten and there being nuts, soldiers, crocodiles and lions.

A man who lives dangerously is Tony Higginson of Formby Books. He works too hard. Now he has added to his burden and blogs in his spare (double hah) time. Double danger there next Thursday (and I’m telling you now because I plan to be busy for a while) when he has invited customers to a crime barbecue. I mean, books and flames! Stephen Booth is the one who will be flambéed. Or was that the burgers?

This is assuming Tony makes it through his day. I believe I have counted three more events he’s doing that day, which is the day I already have so much on that I am wondering if I can crawl out of bed for the piano tuner at the crack of dawn. I suppose, take one event after another… But no trips for me to the coast and Tony.

Next year I’ll send out dates when I’m available.