Manga Shakespeare, anyone?

Monster spin-offs

My brother brought this odd trend for reimaging classics to my attention - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is also available. Bizarre, but i love the cover!

And another one

Booker club

I wrote a piece for the Datablog last week on Booker prize winners and whether it boosts sales. In the process I came across a Guardian blog, the Booker club, in which Sam Jordison reads and reviews a different Booker winner each month.

Whenever a new 'top 100 books ever' type list comes out I promise myself I will read all of them, but never quite get beyond the first few. So the Booker winners list, standing at only 43 books so far, is much more achievable.

I've only read three or four of them in the past, which is shameful considering the list includes classics like Midnight's Children, The Remains of the Day, The God of Small Things and Possession.

I'm not sure how easy it will be to get hold of some of the early winners (The Elected Member, anyone?) but let's see how far I get this time! The Man Booker archive even stores the shortlists, too, which should keep me going a few years.

Book of the fortnight

Sadly overdue, again (insert library joke here). Must try harder to turn these in on time!

Anyway, on with the review. Jo and Dave bought me Twilight for my birthday; I remember the hype surrounding the film (why teenage girls think Robert Pattinson is attractive is beyond me, maybe I need to see the movie) but I hadn't read much about the books.

Jo quite rightly thought a book about American teenagers and vampires would interest me, and once I got used to the slightly adolescent style it was a good read, although definitely a piece of escapism rather than a literary work of genius.

The story centres around Bella, the new girl in a very bleak Washington town, who falls in love with Edward, another outsider, who just happens to be a vampire (but he doesn't eat humans, so that's okay). Cliches abound - lonely teenagers, high school cliques, vampires with good intentions - and the romance element reminded me of Mills and Boon; this is definitely a Buffy-Angel teen fantasy, not a complex Buffy-Spike one (no offence to Joss Whedon, who is a much better writer). The fluffiness is saved by Bella's pithy sarcasm, though (I couldn't help picturing her as Ellen Page), and the plot does darken as it unfolds.

But I'm not the target audience, and it's easy to see why the series is so popular. What teenage girl can't identify with being the outsider, or wanting to fall for the devastatingly handsome but slightly dangerous boy at school (and, even better, have him fall for her?). If you roll your eyes at the mushier stuff, Twilight is a great guilty pleasure and it's way cooler than reading Harry Potter on the tube.

Animal vegetable mineral

In the same chapter of Diana Athill's biography (see Bible post below), she recounts a conversation with a friend who bemoaned the proliferation of animals in children's books, specifically talking, clothes-wearing animals.

A quick glance at Logan's bookshelves confirms it: This Dinosaur Is So Big! (dinosaurs), That's Not My Puppy (dogs), Guess How Much I Love You (rabbits), The Very Hungry Caterpillar (you get the picture). Thomas the Tank Engine isn't an animal but neither is he a person (does anyone else find him a teensy bit creepy?). We're Going on a Bear Hunt, about a family of five, really centres on the bear, not the people. And in Not Now, Bernard, Bernard quickly gets eaten by the monster.

Athill argues that"children respond to animal protagonists because when very small what they need is not to discover and recognise 'real life', but to discover and recognise their own feelings." While learning about themselves is only one reason for reading to children, her point makes sense. The most obvious application is Eric Carle's From Head to Toe, where children are encouraged to mimic animal behaviours (it also serves as a good party trick, Logan has built up quite a repertoir).

The only real exception I can think of are the Charlie and Lola books, by Lauren Child. The protagonists are most definitely children, and aren't "drawn in such an unrealistic way that they might as well be animals", as Athill describes Postman Pat (!). The appeal here is that no adults encroach on the stories - not even partially, like Mammy in Tom and Jerry - and the dialogue is defiantly childlike (the Animals book includes a "biggish elephant" and a "very biggish whale", the Shapes book "squarish" and "triangley" shapes). They may teach basic realities, but they keep that teaching on a child's level rather than preaching from an adult's point of view.

All this reminds me of a friend's mother who refused to let her younger sibling watch The Land Before Time, not because the dinosaurs were speaking but because the film was about dinosaurs, and as all good Christians know, dinosaurs didn't really exist. So we're back to the Bible again. No more religion today, promise!

Everyone should read the Bible

Guardian Education is running an interview today with the poet Andrew Motion, in which he argues for Bible stories to be more central to education. I did a bit of background for it (it is almost impossible to summarise Bible stories in less than 200 words, btw - unless you do it in Lego).

I think Motion's point is a valid one; being an atheist should not mean denying the educational value of morality tales like those in the 'good book', or the writing quality. I keep meaning to read the Bible properly; the Old Testament in particular is packed with juicy stories.

The article quotes the director of the National Secular Society: "Children already get 45 minutes of religious education a week for 10 years. Isn't that enough?" But RE looks at religions as a whole, not at the historical or literary impact of religious storytelling.

Diana Athill addresses that very point in her biography Somewhere Towards the End, which coincidentally is my current read. She too was a committed atheist, but was raised on Bible stories by her grandmother. She says enjoying familiar Bible chapters "does not mean that I kneel down and worship God [but] they still trail a whiff of that old special importance...it did certainly influence the way I was to see life; yet it failed to convince me of its central teaching."

It is possible to separate the doctrine from the story, and appreciate the intrinsic value of the writing without believing in the religion. It would be a shame, as we become increasingly atheist, if the beauty and creativity of so many of the Bible stories was lost.

Not about death!

Nice to see Michelle Obama getting into her role as first lady by reading an excellent Eric Carle book to some schoolchildren.

My favourite animals are the rather surreal purple cat and blue horse, no doubt thrown in to confuse parents with no imagination.

Book of the fortnight: The Year of Magical Thinking

Um, you may have noticed that my rather optimistic initial post was called 'Book of the week'. I'm not organised enough to have kept that up even into the second week, so I've scaled it down a bit!

Having appealed to Mark when I got no books at all for Christmas, and resorted to reading more of my Stephen King back catalogue (The Shining this time, an absolute classic even for those of you who hate everything King, but surprising how much was added to the film by Stanley Kubrick - there you go, two reviews for the price of one), I got a mountain of books for my birthday, so I should have plenty of meterial to keep the feature up this time.



The first on the pile was Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (sponsored by Jo Smith). Ostensibly a record of the year following her husband's death, a time when her daughter was also seriously ill, it is really a treatise on the nature of grief, of loneliness, and a memoir of a life lived together.

Didion's writing is sometimes lyrical, drawing on her vast literary knowledge for discussions of death, sometimes analytical, looking instead to medical texts and the coroner's report to make sense of her loss. Some passages of medical jargon had to be read several times over, which spoiled the flow of the writing.

Some readers may also find her style cold - there is no vast emotional outpouring of grief, rather the devastatingly real minutae of living without someone close. But that doesn't make it any the less powerful; the passage about her daughter reading a dedication at the memorial service - "Even more than one more day, as you used to say to me" - gets me even now.

The subject may not be for everyone, but I found it a heartbreakingly brilliant portrayal of loss. Like Jo said, it's an odd book to give someone as a present but I'll certainly be passing it on to everyone I know.

Logan goes to Oxfam

We had a jaunt to Crouch End at the weekend, they've got a comics section in the Oxfam bookshop there. Logan helped himself to a book from the children's shelves then wandered the entire shop until he found somewhere suitable to read, wedged against the revolving shelves by the front door.

Check out the reins that are cunningly disguised as a backpack, too - quite cool, but still don't stop him wandering into the road if you're not careful. And you feel a bit like you're walking a dog.

Something that is nothing whatsoever to do with that Obama guy

I volunteer as a reader at a local school once a week, so I know more about children's books than adult ones these days. This week we picked up a copy of Chris Riddell's Ottoline and the Yellow Cat; while my six-year-old friend was less than impressed (it was "boring" - that word was banned in my junior school - and anyway, she wanted to read books with big pictures and no words) I have found my new fiction hero.

The style was familiar from Riddell's political cartoons in the Observer, but I'd never encountered his children's stories (over 100 at the last count!). The book has a totally bizarre storyline (Ottoline lives in a New York apartment with Mr Munroe, a small hairy thing from a Norwegian bog, where she curates her parents' collection of random objects (four-spouted teapots anyone?)) and quirky line drawings (there are so many images it's a bit like a graphic novel), which are tagged to provide extra snippets of information; there are hidden joys on every page.

In short, it's everything I love in a storybook. I'm smitten.

Book of the week 1

It's not a grown-up book I know, but I've been reading We're Going on a Bear Hunt at least ten times a day of late. Like many people, I know the rhyme from childhood but I hadn't realised it was written by one of Britain's best contemporary children's authors, and the current Children's Laureate. Logan loves it - the rhythm of Michael Rosen's story and the actions that go with it but also the wonderful illustrations by Helen Oxenbury.

YouTube has a wonderful video of Michael Rosen's personal rendition; buy it here, your toddlers will thank you.