I’d have to keep doing it…

It’s a particularly busy time for everyone with Children’s Book Festival.

Want to know how everyone is getting on this October?  go here, here, here, here, here and here.

In the meantime here is something to ponder, it might give us all a reason to do more and better all year round.

Overheard in a bookshop last Thursday evening. A mother talking to her friend about her young son. “I wouldn’t want to start reading to him at night because then I’d have to keep doing it”

National Campaign for the Arts

You might have seen a few articles and letters to various editors about the the value of the arts flying about at the moment. Following on from the Bord Snip report and now the Commission on Taxation report which threatens the Artists Tax Exemption many in the arts community are determined to fight for funding, recognition and the arts infrastructure. CBI is participating in the National Campaign.

Follow these links for a selection of relevant sites and articles. You can also follow the campaign on Twitter – @campaign4arts.

National Campaign For Arts

Dublin Central Arts Workers

Visual Artists Ireland respond re Artists Tax Exemption

Stuart McLaughlin on making the case for the Arts

Jim Culleton on Iceland, Ireland and Culture

Francesca Simon Audio interview

Just One More Book has a  really interesting interview with Francesca Simon. Despite being a global phenomenon  since the mid nineties Horrid Henry is only now being published in the US. The interview touches on what might have delayed the US release, and there is also much discussion of the pleasure of reading aloud.  Well worth the 25 minutes for this one.

School Library Budget cuts – put ‘em under pressure

Martina Devlin has an opinion piece in today’s Irish Independent about the cut to the school library budget.

It didn’t cost a lot, at around €2m a year, but it made a difference. It meant books — not textbooks but attractively packaged, recently-published novels and non-fiction books — were introduced into the classroom.

After almost 40 years, the scheme has now been discontinued. There is no School Library Grant for 2009 — the budget is gone. Not reduced but removed. Teachers and librarians expected some decrease, in view of economic circumstances, but to their dismay it has simply vanished.

The impact of the cuts for children, teachers, authors, illustrators, publishers and suppliers is huge. If you feel as strongly about this as we in CBI do, please please tell your elected representatives local, national and European.  You might also want to Talk to Joe about it. The more we can raise our voices the better.

There is also a good report about how the scheme operates available from Wexford Libraries here

Axel and Julia talk about two sides of the Gruffalo

I am making a firm resolution to get to the Hay Festival next year. Not only is the line up always fantastic, and I have heard great reports from former attendees but the background to these web videos make it looks like a cross between Electric Picnic and a Buckingham Palace garden party.

Anyway onto the content – a short interview with both Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler below. Interesting that they both touch on the nature of their relationship as author and illustrator – It is not a collaboration as often people presume. Instead their work is managed by the publisher involved and each works independently.

well worth the watch -

Axel Scheffler – http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2009/jun/10/gruffalo-axel-scheffler

Julia Donaldson – http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2009/may/26/hay-festival-julia-donaldson-gruffalo

Irish Reading Stars Start perhaps?

You might have spotted mention of Premier League Reading Stars over on achuka and The Independent last week. Fantastic scheme and a really creative reading partnership.

In summary (and I do it no justice here) each premiership club nominates a reading champion who shares their book choice and then each club adopts local library branches to work with for the duration of the project.

The book selections are often entertaining in themselves – including

• Bacary Sagna – The Soul of a Butterfly by Muhammad Ali
• Brad Friedel – Stick Man by Julia Donaldson
• Jamie Carragher – War Horse by Michael Morpurgo
• Wayne Rooney – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by JK Rowling
• Robert Green – The Iliad by Homer
• Emmerson Boyce – Wallace and Gromit: The Bootiful Game
  

It got me thinking what would an Irish Reading Stars look like, I’ve started a list below, to amuse me on a gloomy day. You’ll notice that its not confined to sports people, you can decide if that means either my knowledge of sports is limited or if I simply can’t resist the option to include some other targets options. Mine are pretty lame – I’m sure you can all do much better………….

• Brian O’Driscoll – Amy Huberman Green, Teen Agony Queen
• Andrea Roche – I will not ever never eat a Tomato
• Ronan O’Gara – The Silver Sword
• Brian Cowen – The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Miriam O’Callaghan – Friday Nights
• Brian Lenihan- My First Book of Numbers

Irish Book Awards – shortlists on rte.ie

Tomorrow is the official announcement of Irish Book Award shortlists but rte.ie has a jump on everyone else it looks like.

Major congratulations to Celine Kiernan who is shortlisted in The Newcomer of the Year category for The Poison Throne.

The other category shortlists are also now visible on the main  awards site- more on those tomorrow.

Libraries with Teeth

David coined that great phase recently when a passionate librarian responded to a Kevin Myers article which questioned the need for publicly funded arts and library spaces.

The library employees will stay on the state payroll while the bookshop closes and its owners and their employees go on the dole. Precisely what are the benefits of that for any town, or any minister for finance?

Moreover, what is the actual cost of keeping both theatre and library going, in terms of maintenance, heating, depreciation, plus the salaries and lifetime pensions of the public servants who work in them?

Discussion of libraries and their role continued in the Irish Times with a piece about their increased use in times of recession. Based on Library Council input the article outlines how

More people are coming in to use computer facilities – some 97 per cent of the State’s libraries offer free internet access – to look for and apply for jobs. “People are also joining simply because they now have less money and more time on their hands,” he (Brendan Teeling, The Library Council) believes.

The books being borrowed have shifted, again with the budget books now competing with self-help books for readers’ attention, although both are overshadowed by the demand for the popular fiction of Marian Keyes, Cecelia Ahern and Maeve Binchy, who all routinely feature in the top 10 most borrowed books in Ireland’s libraries.

Libraries are an extraordinary community resource and in so many cases, with the comittment of staff, community and other organisations become vibrant hubs for literature. Sometime I wonder though if they try and be too many things to too many people. Nurturing the creative flair of some library spaces may just allow them to excel in a particular area – children’s services, local history, music etc. I’ve been lucky enough to meet with some library teams from Holland who push to develop the range and ambition of library services. More on the inspiring Library of 100 Talents tomorrow ……

World Book Day want to know your guilty secrets

In the run  up to World Book Day, they want to know your guilty reading secrets -

Ever pretended to have read a book you hadn’t?

Ever stayed up way too late to finish a book?

Survey here - It’ll only take a couple of minutes and it would be nice to have Ireland  represented

In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I went through a Dick Francis stage when I was about 13!

on boys and reading

The Times Online carries an article by author Joe Craig about creativity and boys. It’s similar to a talk Joe delivered last year in Cork city libraries during Children’s Book Festival

The biggest change comes in Year 7, which statistically is also when there’s the biggest drop off in reading – especially in boys. Now, it perhaps seems obvious that the withering of originality is greatly caused by reading less. But I think it’s also the other way round: they read less because their creative spark is consistently doused. Their connection with stories, with ideas and imagination, is stifled by the school environment. If the fun has gone from stories, why read?

Oisin McGann talked about something similar at Teenage Kicks, The LAI conference in November. You can access the full text of his often very funny talk here.

When boys are at that age, we’re basically just little cave men. We have simple tastes, which – in some cases – we never grow out of. I firmly believe that most of the cave paintings that have been found around the world were painted by men, simply because they are largely pictures of a buffalo or a mammoth being shot in the arse with an arrow. If women had been doing the painting, they would be pictures of marriages, girls becoming best friends, or people sitting round dealing with social issues. Or they might possibly be recording the invention of the shoe (I wasn’t sure if I’d get away with that one). But the boys wanted to shoot a mammoth in the arse with an arrow and six thousand years later, we haven’t changed.