You’re never too old for Slinky Malinki!

… so said my foxy flatmate, when a prospective new boyfriend, on seeing her bedroom for the first time, queried why an undergrad English student had picture books on her bookshelf. Being at that time (though not for very much longer) unfamiliar with Lynley Dodd, the boyfriend thought he might be about to get lucky. As, of course, he was: my flatmate proceeded to read him children’s stories for the next hour.

There comes a time in everyone’s life when some well-meaning adult (usually a parent, teacher, or librarian) will say “you’re too big for picture books now. Why don’t you choose a real book this time?” From that point on, picture books are shunned for recreational reading.

Like my flatmate, I consider this to be a great loss. Picture books have so much to offer, it’s such a shame that they are used almost exclusively to people whose age is in single digits. Accordingly, I periodically throw a “Picture Book Appreciation Day”, where I make a lot of fudge, ransack the public and National libraries, encourage all my guests to bring their own, and we sit around and read to each other and talk about our favourites (and consume vast quantities of sugar). The biggest problem with hosting these events is deciding which images to include on the invitations!

I could give so many reasons why grown ups can appreciate and benefit from picture books, but to me the majority seem so obvious as to be not worth mentioning, so I’ll just close with this one: picture books, being shorter, are more memorable, so therefore easier to quote verbatim. Hardly a day goes by without me feeling the need to enrich conversation by making a picture book allusion. Here are some of the ones I’ve used since starting this blog:

“… and they said, ‘good question!’ / But nobody had a good suggestion.”

“”You should have looked in the matchbox first.”

“The cat from Norway got stuck in the doorway.”

“Unless someone like you / cares a whole awful lot / then nothing is going to get better / it’s not!”

“Hey! Upside down critter! Who are you, and what do you eat?”

“This block of chocolate is mine and all for me!”

“Never try to milk a chicken. It hardly ever works.”

Judge a book by its cover!

I wrote the following a few years ago for a website I used to have which promoted CYA literature. I was reminded of it when I read Lyndsey’s first post about how she chooses something to read.

…I think the theory goes that there is much, much more to a book than what the cover tells you. Imagine how many great stories you might miss out on just because the cover had a stink picture, or because the book was in bad shape! Often the books that are in the worst condition, with the cover falling off, pages falling out, creases and dog-ears and scuffs and dirt all over them, contain the best stories. They got into such poor condition because somebody loved that book so much they took it with them everywhere! It was bound to get a little damaged along the way…

Despite this, I am increasingly aware that if you’re trying to choose one book from among many you haven’t read, the cover is all you’ve got to go on. I know it’s unconventional, but I do it myself and advise you to do the same: go ahead and judge a book by its cover! After all, until you’ve read it, what on earth else are you supposed to judge it by?

But judge wisely. Make use of all the information the cover can give you, not just the picture. (I would agree strongly with an adage that said “don’t judge a book by the picture on its cover”!) If I’m thinking about a book I’ve never heard of before, I’d be processing the following things, in order from least to most important:

Title is of little use to you if you haven’t heard of the book before. Sometimes a title will be especially intriguing and descriptive (e.g. How Hedley Hopkins did a dare, robbed a grave, made a new friend who might not have really been there at all and while he was at it committed a terrible sin which everyone was doing even though he didn’t know it), more often it will merely name a principal character (e.g. Alex; The Hobbit) which is of no use to the first-time reader.

Image The image includes any pictures or graphics, as well as the way the cover itself looks- e.g. does it use holographics, bright colours, particular font/s and so on. Again, there is little this can tell you about whether the story this cover contains will be one that appeals to you. Having said that, it is the book’s image that is traditionally most likely to entice someone to pick the book up and take a closer look, which is I think what the silly proverb is advising you to do.

Reviewer’s Comments Sometimes they are helpful, sometimes they aren’t. I hate it when a cover has only reviewer’s comments and no blurb. And when covers have more than two or three sentences of reviews, I start thinking that the authors must be a bit full of themselves. 

The one time when a review on the cover will have a major influence on me wanting to read the book is when the review is attributed to another author whose name I instantly recognise whose writing I have enjoyed. It makes sense to me that, if I love the writing of Diana Wynne Jones (which I do), then she knows something about what I like to read, so if she’s recommending a book, it’s almost certainly worth me looking it up! 

Blurb is a crucial part of a book’s cover, and more often than not it is the most information you can get about a book before you read it, unless you are lucky enough to have had someone recommend it to you personally or review it for you. If the blurb tells you about the plot and / or characters of the story, and they don’t interest you at all, there’s a pretty good chance you won’t like the book. 

Publisher is a factor I’ve only recently noticed, even though I’ve been ‘judging’ books this way for years. Depending on the publishing house, books produced by the same publisher tend to have a similar look. So, when I’m browsing through rows and rows of books at a book fair the ones most likely to catch my attention are the ones that look familiar, because the spine is a similar colour or has a familiar logo or the cover is set out in the same way or whatever as another good book. And, as a general rule, publishers publish the same kinds of books. Puffin and Apple are good examples of publisher’s symbols to look out for for books for 8-15 year olds. 

Author is, in my opinion, the best way to judge a book you haven’t read. Generally speaking , if a person wrote one book you loved, you’ll find the rest of their work worth a read. Make an effort to remember the names of the authors of books you read, so that you’ll know what to look for (or what to avoid!) in the future. 

I’m certainly not saying not to read anything if you haven’t heard of anything else by that author. (When you think about it, if that was your policy, you’d never read anything!) But recognising an author’s appeal for you is an excellent place to start. 

If you can’t judge a book by the information on its cover, you’ll end up reading a lot of books that you won’t enjoy. Which would be a sad thing, when there are so many good books to read!

A real good plain sensible name

I guess I’m not the first blogger to have written three posts in succession, and then done nothing further for a week. In my case it’s not that I ran out of motivation, couldn’t think of a topic, or lost confidence in the project. Oh no not I- I was trying to think of a good title for my next post.

Having a meaningful subject header is a bit of an obsession of mine. If you email me something without a subject, I’ll type in what I think the subject should have been next to the RE: when I reply. If I might want to refer back to your subject-less email, I’ll forward it to myself with a subject, so that I can find it again later.

If I’m initiating a topic, my preference has always been to use a song lyric in the subject line. Mostly I’ve used pop songs (e.g. “nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do”), but musicals are also good sources of topical lines (e.g. “I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine”), and sometimes I resort to children’s songs (e.g. “I never knew just what it was, and I guess I never will”).

When it comes to this blog, I feel it might be time to extend myself. My first and third posts used lyrics in the title, my second and fourth use quotes from children’s literature (as that is to be the main topic of the blog). I’m aiming to use a quotation from each story I review as the title of that review, but we’ll see how that goes. It took me several nights’ tossing and turning to think where I could find something that said what I wanted to say about names, and when inspiration struck it was in a book that is very familiar to me. I could see myself wasting hours ransacking my library trying to find a particular thought expressed somewhere in the realms of Narnia, or Tortall, or Solla Sollew.

It’s taken me about ten minutes to write that last paragraph. Why? Because most of my brain is occupied trying to find a thematic link between the three song lyrics I quoted above. Moving right along…

Just because she doesn’t do what everybody else does

Well, now I’ve perved at the blogs of twenty others on my course, and I’m gaining confidence. Many have commented that, like me, they’re new to this blogging thing. Together we can learn from each other.

The word “uncategorized” is annoying me. Partly because I don’t want American spelling on my blog, but it’s on everyone’s blog, and I can’t figure out what it means! Tags make sense to me (I credit LibraryThing with getting me into my library career path in the first place), but I haven’t gotten my head around these darn categories yet.

On the topic of things that annoy me, I don’t like it that every time I press ‘enter’, a new paragraph is started. Maybe I just want to start a new line sometimes, all right?

Anyway, I had to choose a theme for the look of my blog. The only clear preference I had was for my menus to be on the right. That left me plenty of options. While browsing, I jotted down the names I was considering using. I was amused to find that my entire list was either food (choco, liquorice, fruit shake) or characters  from children’s books (Coraline, Regulus). So, trying to act like a grown-up making informed choices based on sound premises, I went back and chose a different theme (brand new day), and I liked it.

Unfortunately, someone else on my course has already shared their blog, and she’s using this same theme. I can’t bring myself to change mine now, I wonder if I should bribe her to change hers? Maybe with a choco-liquorice fruit shake?

Let’s have a little talk about tweetle beetles

What do you know about tweetle beetles? Well…

When tweetle beetles fight, it’s called a tweetle beetle battle.

And when they battle in a puddle, it’s a tweetle beetle puddle battle.

AND when tweetle beetles battle with paddles in a puddle, they call it a tweetle beetle puddle paddle battle. AND…

When beetles battle beetles in a puddle paddle battle and the beetle battle puddle is a puddle in a bottle, they call this a tweetle beetle bottle puddle paddle battle muddle. AND…

When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles and the bottle’s on a poodle and the poodle’s eating noodles, they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battle. AND…

At this point the narrator is interrupted. This entire extract (including the post’s title) is from Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss. Is this sufficient explanation for the title of my blog? Perhaps not.

My profile picture shows a tweetle beetle with a paddle (but no puddle). If you look closely, you may discern that it is a photograph, not a drawing.

Before I finished primary school, I  learned that I could read this text aloud fluently with ease, and many others (both my peers and those older than me) could not.  At about age 15 I declared I would like to get a tweetle beetle tattoo. I was told not to, because I would change my mind. When I turned 30, I decided half my life was long enough to demonstrate that my mind was made up.

I talk fast, and I have a lot to say. Dr. Seuss is a genius. That’s why I called my blog “tweetle beetle babble”.