Hunger Games

If you're interested in teenage fiction, in particular the dystopian kind, you can hardly fail to have noticed yesterday's premiere of the Hunger Games movie. See Yahoo! Movies for more information about the film and s1play.com for details of when you can see it in Glasgow. There's a great review in Empire which gives it 4 out of 5 stars and says: "As thrilling and smart as it is terrifying. There have been a number of big-gun literary series brought to screen over the past decade. This slays them all." More locally, the Herald also gives it 4 stars and Literature for Lads gives it 9 out of 10.

I've written about the books, by Suzanne Collins, before here. If you want to read them, we have them to borrow - though you might have to wait for the first one. In the meantime, our booklist Survivor has a collection of other titles you might like. The film has produced a flurry of articles on why dystopian fiction seems to be so popular among teenagers at the moment, including Booktrust the Telegraph, the Literary Platform, Slate and We love this book . The Observer has also run a profile of Suzanne Collins, and some teachers are posting study guides here and here. The Guardian has a Hunger Games quiz, on which I only scored 3 out of 10 - oh the shame, I really need to read those books again!

If you see the film, let us know what you think in the comments.

NB this post has been updated with later material since first being published.

Scorsese films Hugo

There was a glitzy premiere this week for Martin Scorsese's new film, his first in 3D, Hugo - But did you know it was based on a book we have in the library? The invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznic (Scholastic, 2007) is a beautiful book for the 9+ age group - it might look dauntingly thick, but much of it is taken up with black and white illustrations, so its already quite filmic in quality. It tells the story of Hugo, an orphan and a thief, who lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station. He desperately believes a broken automation will make his dreams come true, but when his world collides with an eccentric girl and a bitter old man, Hugo's undercover life, and his most precious secret, are put in jeopardy.

The movie has its own website where you can watch the trailer, and you can borrow the book from us - find it at J 808.3 SEL.

The Hunger Games Companion and film

I've blogged before about Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy, the first of which will be out on film soon. If you want to watch the trailer, there's a link here. I've also just added to stock The Hunger Games companion by Lois H Gresh, which I was lucky enough to win in a draw from the publishers, Macmillan Children's Books. Thanks very much to them. It contains an author profile and insights into the series' main themes, such as the nature of evil and the justification, or otherwise, of rebellion and war.

The novels are at J 808.3 COL and the Companion at J 808.309 GRE (although it'll be going out on the new books' display this weekend).

Jeff Bridges, The Giver and dystopian fiction

Jeff Bridges hopes to bring to the big screen a classic young adult novel, Lois Lowry's The Giver. In a world without conflict, poverty and inequality, conformity and happiness are a way of life. But for Jonas, things are different. While his friends are selected to be doctors or teachers, Jonas is sent to the Giver where he discovers the secrets beneath the surface of his world. The Oscar-winning Bridges would take on the role of The Giver if the film comes to fruition.

We have the book in the library, and it's on our Survivor booklist. Mostly set in apocalyptic versions of the future, the books on this list share a common theme: the battle for survival. Their central characters, usually teenagers, have to overcome fire, floods, demons or some other horror as they struggle to build new lives or new societies. As well as being good stories, the books will also make their readers think about the way we treat our world today.

Dystopian fiction is a popular, current theme. Julie Bertagna also features on the list with Exodus and Zenith - she's recently published Aurora, the final part of the trilogy. Read her article in the Scotsman earlier this month on why teenagers are such avid readers of books on dystopias. Books for Keeps also recently published its list of 10 of the best dystopian novels.

Wimpy Kid 2

The second Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie is out. Watch the trailer and read an interview with author Jeff Kinney - and borrow his books from us, here's what we have.

Film news

Last week, Booktrust published a list of ten favourite children's books made into films. You can see what they were from the slide show below - and all are available to borrow from Jordanhill Library. Do you agree with the choices? Are there other books which were made into better films - or do you just prefer to read the book and imagine the characters yourself?



More films are in the pipeline - Working Title Films and PeaPie Films have acquired the rights to Andy Mulligan's Trash and casting is well under way for the film version of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. This has not been without controversy, as the comments to the article show but, as suggested above, many people have their own images of the characters and won't be happy with an actor who doesn't fit that. I have to admit, the chosen actors look a bit too perfect and shiny for me

Shaun Tan's "The lost thing" wins Oscar

Oscar congratulations to Shaun Tan : The Lost Thing, based on his book, won Best Short Film. Read a review of the book from Books for Keeps and Trevor Cairney's blogpost about Tan, watch the film online and borrow the book from us - we have several Shaun Tan books on our catalogue.

Judy Moody at the movies

Walker Books (@walkerbooksuk) have just tweeted:


Exciting news! The Judy Moody movie, Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer, will be released in the US on June 10, 2011...

No date yet for the UK.


See also http://www.judymoodythemovie.com/ and check our catalogue for Judy Moody books (by Megan McDonald).

PS 3/3/2011, article from USA Today

Why Patrick Ness is better than Tom Cruise and other miscellany

Well, the snow and the end of term have got in the way of blogging for quite some time, so here are some of the items I'd been meaning to write about all thrown together in an end of year pot pourri. No particular order, but I've put Patrick Ness first because I liked the headline!

Why Patrick Ness is better than Tom Cruise comes from those nice people at Scottish Book Trust who recently took Ness on tour around Renfrewshire and West Dunbartonshire. Alison, the librarian from Clydebank High School, posted on their blog to talk about the effect of Patrick Ness on her pupils. There's also a video from the tour.

Still with Scottish Book Trust, did you know about their Teachers' Online Bookgroups? There's one each for books for primary and secondary age children, and one for professional development. Each has downloadable material to go with the texts, e.g. for Choke Chain by Jason Donald (a book for secondary children) there are teachers' notes, an interview with the author and a podcast of him reading an extract from the book.

Picture books do still work for kids - an article in October in the New York Times suggested that picture books were no longer a staple as parents tried to push their children towards "chapter books". This has promted responses from both CBS News and Publisher's Weekly - don't write the obit for picture books yet, they say. Certainly not in this Library, where they remain very popular.

Enid Blyton falls out of children's favour is an article in the Telegraph which relates that Blyton has fallen out of the top ten list of children's authors for the first time in decades because youngsters cannot relate to her language. Hmm, we don't stock her anyway because we don't consider her good enough quality (though I read them all when I was growing up and I turned into a librarian, so they can't be that bad!)

If you want quality, Julia Donaldson is a safe bet. An article in the Guardian's Books Blog praises Stick Man as a potential Christmas classic.

Looking for fiction for 10-14s? Look no further than the Literacy Adviser (Bill Boyd, latterly of Learning and Teaching Scotland) - and happily, most of the recommended titles on his long list are in stock here. The rest of the site is worth a look too. I now subscribe to his blog, and after the New Year I hope to create a Blogroll of this and others that I consult regularly.

Another good blog to follow for children's and teenage fiction is Tall Tales & Short Stories. For example, here's an interview with Keith Charters and Graham Watson of Strident Publishing - a Scottish publisher based in East Kilbride, many of whose books we have in our catalogue.

David Almond is a popular, and award-winning, author whose My Dad's a Birdman is now a play - Observer review here. Skellig, of course, was made into a film and we have both book and DVD in stock.

If you like Michelle Paver's Chronicles of Darkness series you might want to listen to her reading from the 6th and final title, Ghost hunter, in a Guardian podcast.

Books for Keeps has started a film-review section. Guess what the first review is? Harry Potter of course!

And finally - the "Books of the year" lists have started coming out. Here are 32 gathered together (not all children's) by SCC English blog and an international collection (all children's) from Chicken Spaghetti.

Season's greetings to everyone. See you in 2011!

Inspiring young readers with film

The Guardian recently ran a piece Films in schools are inspiring children with the joy of learning about the charity Filmclub which supplies schools with free films from a 1,800-strong cinematic library and claims that movies help disengaged pupils to connect with their lessons. One example is The boy in the striped pyjamas of which one young reviewer says "You actually feel like you witness the horror of the Holocaust and you connect with the characters in the movie." Of course, you can do this with our stock - we have both the book and film of Striped pyjamas and many other titles. One section of our Books for Boys list is devoted to film and TV tie-ins.

More and more children's books are being filmed - recent announcments include Judy Blume's Tiger Eyes , Michael Morpurgo's War Horse and Francesca Simon's Horrid Henry.

Finally in film news, Scotland on Screen is an exciting educational resource that puts hundreds of important historical film texts online, providing students with a rear-view mirror on our society over the past century.

Cast announced for Morpurgo's War Horse

"Steven Spielberg has rounded up a clutch of quality British acting talent to head up the cast of War Horse, his first film to reach the screens since 2008’s Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. Emily Watson, Peter Mullan, David Thewlis and Benedict Cumberbatch have all signed on the dotted line, but taking the lead (or the reigns) is young actor Jeremy Irvine, who has earned his stripes with both the National Youth Theatre and the RSC." From Empire Online.

War Horse is by Michael Morpurgo who today took part in a Scottish Book Trust Authors Live session - read about it and download teaching resources here. We have the book and a CD version in stock - check the catalogue for a full list of our Morpurgo holdings.

New author links

A mixed bag of links which have dropped into my RSS/Twitter feeds recently:

Philip Ardagh's Grubtown site.

Lots on J M Barrie because of the 150th anniversary of his birth: the official site; Books from Scotland; and the NTS.

A Theresa Breslin podcast from Scottish Booktrust.

A Booktrust interview with Lucy Cousins to celebrate Maisy's 20th birthday.

A YouTube trailer for Michelle Harrison's 13 Treasures.

A Telegraph Book Club piece about Clive King's Stig of the Dump.

Two blog posts about Nicola Morgan, one from Scribble City Central and the other from Absolute Vanilla.

Finally, some film news. Films are definitely on the way about Judy Moody, Diary of a wimpy kid and, possibly, Mr Gum. I couldn't find any links about the latter apart from this tweet from its author on 20th May:
@AndyStantonTM EXCITING INDUSTRY GOSSIP: I am meeting with a film company today to discuss possible 'Mr Gum' movie.

Coming soon 2: more films of children's books

With the news that Disney is rebranding its film of Rapunzel as Tangled, Jim Crace in yesterday's Guardian imagines what other children's stories and fairy tales could be made more appealing to boys - Malice in Wonderland for example? I've already mentioned the Percy Jackson film and the forthcoming BBC production of Saci Lloyd's Carbon Diaries (click on the films tag below to see all relevant posts) but don't think I've covered Cressida Cowell's How to train your dragon which is due to come out in a few months time - we have it and other books in the series in the Library.

Children's book miscellany

This post is an update for several links I haven't had time to blog about individually in the last couple of weeks. I'll start with ones about specific authors. Katherine Paterson is currently serving as the US's equivalent of our Children's Laureate, the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Read for your life in Public School Insights is an interview in both podcast and transcript while Fiction Focus's Tuesday Spotlight collects together a number of links, articles and interviews as well as the trailer for the film of Bridge to Terabithia. The latest Horn Book (yet to arrive in the Library) is also largely devoted to Paterson.

Who else? In alphabetical order - much loved picture book authors Janet and Allan Ahlberg feature in Trevor Cairney's blog, Literacy, families and learning; Michael Foreman is interviewed in Write Away and Mo Willems, loved for Don't let the pigeon drive the bus, talks to chron.com.

Films and classics next. Lucy Coats wonders if the Percy Jackson film The Lightning Thief, from Rick Riordan's book, in which the hero discovers that not only is he the son of Poseidon but Zeus is after him for a crime he hasn't committed, will reignite interest in Greek myths. Again, there's a movie trailer to enjoy. Tim Burton's film of Alice in Wonderland is also out, and in the Guardian, AS Byatt "takes another trip down the rabbit hole to celebrate classics she first enjoyed as a child".

Some more about reading itself: boys read as much as girls but prefer the simpler books (Independent); why kids re-read books (Literacy, families and learning); how to make reading cool (Guardian); and sharing picture books, a series of Book Trust videos.

Finally, Curious pages is a blog I've been dipping into for a while. It's billed as Inappropriate Books for Kids, which really seems to mean old-fashioned. The link I've included is to a 1971 Snoopy book. Recent posts include one on Shel Silverstein, complete with video, and another on Florence Parry Heide who wrote the Treehorn books. I love it, but then I'm of that sort of vintage.

Coming soon: more films of children's books

The Eagle of the Ninth (Rosemary Sutcliff's classic) is due in cinemas sometime this year. Read about it in Wikipedia and Skerricks' blog has pulled together a lot of stuff about it. Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief (Rick Riordan) is out next week - here's the trailer. Our catalogue gives a synopsis of the book, and if you like it, it's part of a series:

The gods of Olympus are alive in the 21st Century. They still fall in love with mortals and have children who might become great heroes, but most of these children meet horrible fates at the hands of monsters by the age of twelve. Only a few learn the truth of their identity and make it to Half Blood Hill, a Long Island summer camp dedicated to training young demigods. Such is the revelation that launches young Percy Jackson on a quest to help his real father, Poseidon, avert a war among the gods. With the help of Grover the satyr and Annabeth the daughter of Athena, Percy must journey across the United States to catch a thief who has stolen the original weapon of mass destruction - Zeus' master bolt. Along the way, they face a host of mythological enemies determined to stop them. Most of all, Percy must come to terms with a father he has never known, and an Oracle that has warned him of betrayal by a friend.

Saci Lloyd turns down Johnny Depp.

Johnny Depp lost his bid to film The Carbon Diaries books by London teacher Saci Lloyd when she picked the BBC instead - read the full story by Vanessa Thorpe in today's Observer. Lloyd introduced her heroine, Laura Brown, in The Carbon Diaries 2015, and the follow up, The Carbon Diaries 2017, is due out this month. It "takes Laura Brown into a frightening era where climate change is busily altering all the norms of modern existence. Laura, a teenager who plays in a band called the Dirty Angels, is the kind of feisty character that readers who are tiring of Potter's tame school scarf and round glasses will welcome" (Thorpe). 2015 is in the Library already and 2017 is on order.

Gruffalo

"He's got a black tongue, orange eyes and a poisonous wart on the end of his nose, not to mention those purple nightmare-inducing prickles on his back. And this Christmas Day he's going to be on the telly."

Read more in Ailin Quinlan's article in the Irish Independent.

See also Julia Donaldson books in Jordanhill Library.

And PS - interview from Guardian 19/12/09

Children's books on film

Snippets: there's Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox out now, I did a couple of recent posts on the film of Maurice Sendak's Where the wild things are, which I think is yet to come out in the UK, and KidsLit blog has more movie news. Sally Nicholls' first book, Ways to live forever is being made into a film right now, and look out for The Gruffalo on TV soon.

Where the wild things are 2

Read a review of the new movie from Claire E. Gross of the Horn Book.

Where the wild things are.

From the Brothers Grimm to Roald Dahl, a good scare has been a part of children's books. Now the film of Maurice Sendak's classic morality tale has started a debate on whether it is still acceptable to frighten young readers. Vanessa Thorpe and Anushka Asthana consider the arguments in yesterday's Observer.