A book lover's guide to building a brilliant children's library

Book corner: A book lover's guide to building a brilliant children's library, by Lucy Mangan in the Guardian, has reached its final round up. Her top 52 are listed below and the attached article considers some of the titles that nearly made it and had to be left out.

No 1 The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster(1961)
No 2 Enid Blyton (1897-1968)
No 3 The Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories by Joyce Lankester Brisley (1928)
No 4 The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1909)
No 5 The Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1935)
No 6 Just William by Richmal Crompton (1922)
No 7 Private - Keep Out! by Gwen Grant (1978)
No 8 The Family from One End Street by Eve Garnett (1937)
No 9 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-69)
No 10 The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis (1950-56)
No 11 King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green (1953)
No 12 Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce (1958)
No 13 Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary (1955)
No 14 Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild (1936)
No 15 Dimsie Goes to School by Dorita Fairlie Bruce (1921)
No 16 Autumn Term by Antonia Forest (1948)
No 17 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (1964)
No 18 The One Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith (1956)
No 19 The Wombles by Elizabeth Beresford (1968)
No 20 The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken (1963)
No 21 The Six Bullerby Children by Astrid Lindgren (1947)
No 22 A Little History of the World by EH Gombrich (1935)
No 23 What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge (1872)
No 24 Life with Lisa by Sybil Burr (1958)
No 25 Charlotte's Web by EB White (1952)
No 26 The Children of the New Forest by Captain Marryat (1847)
No 27 The Borrowers by Mary Norton (1952)
No 28 Dear Teddy Robinson by Joan G Robinson (1953)
No 29 Tottie: the Story of a Doll's House by Rumer Godden (1947)
No 30 The Borribles by Michael de Larrabeiti (1976)
No 31 The Railway Children by E Nesbit (1906)
No 32 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1876)
No 33 Grow up, Cupid by June Oldham (1988)
No 34 Goodnight Mr Tom by Michelle Magorian (1981)
No 35 Fireweed by Jill Paton Walsh (1970)
No 36 The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark by Jill Tomlinson (1968)
No 37 Grinny by Nicholas Fisk (1973)
No 38 All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor (1951)
No 39 The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright (1941)
No 40 Alison Uttley's A Traveller in Time (1939)
No 41 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847)
No 42 Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster (1912)
No 43 My Naughty Little Sister by Dorothy Edwards (1952)
No 44 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse (1938)
No 45 The Trouble with Donovan Croft by Bernard Ashley (1974)
No 46 Ladybird books
No 47 Alices Adventures in Wonderland: by Lewis Carroll (1865)
No 48 Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret: by Judy Blume (1970)
No 49 The Worst Witch by Jill Murphy (1974)
No 50 Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery (1908)
No 51 Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C O'Brien (1971)
No 52 Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson (1948)

Author updates: Crompton, Grey, McKay, Willems

Some articles about authors which have been lurking in my inbox for a while:

Richmal Crompton in the Times.

Mini Grey in the Oxford Mail.

Hilary McKay in Bookbag.

Mo Willems in the School Library Journal.

International children's reading groups

Authors including former children's laureate Michael Morpurgo and the Carnegie medal-winning Frank Cottrell Boyce are taking part in a pilot project from the British Council that will link young readers in the UK with peers in China, Ghana, Egypt and Pakistan. In the case of Pakistan. the link is with Glasgow schools. See the Guardian report for more details.

Scottish Children's Books Award

The winners of the 2009 Royal Mail Awards for Scottish Children's Books have just been announced. They are:

Early Years (0-7) Winner:

Manfred the Baddie by John Fardell

Younger Readers (8-11) Winner:
First Aid for Fairies and Other Fabled Beasts by Larid Don

Older Readers (12-16) Winner:
Ostrich Boys by Keith Gray

Acceptance speeches can be seen via Youtube

All titles are in Jordanhill Library.

School libraries in the developing world

I'm re-posting this from the CILIP Information and Advice blog:

Room to Read - school libraries in the developing world

The Financial Times' 2009 Seasonal Appeal is for Room to Read, a charity that promotes literacy and educational opportunities for children in the developing world. One of the ways they do this is by building and stocking school libraries, and as a result of their work libraries have been established in countries such as Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Nepal. The FT reports that, at one school in Sri Lanka, a teacher described their new library as "like heaven for the children, a reader’s paradise".

Further details are on the FT website
See also http://www.ft.com/indepth/seasonal-appeal

What do teens want?

In What do teens want Carol Fitzgerald details the results of the Teenreads.com 2009 Reader Survey. It covers a wide range of topics including what teenagers read, when they read, who influences them, use of social media and e-books. Points to bear in mind are that most of the 11-18 year-old respondents (87%) were from the US, the results reflect teens who are already drawn to books (they did not study what keeps nonreaders from picking up a book) and, while they purposely marketed the survey to attract male readers, the vast majority (96%) of returns were from female readers. However there is still a lot of useful information to be gleaned from the survey.

Horn Book

Fanfiction, and what makes a good pop-up book are two of the topics in the latest Horn Book (Nov/Dec 2009) to come into the library. Other than that, there's a bit of  New Zealand theme with an interview with prize-winning author Margaret Mahy, including a poem she has written Christmas in New Zealand, and an article by Lynne D Jackett on the history of children's reading in NZ. For more information about Margaret Mahy, see the pages from Christchurch City Libraries where she worked before becoming a full time writer, and see our library catalogue for a list of the titles we hold.