Children's book news

It's the Easter Vacation here and our system is down for 2 days for maintenance. That's a chance to spend time rounding up the latest articles and children's book sites to hit my inbox, so here they are.

• Did you know The Very Busy Spider turned 25 last month? Read more on Eric Carle's blog.
• A new website has been set up to celebrate the work of children's author Rosemary Sutcliff who died in 1992.
• William Mayne died recently, aged 82, and the Guardian published his obituary. His award-winning children's books were somewhat overshadowed by his indecency conviction in 2004 so have not been popular in recent years.
• A good general site for finding websites for children's authors is Pickabook - it's actualy an online bookshop, but has this and other useful information such as a list of award winners.
• Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 format. It's also compatible with iTunes.
• Is reading an unpopular pastime? New National Literacy Trust findings from a major study of 17,089 pupils from 112 schools reveal that only half (50.6%) of young people enjoy reading very much or quite a lot. Read a summary here (includes link to full report).

World Book Day - the Scottish story

Children all over the country celebrated World Book Day yesterday, as reported in today's Herald. A highlight was the live event at the BBC featuring Michael Rosen, which was also watched online by children in over 900 schools. This is the first in a series of Meet Our Author events to be organised by the Scottish Book Trust - this link includes a report and a video.  The Herald article also refers to a survey of parents, organised by Munch Bunch, to mark World Book Day by finding the top 20 bedtime stories - the favourite was Eric Carle's Very hungry caterpillar. The full list is in the Herald link above.

Eric Carle's blog

Thanks to Tidy Books whose tweet alerted me to Eric Carle's blog and his lovely post about Christmas memories from his childhood in Germany. See also the official Eric Carle website and the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. And of course we've got lots of his books in Jordanhill Library - see a few below.

Books for Keeps

The May edition of Books for Keeps is now in the library. It has all the usual reviews and features, including Authorgraph (this month about Kaye Umansky, author of the Pongwiffy books) and Classics in Short (about The very hungry caterpillar, currently celebrating its 40th anniversary - there's an article by Joanna Carey about Eric Carle elsewhere in the magazine). Other highlights include Melvin Burgess on how Dickens provided a source of inspiration for his latest novel, Nicholas Dane, and Caroline Horn on digital developments in children's publishing. I though this was going to be about eBooks, and it does talk about them, but it's more about how authors and publishers are using the digital world to build audiences for new books, engage young readers and communicate directly with them online. (See also my previous post, eBooks- an awfully big adventure?)

Some of the examples in Horn's article I knew about - for instance, readingzone.com and spinebreakers.co.uk are already on our internet links page - but I hadn't heard of www.trappedbymonsters.com/, set up by a group of authors who write, funnily enough, about monsters. The premise is that they planned a get-together where they would write the ultimate book of monster pain and slaughter - but the monsters got to them first! Now they are trapped in a dark, damp cave and forced to blog about brilliant books, post exclusive poems and stories, reveal secret writing tips and more. It looks a lot of fun.