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If you’re reading the Penguin blog then it’s very likely that you’re an avid reader and know the virtues of getting kids reading from a young age. We all know that reading is fundamental for development and research has shown that having good reading skills from an early age is linked to future success in life. But what about kids that don’t enjoy reading and don’t understand the pure escapist pleasure that books can offer, how do we help them? There are many children for who, delving into a book is the last thing on their mind. Whether it’s because of the distractions of TV and video games or because it feels too much like school, some kids just don’t ‘get’ books. So as voracious readers ourselves how do we help these kids become readers and learn to love books?
The key is to get kids to take that first step into enjoying the reading experience, as once they start to enjoy reading they will soon flourish. One way to engage kids is through books which are not straight-forward black and white text. So books that have fun and engaging text, a humorous story or are in a comic book style are more likely to be engaging for kids as they will find reading less of a chore. This is what makes the Geronimo Stilton books so ideal for reluctant readers, not only are the books funny, (they are about a mouse reporter and his fabulous adventures, so how could they not be!) but they are also full of colourful text and pictures. Every page is interesting to look at, whether it’s the bright pink text flying across the page or the words climbing up the page, this fun text design is perfect for engagement and it’s more accessible than traditional black and white text. As one reviewer puts it: The illustrations are brilliant along with the different types of fonts and colours used as they encouraged my 5 year old to follow the words as I read them.
If you’re looking for further proof that books with engaging text and images are accessible for kids and great for reluctant readers, then look no further than Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid series. This illustrated diary series with its comic style adventure has proved a huge hit with kids, even beating Harry Potter to be voted Blue Peter’s best book of the decade!
So if you know a reluctant reader why not give one of these series’ a whirl, who knows you might uncover an avid reader who was just waiting to find the perfect book for them. The key is to find the book that interests them and that they can relate to. Whether it’s a comic strip book or a book about an adventuring mouse, there will be a book out there that captures their imagination and stays with them for the rest of their lives. After all it’s book characters, more than TV, film or cartoon characters that stay with us the longest.
The Fever Tree took me down a rabbit warren of research - a world of dust, diamonds and disease. I began with an idea: what was life like for the British on the diamond fields of South Africa? Who were the men and women who went out there? What kind of lives did they lead? And what moral codes were they bound by? My journey started in the British Library, reading books on the history of South Africa in the 19th Century. These were wonderful for giving me a general overview of the period - the politics of the time, and the people who were in power - but they couldn't bring that world to life. I needed real stories about ordinary people. I wanted to know what it smelt like to live in a tent in a diamond mining town, alongside 4,000 Europeans and 10,000 Africans, without sanitation or running water. I wanted to know what it was like to be shipped out to South Africa to work, by an emigration society which specialised in re-locating women. Using the bibliographies of the history books, I tracked down the primary sources from which much of their material was taken. I was drawn into the extraordinary world of the pioneer - men who travelled thousands of miles into the interior of South Africa with little more than the shirts on their backs. There was Barney Barnato, a Jewish boxer from Whitechapel who scraped a living as a comedian, and went on to become one of the richest men on the fields. There were cockney traders, flush with success - lighting cigars with five pound notes; there were men who made little and - after a bad turn at the gambling tables - shot themselves on the veldt. These were the stories which allowed me to see just as my characters would have done over a hundred years ago. I read guide books on the Cape published in 1880 and sifted through women’s magazines from the 1870s - turning over patterns for embroidered glove boxes and lace cushion covers - just as my character Frances might have done. I delved into manuals on social etiquette, cooking, botany, and what to bring on a hunting expedition to the Transvaal. There are books in the British Library which you simply couldn’t find in a lending library. Books that might have had a tiny print run, and aren’t useful to anyone but a handful of historians, which proved priceless for my research.
One afternoon, I was reading about African labour on the diamond fields, when I came across a reference to a smallpox epidemic which had ravaged the diamond mining town of Kimberley in the 1880s. I looked at the notes at the back of the book, and they cited the diary of a doctor called Hans Sauer. I tapped it into the British Library catalogue, and sure enough, they had a copy. In just over an hour Sauer’s diary was sitting on my desk, and it told the extraordinary story of a smallpox outbreak which had been covered up by Cecil Rhodes, the great statesman. The epidemic - which could have been easily contained with vaccination - ended up killing thousands. At the time it was reported as ‘the greatest medical scandal in the long and honourable history of British medicine’, but it has since been forgotten. Two of the doctors who were paid off to deny the presence of smallpox - Jameson and Matthews - went on to become Prime Minister and MP. This shocking story seemed to lie at the very heart of Britain's exploitation of the resources and people of South Africa under the banner of 'civilisation'. Here was a tale of adventure, greed and exploitation, of gambling dens and brothels, of men - one minute a pauper, the next a millionaire - scratching a living on the veldt looking for diamonds. After six months of research, I knew I had 'found' my story.
A guest blog from Olivia Scott-Berry from Penguin's teen site, Spinebreakers
I’ve never wanted to hate but couldn’t help loving so many people all at the same time.
Every now and then an event comes along and you think, you know what? My biology homework can wait, Masterchef can be recorded, dinner is reheatable- It’s a Wednesday night, but I’m going out! (It’s a phenomenon I like to call ‘the dilemma of the sixth-former’)
The Penguin General Bloggers' event then, was something pretty special. Imagine this: you receive an email telling you that seven of the most brilliant authors are going to be giving readings, and that you will get to talk to them afterwards and there are going to be goody bags. Can you honestly tell me that you would have said no, I have to finish this sheet on quadrat sampling?
Arriving at the event, I knew that I had made the right choice between my education and my passion for books, because not only were the free books stacked high, but the room was packed with people each with their own unique take on the publishing world- editors, bloggers, authors- people who I was really excited to talk to and hear their experiences and get some advice.
It was probably one of the most daunting things I’ve ever done as a Spinebreakers - by definition we are readers, which is an activity that calls for quiet and aloneness and the kind of imagination that thrives in that environment more than any other- but it was gratifying to see that the authors were just as true to their sixteen-year-old bookworm selves as I was and acknowledged the paradox of the modern author’s duties. (Not that any of that showed in their amazing readings!)
Equally gratifying was the real interest people took in Spinebreakers and what we do, and I only hope that I represented us well to this group of amazing people, who, after all, were not just composed of authors, but of bloggers too. It was incredibly humbling but also inspiring to see all these people who do what we do at Spinebreakers but to a whole other level, and who do it so well (as you can probably tell from the fact that I’ve written up my report the very next morning without going on iplayer once!)
If you’re anything like me, you probably want to hear all about the books, but I thinkthat whatI took away from last night was the knowledge that I can allow myself to meet the authors- it is not a sacrilege and it could in fact enrich the whole experience (even now I am itching to reread Anatomy of a Disappearance after hearing it in Hisham Matar’s own voice). So I’m going to compromise and tell you a little bit about the books (which you must read, all of them!), and a little bit about the authors:
If you ever wanted to know what it’s like to grow up in a modern commune, it sounds like (I haven’t read it yet- even the Penguin editors are waiting anxiously for their proofs to arrive) Wild Abandon will be the perfect book for you, and if you didn’t- you will now just to hear Joe Dunthorne’s comic take on it. The man himself? Two words: Funny. Shorts. (Get yourself down to one of his poetry readings now).
Landfall, Helen Gordon
Helen Gordon is a former associate editor of Granta magazine and the author of Landfall, the story of an art critic in South East London (woop woop), which sounds (again, I haven’t read this, but I do have the proof right next to me right now) totally brilliant in a knowing and satirical way, but when I spoke to her I didn’t know all of this yet. She took such an interest in Spinebreakers and encouraged me to keep writing (and had a jumper on which I coveted) that I now feel really bad that I didn’t ask her anything about the book, because it sounds amazing.
Mr Chartwell is one of those books where you absolutely love the author and hate them for having the idea instead of you- and hearing Rebecca Hunt read, the feelings intensify. She is absolutely lovely and the kind of person I wish I was and an amazing speaker- who else could pull off the voice of a large black dog who happens to be a metaphor for depression? And do you know what makes it one of those books even more? Even if I did have the idea first, I wouldn’t be able to pull it off in prose half as sparkling as Hunt’s. Girl in Translation, Jean Kwok
Jean Kwok is an absolutely lovely lovely person. I could hear my English teacher screaming at me for my limited vocabulary as I wrote that, but there is no better way to say it- she is the absolute embodiment of everything that is lovely. Not only did she make me feel completely comfortable talking to her, but she managed to command the floor like she was having a conversation with each one of us. Once I could tear myself away from her warm sunshine accent, I was equally fascinated- Kwok’s tale of arriving in New York and the troubles that ensued (having no central heating, working on a piece-by-piece basis in a factory, having a talent for school) has elements of truth with her own life. Even without knowing this, the novel is beautifully brilliant- it will make you smile.
On TV programmes when someone dies or goes missing then those who are left behind are shows in crying in a series of artistic shots, and the cameras will only return to them once something changes in their lives. This is a nice idea to believe in, but it couldn’t be further from the truth- as Hisham Matar shows exquisitely in Anatomy of a Disappearance- life, ordinary life, goes excruciatingly onwards. The absence of the main character’s father is described with such poise, the everyday events imbued with such numbness that it comes to sit in your own heart as you read. This book made me extremely guilty that I didn’t know enough about the events that forced the disappeared father out of Egypt, and especially after I heard Hisham Matar’s mournful, silken reading, I am definitely going to find out more. I’m afraid I might have to disappoint my English teacher again and tell you that Hisham Matar is an absolutely lovely man, who wonderfully disarmed me by telling me that he liked my jumper. I can only respond with how much I loved his book.
I’m not really sure how to do justice to the presence that is Ross Raisin- is it okay if I just tell you that, despite hailing from Yorkshire and not (as far as I could tell) having any particular links to Scotland that he did his reading in a Glaswegian accent, which, despite his warning that it wouldn’t, I thought sounded pretty good? His new novel, Waterline, sounds a world away from his first, God’s Own Country (which I loved), but looks to be just as brilliant. I’m going to take the words straight from the press release because I think they summarise everything that I am looking for in a book- ‘the tale of an ordinary man caught between the loss of a great love and the hard edges of modern existence’. Sold.
Luke Williams joins Rebecca Hunt in the ranks of authors I want to hate but absolutely can’t- the idea behind his first novel, The Echo Chamber, is brilliant. It tells the story of Exie, whose superhuman hearing means that she can hear things that other people can’t, and who is now writing up her memories of her life, beginning in Nigeria as the British Empire’s influence was deteriorating. I was instantly intrigued by this ambitious idea, and however much I want it to fail to make myself feel better, from seeing Williams read that doesn’t seem likely. He is so confident and in control and in sync with his story (though he actually is Scottish, he too pulled a Raisin and read in a voice completely different from his own) that I just know it is going to live up to my expectations.
Because I refrained so well from adding two simple words to the end of each of these summaries and because I’m pretty sure that my biology homework is going to have to wait for a little while because I will be taking my own advice, I’m going to end my review with what you really really must do. Read them. (Now!)
Penguin design guru Richard Bravery talks about the unique approach to designing the Penguin Essentials
Classic (backlist) books generally take the cover approach of marrying the period of the book with the aesthetic of the age. So a 1920's book is generally twinned with Deco styling/artists. But with the Essentials we wanted, where possible, to break away from that approach, and package the books as if they were new texts, using contemporary artists to appeal to a new generation of readers.
We wanted to use a core of international artists and designers who hadn’t worked in publishing in the traditional sense before; from tattoo and graffiti artists, to paper sculptors and gig poster designers, as we wanted the designs to feel fresh, different and unexpected.
Like most things when you try something new, you fail as much as you succeed. It’s a delicate balance, to move something on but not stretch too thinly the link (be it cultural or aesthetic) between the book and the design, after all, what’s the use of a great looking contemporary package if it alienates the very people you were hoping would read the book? So it was really important to us that the artists themselves were as enthusiastic about the project as we were, as most of the books took time, patience and commitment to get to the finished design.
It was a joy to work with such a varied group of artists, constantly bouncing ideas around and developing the designs, some of my personal highlights were keeping my fingers crossed one anxious night whilst RIPO went hunting for a suitable piece of Barcelona on which to daub the Steppenwolf painting. Working with Anders Nilsen and Parra and watching them bringing two very difficult books to life. And the sheer delight of seeing Kristian Hammerstad’s ideas for A Clockwork Orange for the first time.
Despite difficult book relationships at times, a deciding factor in agreeing to domestic bliss with my better half was the discovery of a key shared book. I say I gave the book to him, he says he gave it to me. Potato potahto. (I gave it to him.)
So which book have you found shared love in? Or, for the misanthropes out there, which was the straw that broke the relationship's back?
Once more, I'll post something nice out to whichever answer I like best. Although that will probably only apply to UK people. But come on! Everyone can just join in anyway! Yeay! Hang on - you didn't even get me flowers. Why am I feeling bad about this?
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I suppose I owe you all a charitable high-five for not pointing out that not only had our previous Friday afternoon literary thought-provoker been done before, but it had been done by me. Shameful. But you were all v sporting for not whispering about my fading cerebral powers behind your hands. Or were you?
This Friday, new thoughts (one hopes). I'm only fifty pages or so from the end of this (which has possibly the best collection of quotes on the jacket that I've seen for a while) and I'm desperate that it wasn't so. At least with this one, there's two whole sequels, which are equally excellent. I'm just not particularly eager to leave the world of Priss, Lakey and Kay, despite those throwaway name-references making the whole thing sound a little too Blyton. Still.
So, my question to you this fine Friday is: which are the books that, while you're reading them, you wished they'd never end? Subquestion: which book would you actually like to live in?
To complete your happy Friday, here's a man we should all be cheering and whooping and celebrating all round. (Actually am, for once, crying as I read this.) Please read this, as it's so very, very important, and go to your library this weekend, and show it some affection.
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Carol Topolski had a triumphant debut with the highly original Monster Love. It was long listed for the Orange Prize, did very well in both hardcover and paperback editions, and generally scared the pants off everyone with its brilliant collage of voices recounting the story of a murder that we know has been committed from the very first chapters. It was not a Whodunnit, but a brilliant Whydunnit, and a great literary debut.
Carol is by profession a psychoanalytic psychotherapist – it is why people are the way they are and how they got that way that fascinates her; she mined this rich seam in Monster Love, and now she does it again in her new novel Do No Harm.
When Carol’s second novel arrived in manuscript I knew it would be scary. I knew I wouldn’t understand the main character at the beginning of the book. This time, Carol has created a protagonist who isn’t just monstrous (like the married couple in Monster Love who murder their child) but just so repellent that you almost can’t bear to follow her journey on the page. Virginia is brusque with people, rude even. She is greedy, she eats too much; she spills her food down her front; she is large and ungainly, she wears awful clothes and shoes – indeed, she hates clothes. It seems as if she wants to repel other people. She is also a brilliant doctor, but she doesn’t suffer fools, and only her colleagues and her patients like her – and even then they aren’t allowed to get to know her well. Then we begin to discover that maybe she isn’t the staunch upholder of her women patients that we thought she is, that maybe she is doing them harm. And yet, by the end of the novel she is a strangely sympathetic character and when you discover all the things that have happened to her, what her childhood was like, you begin to feel grains of sympathy.
The result is one of the most complex and well realised characters I’ve ever read – indeed, if you walked round her she would be completely 3D. By the end of the novel we know she is deranged, but, in the way of the best fiction, we understand why.
Last week a new exhibition celebrating the art of the book cover opened in East London’s StolenSpace gallery. The gallery invited the great and good of contemporary street art, regular indoor art, illustration, photography, sculpture and design to create a cover for a book of their choice: a book that had inspired them, profoundly affected them or one that they just remembered fondly from their childhood.
The result is a fantastic and varied exhibition, including work from Belgian street artist, and personal favourite, ROA, Shepard Fairey from the US and Japanese artist Usugrow among many, many others. The exhibition also includes a sneak peak of the artwork for our new Penguin Essentials series that publish in April next year. I took my camera along on Saturday so I could share some of my favourites with you.
‘20,000 Leagues Under The Sea’, An Under Pressure Art Production
‘Island’, Mat Eco
‘Cat In The Hat’, Ripo
‘The King of Air’, ‘The Offenders’, ‘The Cosmic Engineers’ & ‘The Doomsday book’, D*Face
‘Burnt Ones’, C215
‘At Swim-Two-Birds’, Tom J Newell
‘Ugly Duckling’, ROA
There is a lot more to see at the exhibition itself, which runs until 19th December.
Today we are publishing a novel written by a bright young thing and everyone here at Penguin is very excited. You see, every now and then in this publishing racket you get hold of a novel that really shakes you to your very core. It’s a rare, exhilarating experience, and one made all the more startling when you realise the author was barely older than you are when he wrote it and apparently wrote the thing in only five weeks.
The author in question? A publisher’s dream. Under thirty-five, incredibly talented, handsome and charismatic and with what some like to call a very promotable personal story. So who the hell am I talking about, I hear you type? Well, the author is a man called John le Carré and the novel ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ was published in 1963 when he was only thirty two.
Now, I’m not too proud to admit that until recently a “le Carré” was something I’d watch, not something I’d read. As regulars to these missives on here will have probably realised, I’m quite picky about what makes it on to my to-read pile and I have to say that I could count the number of crime/thrillers/espionage books I’ve read on one hand. But I was wrong, and thankfully the prize for my ignorance is being able to discover and read for the first time one of the most thrilling and engaging writers working today.
First published 47 years ago, and being reissued today in Penguin Modern Classics, le Carré’s ‘Spy’ still has the power to make you uncomfortably aware of the mechanics operating in the pit of your stomach. His relentless, unflinching and unforgiving vision of the world reminded me of the moral wasteland that permeates McCarthy’s scalpathon ‘Blood Meridian’ and leaves you with an overwhelming sense that no matter how good the good guys are; the bad guys will always win.
Fast forward 47 years and 19 novels later, and le Carré set to publish his new novel, ‘Our Kind of Traitor’, in September. While ‘Spy’ was absolutely of its time, painfully relevant to the Cold War world it so expertly describes, ‘Our Kind of Traitor’ is a novel for now, for today and le Carré tackles the City of London’s unholy alliance with Britain’s Intelligence Establishment with aplomb. This was the first le Carré I read, and I loved it. As he leads you down the rabbit hole of intrigue and espionage, seamlessly gliding through the heads of his characters, offering a hint of information here, a glimmer of understanding there, you cannot help but feel under the control of a complete master.
So, if you are life long fan, like an awful lot of people are, then you are in for a real treat. If you are a novice, an ignoramus, like me, then what are you waiting for? You have 21 novels to catch up with before the launch of ‘Our Kind of Traitor’ on September 16th.
My job, as 50% of the Penguin General marketing department, is simple: get people to read our books. I try to achieve this in many different ways, whether an everyday conversation with another colleague or a national advertising campaign, my aim is always to communicate a very simple message: read this. It’s a gratifying job when everything works, but if there is one thing, more than any other, which often gets in the way, it’s the page count. Quality, by the time a book gets to me is not an issue, but if that book is over 450 pages long, the answer to my enthusiastic “so have you read that amazing book I was telling you about?” is usually, always, “no, not yet, I want to, it’s just that it’s soooo long”.
Bizarrely, this doesn’t seem to be a concern of people on the outside of this particular office. The two runaway, undisputable mega success stories of recent years are Stephenie Meyer’s ‘Twilight Saga’ and Stieg Larsson’s ‘Millennium Trilogy’. Starting with Meyer, the four books that make up this series have sold a staggering 6,908,573 copies in the UK combined. Wow. These aren’t short books: 'Twilight' (464pp), 'New Moon' (497pp), 'Eclipse' (576pp), and 'Breaking Dawn' (720pp). Length obviously isn’t an issue for fans of Bella and Edward. Now let’s look at Stieg, with sales for his trilogy clocking in at more modest, but still respectable, 2,729,821. These aren’t short books either: 'The Girl with Dragon Tattoo' (542pp), 'The Girl who Played with Fire' (608pp), and 'The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest' (656pp).
So, this little bit of cod research tells us that people don’t mind long books, or, put another way, they don’t find length inherently off-putting. The seven books mentioned above are obviously very commercial propositions; immensely readable with g-force plots. However, why do people sometimes assume that the same will not be true for more, dare I say, literary reads? Does length in commercial fiction equate positively in the mind to ‘more story’, while the literati will look at a lengthy book and just see ‘more difficult’? ‘Tome’, I suppose, does sound rather deathly.
Personally, I‘m seldom dissuaded by length. My favourite book of all time is long, fiendishly so. At 1104 pages and with eye-squintingly small type, I can see why some might find ‘Infinite Jest’ a little daunting. Maybe. And one of the best books of this year is long. Paul Murray’s hilarious-while-utterly-heartbreaking 'Skippy Dies' comes in at 664 pages. Even the best book I read last year was long, Roberto Bolano’s insane '2666' (912pp). You see the thing about a good book is that when they are really (can’t stop reading chunks aloud to your friends) good, they are never quite long enough.
In around about way then, we are publishing two books this summer that are long. Off-puttingly long in the minds of some unnamed colleagues here (you know who you are). Julie Orringer’s sweeping epic ‘The Invisible Bridge’, is a whopping 604 pages and James Robertson’s panoramic ‘And the Land Lay Still’ isn’t so trim either at 674 pages. These are great books. Truly remarkable achievements and utterly worth every second they take to devour. So if you see them on the shelf, pick them up, have a read and be rewarded by the rich, enveloping experience that only great, big, fat, long books can offer.
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