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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.
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!)
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.
We asked our Facebook fans whether they made any book-related resolutions for 2010 and got some really lengthy replies - some said that they would like an answer to the question of whether to e-read or not, others just wanted to read more. We realised that having asked the question, we hadn't answered it ourselves. Here we share our reading resolutions...
Anna Rafferty, Managing Director of Penguin Digital I'm going to read more Modern Classics - I've only read about twenty as I'm always drawn to the Black Classics for escapism and I'm a devil for re-reading favourites like Moll Flanders and David Copperfield again and again, but I know that there are some great new stories in there!
Aine Fearon, Online Developer Despite having almost finished this brilliant 1193-page whopper on the fifteen-minute commute clinging to a handrail on the Piccadilly line, I've resolved to make more of my new, longer commute to work and get some proper reading done.
Hannah Michell, Online Marketing Executive Last year I resolved to read fifty-two books and only managed about thirty books (I'd like to think that this is, in part, because I picked up some real epics like Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda and Paul Murray's Skippy Dies). This year I really aspire to get to fifty-two books and taking inspiration from our 52 Books minisite, I'm also going to try to diversify my reading list to incorporate some non-fiction titles: I'm looking forward to sinking my teeth into Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals.
Jo Galvin, Children's Digital Marketing Manager Being in children's publishing, my resolution would be to make sure I indulge a little in the grown up world of books every now and then. It's going to be a challenge going from lift-the-flap to The Left Hand of God, but I think I'm ready for it...
Jeanette Turmaine, Development Manager I'm going to read a book in each available iPhone and Android ebook app :-o
Alice Berry, Magnet Editor To only read my son two stories at night. He always nags me for a third.
Matt Clacher, Literary Marketing Executive This year I really need to read more than just fiction. Every time I pick up a newspaper, read an essay or whatnot, I measure the experience in time I could have spent reading fiction. And even when I make an effort to read some non-fiction, it's usually by fiction writers anyway. I'm a fiction junky, and while I'm not looking to kick the habit just yet, this year I'd like to spend a little more time eye-balling some facts, such as those in Dave Eggers' Zeitoun, an urgent, timely and unforgettably haunting account of the horrors of post-Katrina New Orleans.
Chris Croissant, Online Marketing Assistant I toyed with the idea of forty books for 2010, but that's ludicrous, I'm too slow a reader. I think thirty books is far more realistic. This is the reading list so far: I've got some Penguin Classics I want to read in the form of William S. Burroughs, A Confederacy of Dunces and many of the Deluxe Classics which are luring me with their beauty. Then there's all the fabulous literary books coming up, such as The Temple Goers and The Lessonsthat everyone's been telling me I HAVE to read. But I try and keep a good balance so I've got some non-fiction to get into; one or two autobiographies I've got my eye on. And lastly, there's all the non-Penguin books to read like anything Foster Wallace-related, The Glass Bead Game and Aldous Huxley's Island, both of which are sitting on my book shelf. I might even finish the Iliad...
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher To encourage my son to read things other than Manga.
These smartpeople have been doing thinking about how magazines might look and work in a digital future. 2010 would be a good time to do some similarly clever thinking about interfaces for digital reading of longer texts.
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Blimey, this travelling lark is slow. I'm sorry I seemed to forget Southern Europe - I'm not going to Germany next at all. Poor old Italy. With its wealth of literature, from feline to flagellatory (always fond of literature that portrays Odysseus as the rotten fibber he truly was), I'm afraid I lumped for something altogether less translated.
Third stop: Italy. Or... the Roman Empire. So, lots of Europe, but mainly centred around Rome.
I'm not sure why I haven't read this already. Maybe it's my mother-in-law's habit of referring to it as "One Clavdivs"*, which is v. v. pleasing but leads me to expect some kind of Wodehousian educational hoot, or maybe it's the clunky jacket on the edition I owned as a youth; either way I'm enormously grateful to Naomi Alderman for suggesting this as my Italian destination.
The Penguin blurb describes this as "one of the most... gripping historical novels ever written", but somehow I feel that this doesn't do it full justice. Rather than merely being a juicy and salacious novelization of Rome, it's mannered, and dry, and genuinely feels as if it's been translated, but really thrives on all these things, and lacks any of the fustiness or distance that translation could sometimes entail. It's funny, and frightening, and despite the fact that I couldn't sketch that family tree if you paid me (although I don't think I'm alone in that), I found all the characters to be incredibly well-drawn and unutterably fascinating. It's a page-turner, and, most importantly, features passages like this:
"'The cook's a genius,' they are all thinking. 'The mullet with piquant sauce, and those fat stuffed thrushes and the wild-boar with truffles - when did I eat so well last?... Ah, here comes the slave with the wine again. That excellent Cyprian wine.' ... And everyone says, thinking of the thrushes again, or perhaps of the little simnel cakes, 'Admirable. Admirable, Pollio.'"
'Thinking of the thrushes again'? If I was served fat stuffed thrushes, I wouldn't just be thinking of them a few minutes later, I'd be stuffing the chef into my bag and locking him in my own kitchen. Mmmm... tiny cooked birds...
Conclusions as a traveller:
Probably not the right country to marry your first wife's new son's second cousin's grandmother. A little too much poison knocking about to ensure the wedding ceremony didn't go off without at least one guest collapsing and dying, and tricky to ensure that you weren't your own sole inheritor.
I am so excited about hitting the rest of Europe. Germany, if all goes according to plan, will be my next-but-one stop, and then I'll try to thread up through Scandinavia. Thank goodness I didn't throw out my moonboots.
Sam the Copywriter
*This is the same mother-in-law who told me about Poe's Raven almost being a Parrot. Then she said, "Lenore! Nevermore!" in a parrot voice. Boy oh boy, it made me laugh, but I will never be able to read Poe again.
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The Consolation of Philosophy, written by the sixth-century Roman politician Boethius while he awaited execution for treason, was the subject of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time on New Year's Day. Suggesting that this book is better than any self-help manual you're likely to find cluttering up your local bookstore at this time of year, this Radio 4 programme drew a line from Plato and Aristotle via Boethius to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and, finally, Camus in an attempt to show how a rational, philosophical approach to the pain of existence could be at the least consoling and at best exhilarating.
This immediately brought to mind Jeff VanderMeer, who has been immersing himself in some of the great philosophical works of all time, served up in bite-sized chunks in Penguin's three Great Ideas series. He has set himself the task of reading and writing about one book each day for sixty days. He has just finished the first series and has taken a short three-day break to re-charge his intellectual batteries before embarking on phase two. Some might say that far from finding consolation in reading these works back to back, Jeff is actually creating for himself a world of pain, if not a world at the very least riddled with doubt and confusion. But that is to underestimate Jeff: a writer exhilarated by good writing.
Regardless of Jeff's state of mind, his readers, judging by their comments, have found this endeavour both entertaining and instructive (though Jeff, borrowing from Schopenhauer, has taken to calling these same readers his 'fellow sufferers'). The process itself is simple: Jeff posts every day about the book he read the night before, quoting a striking line, providing a brief summary, posing a question for his blog readers, and providing a long commentary on his experience of reading it.
And it is intriguing to see not only how these thinkers and philosophers speak to Jeff but also to each other through this experiment. Jeff has said that he often recognises the ghosts of ancestral writers in the words of those who came after them. While sometimes he wonders how different certain tracts might have been had others, yet to be written, come before. Would the Communist Manifesto, for example, have been any different, had Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which unreservedly placed humankind in the red-in-tooth-and-claw jungle of the animal kingdom, been published first?
His comparisons are also fascinating. I'd never have expected to see Swift and Ruskin directly compared to one another, but Jeff's delight in their use and mastery of the extended metaphor shows the keen eye of a fantasy writer at work. I also enjoyed this playful description of Orwell's writing: 'good prose is a window pane, but sometimes the pane is dirty or
cracked, and sometimes it has the reflective qualities of a mirror, or
even a hint of soft green fungus growing in the gutter between glass
and wood.'
Perhaps most interesting of all is that Jeff finds many of the texts not only highly relevant today but also he suggests that often we have failed to heed the ideas or lessons contained within them. Anyone dispirited by the misadventures of the American government of George W Bush over the last eight years will find that Rousseau's The Social Contract still has a lot to teach, he tells us. While his assessment of Paine's Common Sense ends with this question: Has the United States “in the flesh” lived up to Paine’s faith in it as an idea?
This is the history of thought as dialogue, which underlines the title of this series of books and provides proof, if any were still required, that what Jeff is doing here is far from frivolous.
Here are links to the first series of Great Ideas as read by Jeff:
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The one thing I feel I missed out on by having a state school education, the only issue that has gradually come to my attention as a marked deficiency in my learning, is that I was never taught to speed-read. I could be wrong and it may not be the case that public school children are actively taught the art of reading quickly, fed fair-trade produce from nursery age and clothed in cashmere-blend uniforms that don’t crackle when you bend your knees. I’m pretty sure, however, that you pick up a certain kind of discipline about sitting down and getting through a book when the primary concern of those around you isn’t how to break into the French classroom at lunchtime.
Of course, this wasn’t a problem for me when it was one or two books a term, but when I hit university and realised the task at hand was likely to be two novels a week, I became a little panicked when I found out there wasn’t a York Notes to DeLillo’s Underworld. I buckled down though, staying up late, missing sleep, finishing some books and not-quite-finishing others, thoroughly believing I was normal.
But as time has gone on and I’ve had more and more conversations about books in which the line ‘Weren’t you reading that last month?’ has been used, it’s time I admitted it: I’m slow. I am a slow reader. Really, really slow. I read, in my head, at about speaking pace; I often re-read sentences or even whole paragraphs (which, at my most positive and self-delusional, I claim makes me a conscientious, diligent reader). And I don’t read for long stretches at a time. I get tired, OK? I crave snacks. Most annoyingly, as most of the people I know probably didn’t go to public school and read at a hefty pace (‘normals’, I call them) it’s become clear that I can’t even blame the government (Thatcher) for this one. If my reading speed were a noun it would be ‘torpor’, and that’s my doing and my cross to bear.
All of which, obviously, poses a problem in this job and one which I’m perhaps treating a little lightly by writing about it here, given that it’s only my third week. I imagine I might be watched, and quizzed, a little more closely for a bit as a result. The problem is there are just too many great books to read here: the books I’m working on, the books that are up for prizes, the books my colleagues are recommending, the books that are going to cause a stir next year, the seemingly endless backlist. Seriously, it’s tough for someone like me. The Marketing guy behind me said he’s read about 50 books since he started 3 months ago. That might be an exaggeration but it’s not something someone in my predicament wants to hear. And everyone here is at it, this reading quickly.
So, I think I’m going to demand to be sent on a speed-reading training course. I don’t think it’s unreasonable: I’m determined to do this job to the best of my ability/in spite of my disability and I think Penguin should recognise that, financially. It’s either that or everyone’s just going to have to stop publishing so many good books.
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