Links!

(Or else I'm just lazy.)

However, I do want to share a few lovely links I've come across lately:

I recently read Kate DiCamillo's sad, atmospheric but utterly gorgeous new book The Magician's Elephant. You can hear an interview with Kate on NPR here.

Another favourite writer of mine is our own Leonie Norrington. I have some lovely outtakes of an interview I did with Leonie which didn't end up in an article on Indigenous children's books for The Horn Book. She was interviewed recently on The Book Show about her new YA novel The Devil You Know. I haven't read the book yet, but I'm such a fan of Leonie's writing—she's a remarkable stylist, influenced, I believe (and we've talked about it) by her experience growing up in an Aboriginal community (although she's not Aboriginal herself). I use an extract from Leonie's first novel, The Barrumbi Kids, with my writing children's books students as an example of an uber-third person omniscient voice (third person on speed, I call it!).

Nice to see a children's/YA book the feature interview on The Book Show, but I can't help but note it was when the usual presenter was on leave. Anyway, it's a good interview, although I do think the best come-back to the question about whether or not the teacher character represented Leonie's attitude towards public education should have been "she's a fictional construct, dummy!" But I suppose it was fair enough in that Leonie was frank in saying that she thinks the system (and not just the education system, but the legal and welfare systems) are failing a lot of kids—including the kids she was writing about.

Also of interest to me was the collaborative approach she took to writing the book, with young people this time, just as she worked with the Aboriginal community she grew up in and wrote about in the Barrumbi books. It seems the lessons learned from the Indigenous approach to story, learning and community are life-long ones.

Anyway, listen and enjoy. I'm hoping to bring Leonie to NSW next year for an author tour as part of the western Sydney project.

What else? This 9 year old lad blogs about books with a maturity and articulation beyond his more than tender years.

My dear friend Nicola, who I met when she was running the Aloud children's book project, back in the early 90s, got married on the weekend, but you'll need to be my friend on Facebook to see the pics. Oh hang on—here's one:

I made the banner!

What else? Oh, I had coffee last week with Michelle Cooper, author of the amazing A Brief History of Montmaray last week, the day Montmaray (winner of this year's NSW Premier's Literary Award) was published in the US. This is a truly wonderful book: if you love books like I Capture the Castle I can guarantee you'll like Michelle's novel. Anyway, I talked at about a million miles and hour and wondered aloud with Michelle about this blog and my ambivalence about talking specifically about books here. As in reviewing, I guess.

I don't really want to make this a book review blog: there are heaps of them out there dedicated to reviewing and frankly, the small amount of time I can give to reviews these days I'd rather reserve for mainstream review publications. But I do actually shy away from talking about individual books because, given my current job (in which  provide some employment to a smallish number of writers and illustrators), I worry about looking like I am favouring certain people by virtue of mentioning their books, or that I'll annoy people by omission if I don't mention their book. So then I think, well, I can write about non-Australian books, but then I think, but I started this blog in part because I wanted a venue to write about and promote Aussie kids and YA books (I think it's fair to say I was one of the first Australian children's/YA book bloggers). Not that I want to be nationalistically limited in any way, but it would feel odd to only mention OS books and no Aussie books.

So subsequently, I don't talk about individual books much at all. And I'd like to. But I have the Dilemma!

So, in the spirit of this wonderful, classic episode ("Doppelgangland") of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which happens to be on my beloved Foxtel, let me quote Vamp Willow:

Questions? Comments?

Or in lolspeak, Halp!