List Challenge's Banned Children's Book List

Oh I just love this list! It's perfect for Banned Books Week which has just finished. And competitive reader me loved that with my score of 25/60 I came 171st of 956 readers when I took the quiz last week. I wish it was more, I have come perilously close to reading more of these books. Quite a few are sitting waiting, unread, in my house. 

Where the Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendak

The Giving Tree - Shel Silverstein

Charlotte's Web - E.B. White

Bridge to Terabithia - Katherine Paterson

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark - Alvin Schwartz

In the Night Kitchen - Maurice Sendak

The Great Gilly Hopkins - Katherine Paterson

Olive's Ocean - Kevin Henkes

Julie of the Wolves - Jean Craighead George

Little House on the Prairie - Laura Ingalls Wilder

Harriet the Spy - Louise Fitzhugh (see my review)

The Diary of a Young Girl  - Anne Frank (see my review)

A Light in the Attic - Shel Silverstein

Where the Sidewalk Ends - Shel Silverstein

Are you there God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume (see my review)

My Brother Sam is Dead - James Lincoln Collier & Christopher Collier

The Chocolate War - Robert Cormier (see my review)

The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963 - Christopher Paul Curtis

James and the Giant Peach - Roald Dahl (see my review)

The Witches - Roald Dahl (see my review)

If I Ran the Zoo - Dr Seuss

Where's Waldo/Wally - Martin Handford

A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle (see my review)

The Giver - Lois Lowry (see my review)

The Adventures of Captain Underpants - Dav Pilkey

Heather Has Two Mommies - Leslea Newman, Diana Souza (illustrator)

And Tango Makes Three - Peter Parnell & Justin Richardson (see my review)

Junie B. Jones - Barbara Park

His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerers Stone - J.K. Rowling

Bone - Jeff Smith

Goosebumps - R.L. Stine

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry - Mildred Taylor (see my review)

Drama - Raina Telgemeier (see my review)

Dragonwings - Laurence Yep

Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging - Louise Rennison

The Rabbit's Wedding - Garth Williams

Shooter - Walter Dean Myers

The Fighting Ground - Avi

Shade's Children - Garth Nix

The Upstairs Room - Johnna Reiss

To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

Speak - Laurie Halse Anderson

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie (see my review)

Go Ask Alice - Anonymous

Thirteen Reasons Why - Jay Asher

Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky (see my review)

Looking for Alaska - John Green

Two Boys Kissing - David Levithan

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins (see my review)

Gossip Girl - Cecily von Ziegesar

Twilight - Stephanie Meyer

Prep - Curtis Sittenfeld

Ttyl - Lauren Myracle

The Earth, My Butt and Other BIG Round Things - Carolyn Mackler

Fallen Angels - Walter Dean Myers

The Face on the Milk Carton - Caroline B. Cooney

Forever ..... - Judy Blume

Draw Me a Star - Eric Carle

25/60

This list has the requisite books I've already read, books I want to read, and books I've never heard of (quite a few actually). I should go read one just to annoy some book banner types.

A Year in Books 2015

It's time to look back in awe at the best reading I did in 2015. Well, it's actually getting a little late for it, I know most everyone else has done their list, but I do enjoy this retrospection, and will enjoy looking back on it years from now too.

As usual I'm relying on the books I gave 5 stars to on Goodreads this year. I read 118 books in 2015. A fair effort but well short of the somewhat random 200 I set myself as a goal.


Withering-by-Sea. An exciting Victorian tale of mystery and adventure.

I am Juliet. Always good to have a Jackie French on my end of year list. 

See Ya, Simon. Powerful Kiwi storytelling. 

Redwall. It really surprised me that I liked this book so much. It still does. 

The Man Who Loved Boxes. A beautiful picture book about the father son bond. 

Brock. An extraordinarily powerful book about badgers and many other things. 

Pardon My French. A fabulous little book that taught me so much

Sister Madge's Book of Nuns. Doug MacLeod is hilarious. 

Protected. Claire Zorn is going from strength to strength. 

Mister Monday. I finally got to read, well listen to, Garth Nix, and he's brilliant. 

The Impossible Knife of Memory. More Laurie Halse Anderson brilliance. 

Fattypuffs and Thinifers. Perfect French Quirkiness. 

The Running Man. My book of the year. 

Risk. A great page turning YA cautionary tale. 

Thelma the Unicorn. Picture book perfection from Aaron Blabey. 

Ash Road. An Australian classic, still fresh today. 

The Witches. Roald Dahl, the master.

The Girl on the Train. It's so nice to get caught up in a thriller from time to time.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Totally lives up to the hype. 

The Lucy Family Alphabet. Is it possible that I love Judith just that little bit more now?

Coco Chanel. A fabulous illustrated biography of fashion's most famous designer. 

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. A fabulous near Dickensian story with added wolves. 

22 out of the 118 books earnt themselves 5 stars. That's a pretty good hit rate.

12 Aussie Books

3 Picture Books

3 Nonfiction/Memoir

2 Paris Books

3 Audio Books

6 1001 Books

9 Female Authors

13 Male Authors

14 New to Me Authors

I hope 2016 is another great reading year. No reason to think it won't be...

Grim Tuesday

Grim Tuesday is the second rather amazing fantasy story in Garth Nix's The Keys of the Kingdom series that started with Mister Monday (see my review). I really enjoyed the imaginative tale of Mister Monday and somewhat unusually for me embarked on my own quest to listen to the rest of the series.

Grim Tuesday of course finds Arthur Penhaligon, our rather unlikely, asthmatic hero back in The House sooner than he expected. Indeed on Tuesday morning, only hours after his adventures of the Monday Arthur is called to return. Things are getting out of hand in The House and they need Arthur's help. In the first story Arthur enters The House with part of the First Key already, here Arthur enters The House barehanded.

Garth Nix has once again created a highly imaginative story. It is similar in some ways to Mister Monday of course, there is Arthur, the second part of the Will, and the second set of keys, but Grim Tuesday's domain is another part of The House entirely and rather different to the Lower House of Mister Monday. Grim Tuesday's domain is the Far Reaches, a type of mine fired by his greed. Garth Nix is tremendous at creating monsters- my favourite this time is Grim Tuesday's disembodied eyebrow that has taken on a life of its own! But using Nothing as a threat is impressive too.

Rather unusually I thought Grim Tuesday himself doesn't enter the story until quite near the end, at the end of the 5th of the 6 audio CDs. He is of course a malevolent threat up until them, but we don't actually meet him until quite late in the story.

My library has the first three books of The Keys to the Kingdom available on audiobook, I will certainly continue on, and hope to listen to all of these wonderful, imaginative, complex stories.

Mister Monday

Arthur Penhaligon is a true unlikely hero. A sickly asthmatic boy starting at a new school two weeks into the new term because he's been in hospital with his asthma. Arthur suffers another asthma attack during cross country on his very first day and sees some rather odd things. He is given a special key on the basis that he is about to die.

Arthur is soon grappling with dramatic adventures of a decidedly otherworldly nature. There are mysterious beasts, dog faced- half human Fetchers, a veritable astonishing array of monsters and creatures. But Mister Monday is not just an action story- Garth Nix's intelligence, far reaching curiosity and word play really shines through the whole story. It's all so very clever. He weaves many worlds, history, time and the seven deadly sins into the story.

Mister Monday was originally published in 2003, and is the first in the seven book Keys of the Kingdom series. Garth Nix has created an incredible, complex amazing universe. His writing is so descriptive, it's almost like being there, like you know what it would be like to be in this unimaginable fantasy world.  It is an incredibly exciting story with many plot twists and cliff hangers. I hope to get Master Wicker to read/listen to this- I think he'd love it.

I listened to the audiobook of Mister Monday while driving to Newcastle for the 2015 Newcastle Writers Festival. It was fantastic, and made the kilometres literally fly by. I was very pleased to see Garth Nix in a session at the festival. I've seen him speak a few years ago in Adelaide, but I didn't know all that much about him at that stage, and it's always nicer to see an author speak if you've read at least some of their work I  think.

All the way in the car something seemed familiar about the audio version, rather unbelievably it took me until the final disc, disc 7 (coincidence, I expect not) to work it out. The narrator totally reminded me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail! And then I knew why Arthur Penhaligon had seemed familiar, surely it must be a riff on Arthur Pendragon? Oh and don't you hate it when you have a blinding insight like this, all by yourself, and there it is, already made on wikipedia. Hmph. Although I had to resort to my knowledge of Monty Python to work it out, not my knowledge of the classics (which is scant and sadly lacking).

This is a series and an author definitely worth pursuing.

261/1001

Garth Nix at Newcastle Writers Festival 2015

I had a fantastic weekend at Newcastle Writers Festival recently. There were many fascinating sessions. I kicked off my Saturday with an hour listening to Garth Nix and Magdalena Ball. I'd seen Garth Nix at another event a couple of years ago, but he wasn't really on my radar at that time and I don't remember all that much about it really. Which is all a bit surprising really as Garth has sold more than 5 million books, and been translated into more than 40 languages. But I'm not really much of a fantasy reader. I went through a sic-fi stage when I was a youngster, but never moved on to fantasy.

This session was primarily themed about Garth's most recent book, Clariel, a prequel to his Old Kingdom series, but published 10 years after the last book in the series. I haven't read any of those books, but the discussion about them was still fascinating. However the spark for Clariel came at the start of writing Lirael all those years ago, when he wondered how a particular character had come to be, how she have been as a young woman.

He mainly spoke to Clairel, but a lot of it applied to writing more generally.

Garth said that he doesn't map out the whole background of his books in great detail. He doesn't work anything out before he needs it for the story, although sometimes he might have worked it out in a previous book, perhaps even in what seemed a throwaway line. Which seems incredible having listened to Mister Monday recently- the first of seven books in the Keys to the Kingdom series. There are references to characters in the other six books of the series, it really seemed like he must have had an overarching plan before writing the first one. But perhaps he didn't?

Garth likes cliffhangers, which is obvious if you've ever read any of his writing, and he also likes monsters- again very obvious. He has a particular skill with both. Garth wasn't able to pick a favourite monster, and again he thinks up a monster when he needs one for the story.

Garth repeatedly said "It all comes back to story for me." A fact that really shows in his writing. It's very exciting.

There was a fascinating discussion on character names. Garth doesn't like ridiculous, unpronounceable names for his characters. Hallelujah! Ridiculous, unpronounceable names are one of the things that puts me off fantasy as a genre. Garth reads his work aloud as he is writing which he says shows the flaws in the prose, and also the flaws in the names. I've heard a number of authors say they do that now. It makes sense.

Garth actually spends a lot of time on his character names. Often he makes them up from fragments of words- names like Clariel and Sabriel. The suffix -iel is a hebrew name for angels. He wanted Sabriel to be evocative of dark night and power and so he wrote 40 or 50 different combinations before he finally chose Sabriel. And he admitted to stealing from Shakespeare as many authors do- Abhorson is the executioner in Measure for Measure, and so it is genius to use Abhorsen as those tasked to keep the dead down.

Then there was a general discussion about the life of a writer.  Garth's first book took five years to write and he earned a princely $3-4, 000.

"Hardly ever does a first novel change anything."

Then he couldn't get his second book published, but he kept writing otherwise he'd be a guy who wrote a book a long time ago. After his second US book deal Garth left full-time work. But then he didn't write anything at all for the year of 1999. He hadn't prepared himself for being a full-time writer, and rather astonishingly he went back to work to give his life some structure and get back to writing. Garth Nix then wrote his next dozen or so books while working a busy day job, so he wrote two nights a week and on Sundays.

"Being a full-time writer is a luxury. You can write a novel every year even when working full-time."

Garth Nix has now written over 30 books, he told us that every book is a new chance, and he quoted someone who said that the difference between amateur and professional writers is that professional writers finish things.

There was another very interesting discussion about categorisation in publishing. Garth Nix has an interesting perspective on this as he has worked in publishing in various roles, and found success as an author of course. He said that categories are to connect a book with it's primary first audience, but that word of mouth is still important for success. Categorisation is a blunt tool but publishers have to use it. Garth has always just written the books he's wanted to write. He advises writers to write the story they want to tell which will always work better than the story you think people want to hear.

It was such a great session. I'm so keen to read more of Garth Nix's work now, I know I have an interesting journey ahead. Maggie Ball did an amazing job leading the discussion. You can read her thoughts about chatting with Garth Nix here.