I’m now a weekly iVoices blogger over at the recently launched iVillage website. Do come on over and say hello and see the other fabulous bloggers.
I’ve discussed my thoughts on the subject of ‘mummy blogging’ here many times over the years. A few weeks ago I was asked my thoughts about it again for this post called ’Mummy Bloggers’: Taking Control or Being Patronised?’ for The Wheeler Centre dailies, sensitively written – as ever – by Jo Case.
The clever folk over at the Killings blog have announced this terrific YA Championship for all YA readers out there (if you’re a parent of a teen, be sure to let them know). By voting for your favourite YA title from the past 30 years you go into the draw to win a terrific prize of books!
One of our favourite shows to watch together is the BBC production Horrible Histories. This Guardian article outlines the huge rise of the TV show and this one profiles its creator Terry Deary, open antiestablishmentarian:
“I don’t want to write history,” he says, firmly. “I’m not a historian, and I wouldn’t want to be. I want to change the world. Attack the elite. Overturn the hierarchy. Look at my stories and you’ll notice that the villains are always, always, those in power. The heroes are the little people. I hate the establishment. Always have, always will.”
Charles II: King of Bling. A rap, a la Eminem. Fabulous!
Sex scenes are notoriously hard to write – but who are the writers that manage to do them well? These ones, as picked by other writers.
Recent findings by the National Literacy Trust in England show that boys are falling behind girls in reading and that three out of four schools are concerned about the current state of boys’ reading. This article by Michael Morpungo goes into his ideas about what might be done about this situation. This paragraph particularly resonated with me.
Perhaps it is partly that we need to love books ourselves as parents, grandparents and teachers in order to pass on that passion for stories to our children. It’s not about testing and reading schemes, but about loving stories and passing on that passion to our children. This might seem naïve and of course the problem is cultural and deep-seated too and therefore unlikely to be resolved quickly, but there must be things we could perhaps do to try to turn things around over time.
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Interesting read on writing sex scenes…just wish I hadn’t been on the Internet at the public library, ’cause there’s a big, old picture of a naked woman resplendent on a bed.
Heh. It was a bit mortifying when the six-year-old asked his mum why the woman on the computer wasn’t wearing any clothes. That got the librarians’ attention. Whoops.
Oh Dom! I’m so sorry, I didn’t even know that article had a nude pic attached to it – I only read it in my reader and copied the link from there, I didn’t actually click over. Did you get in trouble? I hope not
No worries, Karen. It was a rather tasteful photo, and once I explained to the librarians the nature of the article — and that I wasn’t, in fact, trolling for porn on their computers — it was much ado about nothing.
In fact, a few of them were rather interested in the article.
Yes, a nude pic indeed. Luckily for me I opted to read it when the kids were out
Interesting article though and I found some of the writers’ selections interesting. I have to agree with the two or three of them who cited Jane Austen as a mistress of the oblique sex scene; I’ve always thought that.
As for Horrible Histories – just pure brilliance.
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Letting Miss 5 see me read and sharing my love of books with her has always been something that I have tried to do, rather than just read with her. I’ve always thought that if she thinks I only read with her then she may think that it isn’t something people do because they love it.
Of course, it does become a problem when she wants to know what the book is called, what it is about and what is happening. I mean, what am I to tell her when I’m reading the Sookie Stackhouse series? And it has always bugged me that she was more taken with the front cover of John Irving’s The Fourth Hand than she was ever interested in A Sound Like Someone Trying Not To Make A Sound (is that the correct title?)
permanently amanda recently posted..5 things … We enjoyed at the Emerge Festival