I dream of ... a library

 

I was recently doing a writing exercise about things I hoped and dreamed about when I was a child and how I felt about those hopes and dreams now. One dream was that I wanted to be a writer. Tick, done that. I dreamed of having a dog. Yup, done that, and I was right – it’s the best. I dreamed of owning a huge gothic house with a morning room and a drawing room and secret passages and servants’ quarters and many bedrooms called things like ‘the rose room’ and ‘the lilac room’. I don’t think that would suit me particularly now – too much cleaning, too many decisions about decorating and I bet the plumbing would be no good. Oh how the practicality of middle age stomps upon the fantasies of childhood!

One dream I held onto longer than most was the dream of having a library. You know, one of those that you see in movies, with books around every wall and a library ladder (I adored the scene in Bednobs and Broomsticks when Miss Price is up the library ladder looking for a particular magic book and the guy – forget his name – is pushing her around and singing). I was entranced by the idea of floor to ceiling bookshelves packed with books, ideally all hardback because if you could, why wouldn’t you? There’d be big comfortable chairs everywhere, the kind you can curl up in, one by a wide light window at one end and another by a grand fireplace. A sofa too, long enough to lie down on, not too firm. There’d be a table or a desk. Nowadays, I’d have to add in good reading lights all over the place, of course. I loved it when I visited grand houses open to the public and went into a library where books with leather covers and gold writing were housed behind glass doors. Yes, I thought. That’s the dream.

And now? I have a lot of books in my house. Being surrounded by books makes me comfortable. When we first moved here, for years some of my books were in boxes and I can honestly say that I never felt more at home than when at last we had enough bookshelves for all my books. There are bookshelves in every room here apart from the bathrooms. Some of the books I have had for a long time. Some are just passing through. When I finish reading a book, sometimes I find a place for it on the shelf, sometimes I put it straight in a bag for charity. It’s not necessarily about whether I’m going to read it again or whether I’m going to lend it to anyone. I keep books because they’re beautiful, because they were given to me by particular people, because I think they have some kind of importance, because they’re part of a set. If the decision’s not clearcut, I keep them. They may go in a cull later on.

A cull? Yes. In an ideal world, my bookshelves would not be packed floor to ceiling. There’d be a little room here and there, a space to welcome more. And to achieve that, not only do I give away the books I’m not going to read again, but I also have to be ruthless about weeding. It’s those ones I wasn’t sure about in the first place that go first, along with the ones my husband hasn’t actually thought about (he wants to keep everything, as though our bookshelves were infinitely expanding). Then I have to think about the rest. Sometimes something I’ve kept for years suddenly becomes dispensable. Occasionally I discover a space where I can fit new bookshelves and then, for a while, all the books can breathe and settle because there’ll be no need to cull for a while.

So would I like to have a library? Yes. I love the idea of a big room – both light and cosy – where I would be surrounded by books. It would be full of books I value for one reason or another and I would know just where to lay my hands on any particular book. But they wouldn’t be packed tight; there would always be space for more. The more I think about it, the more I think that it wouldn’t just be a library, this room. It would have to be my living room because why would you want to go anywhere else? (Do I put a TV in this fantasy library? Depends on how many other rooms I’ve got in the fantasy house.)

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My new book, Snippets, is available now.

For a taster tale, you can read a Snippets story that's not in the book here.

You can get a copy of Snippets on Amazon or if you’d like a signed copy send me a message on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. 

Go to https://ko-fi.com/clairewatts to read a new Snippets story every month. It’s free, but you can support me with a donation if you like.

You can also find me on my website clairejwatts.com

Reading children’s books and childhood reading

 

Of the twenty-seven books I’ve read so far this year, fifteen were children’s books. I read a lot of children’s books, mostly because I find them satisfying, but partly, of course, because I’m interested in how and what other children’s writers write. Do all children’s writers feel this way? I would be surprised to learn of any writer who didn’t read a good deal in their own area of work, suspicious too of their reasons for writing for a particular market if books of that ilk didn’t interest them. I suppose some maverick genius might manage to write a perfect book for children or a perfect romance or a perfect thriller without ever looking at an example of the type of book they were writing. It just doesn’t seem very likely.

Three of those twenty-seven were books about children’s books – there’s a whole world of writing around children’s books once you start looking: writing craft, criticism, history, memoir – plus articles and reviews. And when you can’t summon up the energy for an actual book there’s kidlit Twitter. I follow a lot of people who are engaged with children’s books and to be honest I would have given up on the shouting match and sales pitch that makes up most of Twitter long ago if it weren’t for this entirely wholesome and knowledgeable community.

I fell upon another rather fascinating thread on Twitter when Sophie Anderson (@sophieinspace) mentioned that she would not recommend the majority of the books she read when she was a child to children of today because there are so many brilliant more relevant texts available and many of the ‘classics’ pushed on children are racist and sexist. I understand where she’s coming from, but as ever it’s a matter of who is introducing reading matter to children. Most adults are not particularly interested in children’s books. They can’t be expected to know what is current and relevant. What they know about children’s books is based on books they knew and loved as a child and what the supermarket and the display tables in bookshops are shoving at them. Most primary school teachers can scarcely keep up with all the demands of their jobs, let alone manage to become well-read in the latest children’s books. For all these reasons, of course people keep sharing ‘classic’ children’s books with children. I think there’s probably also a tendency to think that these books have stood the test of time so they must be good and that, since they are classics, they must be ‘safe’. None of which is necessarily true. Reading possibly problematic old books with a child and sharing problems in them is one way forward, but I think really the best thing is to give children lots of opportunities to choose for themselves. Learning to look at book covers and blurbs to help you decide if a book will suit you is a skill. So is choosing to read something new and then deciding that it doesn’t suit you. This is, of course, where a well-stocked library comes in. *sigh*

All this led me to think about my own reading choices as a child and who and what influenced them. 

What there was in the library mostly dictated what I read. I didn’t own a lot of books but my mother took us to the library every week. Occasionally she’d point out something there she’s enjoyed as a child (that’s how I came to Elizabeth Gouge) but mostly it was just me and the shelves.

I read all the classics, What Katy Did, The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, every Nesbit I could get my hands on, influenced largely by BBC serialisations, I think. There was modern stuff too, Helen Cresswell’s Lizzie Dripping, I think Tom’s Midnight Garden and The Borrowers. From the cinema, I came to all the Mary Poppins books, so much stranger and more mysterious on the page.

One very strong memory is of a serialisation of Elidor on the children’s radio programme which was all we had by way of English language media when my father was based in Germany. It was mind-blowing and led me to the rest of Alan Garner.

When I was about eight, a friend of my mother’s who reviewed children’s books came to stay, bringing me a stack of new paperbacks, eight or ten new books all at once. It was glorious. The only one I have left is the rather wonderful The Saucepan Journey by Edith Unnerstad. I think this is the moment I started wanting to own books. After birthdays and Christmas I would head straight for a bookshop. And oh, the joy when I discovered a local second hand bookshop – a big pile of books for scarcely any outlay, lots more classics because they’d be in hardback which, to my mind, meant they must be superior.

The only influences I remember from teachers was when we listened to a recording of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which led me to the rest of Narnia and another teacher lent me a book called Well Met By Witchlight by Nina Beachcroft when I missed her reading the end (I tracked this book down a year or so ago and it wasn’t nearly as good as I remembered, but it was a huge influence on the direction of my childhood writing).

Then there was my friend Miranda. Her mother knew a lot about children’s books somehow. Through her I found K M Peyton and Barbara Willard at just the moment that I was tiptoeing around the edge of adult novels, because British publishing was still only toying with YA back then. 

So back to the question of whether I would share classic children’s books with children. Personally, no. I take great pleasure in buying books for all the children in my present-buying sphere. I like to share new and interesting books they may not have come across. I wouldn’t stop a child from reading classics, but I’d let them arrive at them for themselves. Direction is great and if there are knowledgeable teachers, librarians and family who can direct a child to their next favourite book, fantastic. But failing that guiding hand, what they need is plenty of choice.

 

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My new book, Snippets, is available now.

For a taster tale, you can read a Snippets story that's not in the book here.

You can get a copy of Snippets on Amazon or if you’d like a signed copy send me a message on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. 

Go to https://ko-fi.com/clairewatts to read a new Snippets story every month. It’s free, but you can support me with a donation if you like.

You can also find me on my website clairejwatts.com

Books for free

I recently read this article  by Dawn Finch, an author, a children’s librarian and a campaigner for the rights of authors. It's about how books by celebrity authors are damaging children’s publishing for writers, bookshops and most of all children themselves and every word of it rings true.

I WILL use the library

If you asked me how I felt about public libraries, I would tell you that I love them, of course. I think they are necessary and beautiful and egalitarian and one of the vital pieces of the puzzle that is social inclusion. As a child, I went to the library every week or so with my mother and I relished the browsing and the choosing of books. There they were, all these stories, all these ideas, all this information, and I could take any of it.

So my position in relation to the closing of libraries and the reductions in funding and the sacking of qualified librarians is – of course – horror and disgust. How can they do that? It shouldn’t be allowed. We shouldn’t sit by and them do that to our libraries.

But here’s the thing: I hardly ever use the library these days.

My fascination for fairy tales

My mother used to take me to the library once a week to change my books. Considering the book-buying habit I have these days it seems odd that I don’t remember ever feeling that I needed to own any of these books. Or perhaps it was that I felt that I did own these books. After all, there they all were – I could take any five I wanted.

Again! Again! or How to avoid burning your child’s books

I’ve always loved children’s books. When I was first pregnant, one of the things I was looking forward to was reading picture books with my child. But I discovered that small children have dubious taste and that they love repetition. Really love it. ‘Let’s read a book!’ I would say, cheerily, to my small daughter. And before I had a chance to lay my hand on something fabulous by the Ahlbergs or Lauren Child or Julia Donaldson, or any of the marvellous, clever, beautiful picture books that exist, she would produce Tinky Winky’s Bag from somewhere or other. (This was some years ago. I suppose it is possible that you may have missed out on Tinky Winky. He was one of the Teletubbies and featured in a TV programme for pre-schoolers).

‘What about Each Peach Pear Plum?’ I would say, weakly. ‘Or Where the Wild Things Are?’

‘I want this one,’ she’d say, settling herself on my lap.

There was no persuading her. Every time we sat down we had to read Tinky Winky’s Bag. I might get away with reading one or two other books as well. But sometimes I had to read Tinky Winky’s Bag twice.

I hated that book. I hated every word of it. I hated the expressionless faces of the characters, the repetitive text, the sheer dullness of it. The funny thing was, I quite liked the TV programme. There was a charming randomness about what happened in it; it seemed to me to reflect the experiences of little kids in a completely engaging way. We never missed it, even the repeats.

I tried various ways to avoid reading The Book.

‘Daddy loves this book,’ I would say. ‘He’ll read it when he comes home.’

‘OK,’ she’d say. ‘He can read it to me then. You read it now.’

‘How about you read it to me?’ I’d say. ‘You know all the words.’

‘Don’t be silly, Mummy,’ she’d laugh. ‘I can’t read.’

So what happened was this. First The Book fell apart. She picked it up one day and the cover fell off. It was pretty ratty-looking by this stage. You should have seen her: a picture of misery. So, of course, I mended it. And then I read it to her.

Then it fell apart again. When I was tidying up. After she was in bed. And the fire was lit. And so… You know what I did, don’t you? I threw it in the fire.

To this day, my husband guilt-trips me about this. He says this was Wrong (with a capital W). He says it was a mean thing to do to a child. He went on quite a bit about Burning Books.

But you know what? She never even looked for it. It wasn’t there and she wasn’t bothered. Suddenly we were reading the Ahlbergs and the Julia Donaldsons and the Quentin Blakes and all the other glorious, riotous, silly, funny, clever, imaginative stories. There never was another one that stuck the way Tinky Winky’s Bag had though. But I think maybe it was a stage that she had to go through, like all those other reading stages that you’d like to hurry your children through, the one when they have to read every single book in the Beast Quest or the Rainbow Fairies series, the one when they seem to be unable to see the value in anything that makes them read slowly enough to stop and think.

I managed to avoid another Tinky Winky’s Bag with my two other daughters. I’d like to think that this was judicious book management on my part, but I suspect it was simply that my older daughter was listening in and wouldn’t put up with anything as boring as that.

My advice? If your child loves a book that you hate, try hiding it for a day or two in the first instance. If they’re not bothered, get rid of it. If they are, ‘find’ it again and try to make sure someone else gets the job of reading it to them.

If there are older children around, get them to read. Either they won’t mind the boring book or they’ll tell the younger child that it’s rubbish. Chances are the younger child will be happy to accept their opinion.

You could also try not buying any picture books at all, but going to the library instead. That way you have to take all the books back every week or so, so nothing’s ever going to get the chance to turn into a Tinky Winky’s Bag.

That’s not that realistic though, is it? Who can resist a picture book? Just make sure you buy the best you can find – it’s not that hard, there are so many out there.

Ten of my family’s favourite picture books
(i.e. those that sprang to the minds of my daughters and me immediately the question was posed – we didn’t ask Dad, who’d probably have added Tinky Winky’s Bag)

Each Peach Pear Plum                        Janet and Allan Ahlberg

The Gruffalo                                       Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler

Pants                                                   Giles Andrae and Nick Sharratt

Bread and Jam for Frances                 Russell and Lilian Hoban

Guess How Much I Love You           Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram

Cowboy Baby                                     Sue Heap

Queenie the Bantam                           Bob Graham

Mrs Armitage, Queen of the Road     Quentin Blake

The Enormous Crocodile                    Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake

Dear Zoo                                             Rod Campbell

Children’s Books – categorizing by age group

This is an information sheet about children’s books which I wrote for the writing group I belong to, intended as an overview for the non-specialist. However, someone else asked me for this information, so here it is, for public consumption.

These categories are of necessity overlapping. Children have very different experiences of learning to read. Their ‘reading age’ may be far above or below their emotional maturity. I’ve divided them up the way you’d be most likely to see them divided in a bookshop or library. Publishers would break these categories into lots of subcategories.

Picture Books

• Some are suitable for children to read alone

• Most designed for an adult and child to share

• Importance of illustration and design; most of the best picture books are co-authored by a writer and illustrator who work closely together

• Many have rhyming texts with plenty of repetition

• There is often a playful use of language which might seem difficult for children to comprehend word for word

• The pictures can usually tell the story by themselves – or expand on the text

• Generally only a few sentences per page; some are wordless

• May contain difficult ideas which adults need to discuss or present to young children, e.g. death, new sibling, potty-training, bullying

• Not necessarily a ‘story’; could be a nonsense rhyme, descriptive or simply words.

Early Readers

• Approx 6 up

• Designed for children beginning to read on their own

• Sentences are very simple, with just one idea per sentence

• In these books the text carries the story rather than the pictures

• Many books in this range form part of a series

• At the younger end, these books have 100 to 2,500 words and each page will have a picture.

• Progresses to books of 3,000 to 15,000 words, divided into short chapters with a picture on most spreads

Middle Grade

• Age 8 to 12

• Word count generally no more than 45,000 words, though fantasy titles may be much longer

• These are the books that are most likely to spring to mind when you think of children’s books

• Generally plot- rather than character-led

• Unusual to have a first-person narrator

• The language varies more than in books for younger readers, but is likely to be simpler in structure and vocabulary than a young adult book

• Feature adventures, comedy, fun

• Unlikely to contain romance, swearing, drugs

• Many of these books feature a child protagonist, but you also find books about adults or animals

• Parents are often absent in these books

• Endings are usually happy

• May feature a series of adventures of a character, so that each chapter is a short story in itself and the book has no overall narrative arc

Young Adult

• Age 12 and up

• Word count generally no more than 70,000 words, but some genres can be much longer

• Tend to focus more on characters and their problems

• Tend to have deeper points of view (often first person) and be more emotional

• May contain material which is considered unsuitable for younger children (drugs, sex) or wouldn’t interest them (romance) or is upsetting

• The language in these books will be as complex as that of an adult novel

• These novels almost exclusively feature a teenage protagonist

Gaps

It happened. All the books came down from the attic, out of their boxes, and onto the new shelves. Well, most of them. There was a little culling to fit in some of the non-fiction, a few duplicates to get rid of, and I had to put the French books and the picture books back up because there still isn’t room for them. I suppose the fact that no one’s going to want to read them justifies this, but you know by now that I’d rather have them where I can keep an eye on them.

The new shelves are in the passage, so that you walk past them all the time going from one end of the house to the other. What is it that is so pleasing about having ranks of books? I see the children running their hands along them as they pass. They ask about this one, that one. Robert and I pick books up, look, put them back. I suppose in time we won’t even see these books, like the pictures on the walls, but just now they are intensely distracting.

I can’t work out when I last had all of my books on shelves rather than in boxes. A lot of them were around when we moved here, sixteen years ago, but I think at that point most of the children’s books were in the attic. Then, when the girls started to read for themselves I swapped them all over, put the children’s books on the shelves and the adult ones in the attic. That would have been, what, eight years ago? The reference books have stayed down here though, in case they were needed, apart from a year or so when we were having building work. So for the past eight years, I’ve had a couple of shelves of books I’ve recently bought, or things I’ve brought down from the attic to read, kept in check by ruthless culling and consigning more boxfuls to the attic at regular intervals.

So you would think, wouldn’t you, that after all this time, having my books where I can see them would give me deep satisfaction. I wish I could tell you that it was so. But I find myself slightly dissatisfied. My first thought was that this was because of the Missing Books. Where is my copy of Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites? Where is Midnight’s Children? Why do I only have two of the books in William Golding’s Rites of Passage trilogy? Where is Lord of the Flies? I know, I’ve probably lent them to people, but I don’t know for sure, which is unsettling.

It’s not this though, that is the really source of my dissatisfaction. Looking at all the adult fiction I own, laid out like that in front of me, I feel that I do not have enough books. How can I explain this? I don’t mean that I should have kept the books I’ve culled over time. No. When I give away a book to a charity shop or a school I do so because I feel that I do not need to own it. I am not interested in ever reading it again, I doubt if I will specifically want to suggest to anyone else that they read it, it is not beautiful enough to keep for its looks alone, and I don’t need to keep it because it is part of a set. I don’t regret any of the books I’ve given away. What I regret is the books I haven’t bought.

There weren’t a lot of books in my house when I was a child. My mother is a library-goer. She rarely reads a book more than once and has no acquisitiveness as far as books are concerned. My father has never been a reader. My brother is, but I think when we were at home he felt no need to hold on to the books he’d read. Maybe he’s different now. But me, I wanted to keep all the books I’d read, and I wanted shelves and shelves of books I felt I might want to read one day. I satisfied this urge with secondhand books. Once a month in the town where we lived, there was an antiques fair. Tucked away in the corner was a secondhand bookstall where they sold books for 10p and 20p, all sorts of beautiful, musty-smelling old books. I would come away each month with piles of everything, anything, ideally in hardback, with the occasional lovely old orange Penguin, authors I’d vaguely heard of, for that price it didn’t really matter what I bought. I still have books I bought then that I haven’t read yet. And after that, I worked in bookshops. This was still the days of the Net Book Agreement, so of course I took advantage of my 33% discount (how would I resist?), going home most weeks with two or three shiny new paperbacks, new authors, prize winners, backlist titles for authors I already loved, genres I’d not yet tried.

There’s a gap after that though. We bought a house, which needed money; we had children, who are expensive. Secondhand books don’t cost 10p anymore, and anyway, I’ve never had enough shelves to put the books I already own on. I stopped buying random books. The books I buy now, and the ones on my wishlists, these are books I plan to read. But I still want more of those others, those ‘oh, that looks interesting’ kind of books that you fill the shelves with and pick up one day. Last week I read Lolita; I must have had it since before we moved here. For sixteen years or more this book has been waiting for me to read it. It was fabulous, a revelation. Would I have bought it new from a bookshop? Probably not. Would I have borrowed it from the library? Probably not. That’s why I need to redevelop my idle secondhand book buying habits. I want more of these random books, these chance finds lying about the house. And that, lovely husband, is why I still need even more bookshelves.

A haven from the slings and arrows of outrageous adolescence

A couple of years ago, three maybe, I went back to my old school. It was a very unsettling experience at the time: I was on edge for weeks before and practically quivering with nerves the whole time I was there. I hadn’t been there for almost 30 years, you see, except in my most vivid dreams, anxiety dreams when I’d be climbing up and down one of the staircases carrying things from my dorm to my trunk. It was the most extraordinary thing to be actually standing in those corridors that I had been dreaming of far longer than I actually existed in. And you know the strangest thing? Since my visit I haven’t dreamed of school again, not once.

However, as you know, this blog is not about school or dreams, but about books, and the point of this preamble is to lead you into one of my favourite places in the world. It’s a place in the school and I recall it with the same intense clarity that all the different places come back to me, but I have never, ever dreamed about it. Do you think perhaps this is because it was a totally calm and stress-free environment for me? You know where it was already, don’t you? The school library, specifically the non-fiction library, because the fiction library was more like a common room.

I’m not sure that I ever ventured into the library before 5^th year, and even then I only ever remember Saturday mornings, which was when my year did their prep there. I never took a book out of the library as far as I remember. But it was such a perfect library, and even surrounded by all those judgmental, back-biting, adolescent girls, it felt like a haven. Although we were unsupervised, we were quiet. Partly I suppose that was the library-ness of it, but I think also the way the room was designed, with bays of books surrounding tables of I think around eight. I imagine whatever chat was going on was given a conspiratorial edge by the apparent privacy of those bays, leading to whispering and note-passing rather than the shrieking and carrying on more usual to a group of unsupervised fifteen-year-old girls.

From this distance, I see the library in patches of clarity and vagueness, like looking at an old photo and trying to remember what is just out of the frame. In general terms I can tell you that it’s a large, square room with narrow floor to ceiling windows spaced evenly around all four walls. This is possible because the entrance is from central staircase surrounded by a low wall into which all however many volumes of the OED are shelved. The staircase leads down to the lower floor where there is nothing but the entrance door, a large classroom, and presumably a toilet and some storerooms. The building is set into a slope, so that the entrance is at ground level but the classroom partly underground, while upstairs one wall of the library leads directly onto the rose garden (but you got that this was a posh school already, didn’t you?). I think there may have been doors leading out on this side, but I can’t picture them. 

Badminton School library, around 1980 (long before the days of quality photos on your phone)

What I can picture is the bay where I sat, I suppose every week as it is so vivid. The large table is oak and not scribbled on and carved like the desks in our classrooms. The chairs too are oak with leather seats, brown I think and far more comfortable than any other chair in the school. This furniture has been specially designed for the library and bears the school’s crest, an oak tree. One of the windows is centred between the shelves of the bay, as in every bay, and through it I see down the curve of the drive a patch of sweeping old evergreens of some kind. The light these windows give is perfect, bright enough but never so much as to be dazzling or too hot. I’m in the languages section. The library is still quite new though older than my time at the school, so to me it seems like a forever place. The lower and upper sections of the shelves are still empty, waiting for the collection to grow into its new home. Behind me, as I sit, are the French and German novels, some of them clearly classics of the type I’m only just beginning to read in English and which I flick through sometimes, just for the feel of the books rather than to actually read them. But here too are a bunch of more enticing Livre de Poche volumes. I begin to pick them up when I’ve finished my prep, at first idly, and then, when I discover I can actually read a bit, I pick the same one, the thinnest one, week after week, but furtively, not willing to admit I’m reading it, certainly not admitting to anyone else, because that would be showing off, wouldn’t it? But I am reading it, and although and I have only the vaguest idea of the plot, I get the sense of it enough to realise that it’s a bit racy for a school library and wonder if anyone else has ever read it. The book was Le Diable au Corps by Raymond Radiguet which I later bought just to see what it was really all about, and sure enough, it’s about a boy having an affair with an older woman.

And here I am, aged about 15

When I went back to school for that visit, the one place I couldn’t go was the library. It was closed because it was being renovated. I suppose they need computers in there now, and these take up space, and I suppose it’s possible that those half-empty shelves are full and now they need more. But I hope they’ve managed to retain some of the bays, with the solid beautiful tables and chairs and most of all I hope they haven’t lost the atmosphere: peace, privacy and a window onto the world beyond the pettiness of school. Perhaps it’s a good thing I didn’t see the library in its new incarnation: I can keep it in my head.