Hello December

Hello people!!

Hello and happy happy December! I am feeling rather festive at the moment, probably because I have just counted up and have only 8 working days left before Christmas.
Hurray and also hurrah.
Christmas is my favourite.

Tomorrow I am taking a Jo day. This means I will stay in bed til much later than 6.45am. I will wrap all (or most of) my Christmas presents, I will take my book and have lunch at Starbucks, I will dance around my house to Christmas tunes, I will go to Ikea and then I will call in on my friends T&S for sherry and mince pies. Hurrah for Jo days.

I have quite a bit of book news to share with you, but not today. I'll come back in a day or so and tell you about 'All My Friends Are Superheroes' which is adorable and about 'Girl In Translation' which I am reading right now. I'll also do some kind of 'hurrah for the amazeballs books of 2011' post too. That'll be nice won't it ;)
Seriously though, if you haven't already then you really should read 'All My Friends Are Superheroes.' I heart it.

Now that December is here I can re-read all my winter favourites: Harry Potter and Northern Lights and Alice and Little Women. This makes me happy. There's just something about Christmas that goes hand in hand with revisiting books you love. It wouldn't be Christmas if I didn't read Little Women.

I leave you with an early Friday photo (due to the aforementioned Jo day tomorrow) - reasons to love Maggie Smith: she gets the star of the entire Harry Potter franchise to hold her umbrella!

Happy Birthday Mr. Dahl

Today is Roald Dahl Day, an annual celebration of the fabulousness of Dahl, held every year on his birthday (he would have been 95 today.) & I urge you to read The BFG at bedtime tonight in his honour.

Everybody** loves Roald Dahl, even people who aren’t big readers have a soft spot of The BFG or Charlie or Matilda and I’m no different because let’s be honest: Dahl was a master story-teller and, whilst as an adult I revel in books like his 'Tales Of The Unexpected,' dark, twisted, very very clever and incredibly well-written, it is probably his books for children that he's most famous for and those are the ones that have their own little corner in my heart.

Even now, 21 years after his death he still inspires the exact same feelings in me as he does in my 7 year old nephew and when Toby's is a world in so many respects alien to me, a world of Ben 10 and Moshi Monsters and Wii games I can’t help but applaud anything that gives us that connection; that bridges the gap between his world and mine.

Roald Dahl was my childhood and in the same way the children of today will look back and thank JK Rowling for theirs, I owe mine to him. He is everything childhood should be: he’s magic and intrigue and excitement and laughter, so much laughter & even now at 28 I feel like a child again when I settle down to re-read his work; it hasn’t lost a single bit of it’s charm and because of the unique way Roald Dahl wrote, from the perspective of a child, it’s so easy now to curl up with The Witches and be transported right back to being 8 years old. It’s so easy to sit down with Toby and talk about The Twits and George’s Marvellous Medicine and feel just as alive and just as excited by it as I did then because Roald Dahl never seemed like a grown-up writing for children, he got inside the head of them so perfectly that it seemed he was writing as one.

When I was a child his books felt real, I understood them and I felt like they understood me. Now his books remind me of how it felt to be a child.

Knowing Roald Dahl opens the door to Neverland because as long as you keep his books on your bookshelf and revisit them every so often you never have to grow up.

**everybody I’ve met. I’m not pretending I’ve surveyed the entire population or anything. That would be crazy.

Day 21: Favourite book from your childhood

I loved this book then and I love this book now and I'm fairly sure I will love this book when I am old and am reading aloud to my Grandchildren. It's the book that symbolises my childhood I think. I still know most of the poems by heart and just thinking of it conjures up so many memories of times gone by that it makes me feel almost melancholy.


When We Were Very Young is one of the first books I can remember loving. My Granny and my Grandpa both used to read it to me as did my parents and even when I was old enough to read it to myself I still loved curling up on the lap of (and then as I got bigger, at the feet of) one of them and listening to them read it to me and I fell asleep so many times with the audiotape playing in the background.

It's funny too, how I remember people reading different poems. My Mum would always go right to 'Rice Pudding' whilst I associate Granny with 'The Kings Breakfast' which I think might be my favourite - it's either that or 'Buckingham Palace' and I would bet money that if you were to go to my Dad, or my Grandpa or even my 23 year old brother now and say "James James Morrison Morrison' they'd smile and continue with 'Wetherby George Dupree, took great care of his Mother though he was only three....' It's almost like an heirloom; it's been passed down from generation to generation, all of us having grown up loving it and being desperate to pass that love along to our own children and I can't wait to read it to my own babies, one day.

The King said,
"Bother!"
And then he said,
"Oh, deary me!"
The King sobbed, "Oh, deary me!"
And went back to bed.
"Nobody,"
He whimpered,
"Could call me
A fussy man;
I only want
A little bit
Of butter for
My bread!"

Day 18: First “chapter book” you can remember reading as a child:

Dinner Ladies Don’t Count by Bernard Ashley.

"Jason comes to school in a foul temper. His teacher Miss Smith tries to deflect his anger onto the plasticine, but he isn't having it. He had come to school 'with a smack instead of breakfast' and all because mum has said he can't have a dog for his birthday. Mum has developed an allergy to dogs, but Jason is beyond understanding. He progresses to vandalising Donna's plasticine model, and then is accused of a crime he hasn't committed. Hauled off to the headmistress, he refuses to explain the real problem. An understanding dinner lady talks him round and back in the classroom he discovers what has really happened to the missing birthday cards. Succinct, but manages to get in all the right detail." - from healthybooks.org

There’s a photo of me somewhere reading this. I got it in an early Christmas book parcel and spent Christmas Day reading it. We still have it somewhere I think. I loved it.