Quite a Lot of Books.

I've been busy with books recently.

These are new here. The top two, "Flea Market Style" and "Granny Squares", were Christmas presents. They're both quite nice - not fantastic or special in any way, just fairly nice examples of their genre (I do like interiors and crochet books). The Nigel Slater "Tender Vol II" book was a mere £1 from a charity shop.  I already have Vol I so was pleased to find the second one. It's a beautiful book and there are some lovely photos inside. I've only read the introduction so far and I am already inspired to grow more fruit in the garden. I may even get round to using the recipes one day... The bottom two books; "Decorate Workshop" and "Gardenalia", were TKMaxx bargains. I'm enjoying the "Decorate Workshop" book especially. I have to admit that with interiors books it's more about the pictures than the text, once you've actually read one, there's no need to ever read another one! This follows a slightly different format to other interiors books, but the pictures are still the best bit. Gardenalia could do with more pictures and less text...
 

Excerpt from "Decorate Workshop".

 Excerpt from "Decorate Workshop".

 Excerpt from "Gardenalia".

 Excerpt from "Tednder Vol II".

 

Over the Christmas holidays, in addition to having the 4000 word essay to write (which I submitted with a few hours to spare, hurrah!), we also had a book chain assignment to complete. This involved reading ten children's books which were to be linked in some (fairly random!) way. Five were to be for older primary school children, and five for younger primary school children. My chain began with The Kite Rider which I'd found in a charity shop and had initially bought for my daughter to read. This linked (via a kite theme) to The Kites are Flying which linked (via Michael Morpurgo) to Private Peaceful, etc, you can see the gist of it all on the poster above which I made. The last book in the chain is The King of Capri by Jeanette Winterson and illustrated by Jane Ray. I wanted to include this one as it made the chain continuous and it was a good excuse to buy another Jane Ray book. I have to confess that this is the one book I hadn't actually read before doing my poster. I had ordered it from an ebay seller but it didn't arrive in time so my blurb is derived from amazon reviews! Had I read it I would have reviewed it slightly differently. I like the illustrations and most of the story but don't like how it ends. Anyway, it's still a good excuse for including some more of Jane Ray's lovely paintings on my blog...

The last two illustrations are actually from "The Happy Prince" which is another recent Jane Ray aquisition, this time from a charity shop.

You can see I'm building up quite a collection. Initially I started buying them for A, but she's not terribly fussed about them, so they're kept in the living room bookcase now for all to enjoy.

I have selected "Children's Literature" as my optional class at university. I thought it would be interesting and useful to find out from the "experts" which new authors and books are recommended for children, my own knowledge being rather dated (authors I particularly remember liking as a child include Joan Aiken, Nina Bawden, Noel Streatfield, Leon Garfield, Nina Beachcroft...)

So here is another pile of new-to-me books (the whole lot cost less than £15 via ebay - I decided to buy rather than borrow as my children will be able to read them later too). These were all recomended either by the tutor or by my other classmates, many of whom are English grads as the literature we're going to be looking at is for children aged around 8 - 15 so is applicable to both primary and secondary PGDE students. I've already read "Wolf" and found it an exciting and enjoyable read.   

And today I took some "stuff" to the charity shop and came away with these, £3 the lot (the deal is 4 children's books for £1). How many can I read before my next teaching placement (when life goes a bit mad and time is in very short supply). I only have a week...