Fifty Five Books in 2015 by Savita Kalhan

In 2015 I did my usual thing of trying to read at least fifty five books, and I managed to reach my target. I love reading, but sometimes work and life can get in the way, so having a target and keeping a record helps keep me on track.

It's also interesting to look back at what I've spent the year reading. Some of it is work related, of course, and some constitutes research. But it's definitely quite an eclectic list that ranges from middle grade books, to teen books, young adult, and general fiction. 

Last year I also set up a teen reading group at my local library, and what I discovered was that the kids in my group not only share my love of reading, but that, like me, they love a huge range of location, theme and genres in the books they read.

Interestingly, what they don't like is being misled by the blurb on the back of a book - especially if it's written in a very different style to the book. They like an honest blurb that more accurately describes the book. Some of them like chapter headings, some of them glance at the last page - just to make sure that the ending isn't going to be one they're not going to like, which can make them put the book down before the end.

My group are mainly younger teens, so although we did shadow the Carnegie for a while, we moved on within a few months. We discussed all the books on the long list and short list, and the group read several of them, but there were a few books that they could not finish because, in the kids' words, 'they were for much older kids.' I'm glad they tried them and knew when to put them down. Some of them will come back to them in a few years, I'm sure.

So here are a few of mine and my teen library group's favourite reads last year:

Lies We Tell Ourselves by Robin Talley

Silent Saturday by Helen Grant

Looking at the Stars by Jo Cotterill

I Heard the Owl Call my Name by Margaret Craven
Buffalo Soldier by Tanya Landman

Cow Girl by G R Gemin

Whale Boy by Nicola Davies

Liccle Bit by Alex Wheatle

And some more:

Half Lives by Sara Grant
Lockwood and Co: The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud

The Fastest Boy in the World by Elizabeth Laird
Apple and Rain by Sarah Crossan

Fuzzy Mud by Louis Sachar

She is Not Invisible by Marcus Sedgwick
The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo by Catherine Johnson
13 Hours by Narinder Dhami

I wish I could fit in more than fifty five books. Maybe I'll raise the bar to sixty books this year...

Happy reading in 2016!


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Creative Mess by Helen Grant

Recently I had a day which I knew was going to be unproductive. I was getting the first thunderous rumblings of a migraine and there was no way I was going to be able to concentrate on writing my book. So I decided to do something useful anyway - requiring no brain power - and clear up my desk.

I say “desk”, but it is actually the oak dining table my grandmother bought on her marriage in 1933, so it has a larger surface area than the average desktop. In spite of this, you could hardly tell the colour of the wood because of all the things heaped up on it. It looked like this:

It took me three hours to clear up completely. Most of it was paperwork, which needed to be filed (groan!) in the proper places. There were also what seemed like a trillion receipts to be sorted: business expenses to be filed, the rest to be shredded. And then there were things like two pairs of 3D cinema glasses, which have no sensible home anywhere. Eventually, however, the desk looked like this:

I still had a stack of hardbacked books instead of a proper laptop stand, but otherwise it now looked tidy and respectable – and to my mind, a bit sterile.

I posted both of these pictures on Facebook, mainly to stop myself chickening out of the clearing up after I’d taken the first one! What was interesting was that instead of a chorus of “what a mess!” I suddenly had other writers commenting, “I feel so much better about mine now,” “Your desk is totally like my desk. I feel relieved,” and even: “That is such a comfort. Please leave it like that.” Some of them even posted photographs of their own messy desks.

Now, I am prepared to believe that there are authors out there who have beautifully ordered work spaces with their highlighter pens lined up in rows. However, it’s clear that many of us like to work in what one writer sweetly described as a “creative midden.” Or maybe we don’t like it as such, but we aren’t bothered enough about it to have a clear up. After all, we know where everything is, right? The reference book I am using is underneath that stack of old holiday photographs. Somewhere…

Anyway, having seen the comments on my messy photograph, I was wallowing in a pleasurable sense of writerly sisterhood, until I was pulled up short by a non-writing friend. “Helen,” she commented, “you wouldn't survive a day in a corporate office. It's clear desk every night.”

Setting aside the fact that I did in fact survive ten whole years in a corporate office before I became an author, this comment stung me a bit. It seemed to imply that my messy desk was incompatible with efficiency, productivity and professionalism. It was, in short, the sign of a deeply messy mind.

Perhaps I’m being oversensitive here. But as an author, you inevitably do hear a few remarks that suggest that writing is something that just sort of happens in a very unstructured way, probably while the author is sitting in an arty little café. Or in a hammock.

“I’d love to write a book if I ever had the time,” for example, which suggests that the speaker is too busy rushing about between important pieces of business to do anything as fey as write. And don’t get me started on the people who suggest a writer gets “a proper job”…

All this did make me think. Am I desperately disorganised and fey? No, I don’t think I am, and nor are my fellow authors.

It takes months, sometimes years, to produce the first draft of a novel. The first novel anyone writes (unless they are already a celebrity with an eager public crying out for their book) is written without any guarantee that it will ever be published and read. Eighty or ninety thousand words don’t write themselves; that represents a huge amount of work done entirely “on spec.” There is nobody hanging over the author’s shoulder at that point, urging them to get on with it. The motivation comes entirely from within.

Then we come to the follow-up book, at which point there may very well be someone hanging over the author’s shoulder, at least figuratively. The second book is notoriously “difficult” as it has to be at least as good as the first one and now there is a deadline, too. Nothing happens without a lot of self discipline. The writer’s muse isn’t lolling about on a chaise longue sipping absinthe and throwing out a couple of half-finished sentences a day; she’s going flat out, like a hamster on a wheel. Well, mine was, anyway.

Living with mess is also a matter of priorities. Anyone who works at home knows that on a bad day, when inspiration is lacking, it’s very easy to get sidetracked into chores. Ten thousand words needed by Friday? Yes, but there’s this DVD collection in desperate need of alphabetising… Get sucked into that particular maelstrom and the book will never be written.

So I like to think that a messy desk demonstrates that the writer has his or her priorities right. They have looked the Spirit of Domesticity in the eyes and said, no, I have a book to write first.  A messy desk is, in fact, the sign of a Higher Calling.

That’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking to it…

Favourite Teen/YA Reads of 2014 by Savita Kalhan

In January this year I decided to challenge myself to reading 55 books. I did it through Goodreads to track what I’ve read and when I’ve read it. Some of the books I’ve read have been for ‘work’, some for research and others for sheer pleasure.

My to-be-read pile is always huge and there never seems to be enough time for reading, so doing it this way keeps me on track – the message: you’re x number of books behind is enough to spur me on to make more reading time. Apparently, I’m ‘on track’, with a few weeks to go before December 31^st by which time I’ll hopefully have made it to the magic 55 books read mark. Looking back over my list of books read, I thought I’d share some of my favourite teen/YA reads of the year.

 

Buffalo Soldier by Tanya Landman

 

 

The Hob and the Deerman by Pat Walsh

 

 

 

The Case of the Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud

Wish Me Dead by Helen Grant

Between Two Seas by Marie-Louise Jensen

The Unicorn Hunter by Che Golden

 

Apache by Tanya Landman

 

 

Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell

 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

 

 

 

I’ll stop there or else it’ll end up being a very long list! It also makes me wish I had read more of my to-be-read pile.

I hope you’ll share some of your favourite teen/YA reads of the year in the comments – the more book recommendations I get the bigger my smile! Merry Christmas!

 

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New Adult or Young Adult?

Open Book, Radio Four’s programme about all matters literary turned its attention to New Adult fiction last week. Was it, asked presenter Mariella Frostrup, just a marketing ploy? Or is there a need for a bridge between Young Adult fiction and Adult fiction?

Cue an intelligent and interesting  discussion between journalist Caroline Sanderson, writer Liz Bankes and editor Emily Thomas, which nonetheless had me grinding my teeth and throwing things at the radio.

It seems to me that the title New Adult could mean books about older teens  moving from the world of school, homework and exams into the adult world of further education, employment, unemployment, sex and parenthood.  These books already exist and are labelled Young Adult.  A New Adult label isn’t therefore strictly necessary but could serve as a useful label to identify books for and about older teens.  It might help them crossover into an adult market. It might encourage publishers and booksellers to see older teen books as a genre worth investment, and keep older teens interested in looking at the teen shelves in book shops. It could, above all, be a useful way of marketing e-books to older teen readers.

New Adult could be this...

..but is actually this

Recent books that might fit into that sort of New Adult category might include Lydia Syson’s A World Between Us – three young people caught up in the Spanish Civil War,  working as a nurse, a journalist, and a printer turned soldier.  Or Malorie Blackman’s Boys Don’t Cry, about a boy whose plans to go to university are hijacked by becoming a father. Helen Grant, Melvin Burgess, Meg Rosoff ,  Sarra Manning, Mal Peet, Kevin Brooks  and many other UKYA authors often write about older teens.  These books are labelled YA or teen fiction, they are shelved as such, they are received with enthusiasm by the supposed gatekeeper. Publishers publish them, and teachers and librarians are not scared of  coming of age books.  On the contrary, they often favour them over  books aimed at younger children -  just take a look at most Carnegie shortlists.

He's 18, having sex, bringing up a child. New or Young Adult?

My next book, Salvage, has two narrators. One is Aidan, 18, who is living with an older girlfriend, Holly and her two-year-old son, Finn.  Is Aidan a Young Adult or a New Adult?  His sister Cass, the other narrator, is 16 and embarking on her first sexual relationship. Is she Young Adult or New Adult?

Unfortunately New Adult has stopped being a useful label for my books and the books of the authors mentioned above, because New Adult has come to mean ‘books about teenagers having sex, generally originally self-published, and picked up by publishers who want a slice of the action.’ Unlike most YA authors writing about sex, they include an element of soft porn (generally the softest of soft porn, almost always from a female point of view, with far more about 'panties' than throbbing or thrusting Men's Bits).  The ‘Adult’ has taken over from the ‘New’.  The quality of writing isn’t great in any of these books that I’ve read, and the sex is often boring (one New Adult book that I attempted to read seemed to have been written by someone who’d never had sex in her life, so was hopelessly vague and boring, others are just a bit tacky and embarrassing). In a matter of months New Adult has come to mean ‘rubbishy’  and ‘put that label on my books and I will kill you’ for most authors writing books about new adults.

Having said that, I think that these New Adult books are not a bad thing. Porn is generally produced by men, for men, and it’s surely good for girls to have access to their own brand, written by women. These books do address emotional issues around sex, and they generally feature interesting  and engaging characters.  They may not engage me, but I’m not their target market. If I were 16 and in possession of an e-reader, I think I’d love them.  As Malorie Blackman said recently, books are a great place for children to learn about sex.  The 'New Adult' romances, or -  to use a word invented and only used by marketing managers - 'steamies', are part of that process.

For the last few weeks I’ve been taking my daughter to university open days. I’ve sat in lecture theatres full of 17 and 18 year olds and their parents, learning about the next stage of their lives. What will they study, how will they find jobs, where will they live, how will they make friends?  I’ve had fascinating conversations with my daughter about her hopes and plans for the future, watched as she was inspired, reassured and challenged by visions of her future. I'd love to have more books to suggest to her which focus on the transition from school to adult life, which tell you what it's like to unpack your suitcase on the first day of university (and I don't mean Charles Ryder at Oxford).

New adulthood is one of the most interesting and important times of anyone’s life. It  offers writers many exciting possibilities.  Right now, though, I’d rather steer clear of the New Adult label.