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Fifty Books A Year
The British Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, has announced that school children should be reading fifty books a year. Leaving aside the irony of this coming from a politician whose...
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A Public Service Announcement: Smoking Is Bad For You
As I’ve previously mentioned, I love the North American cover of The FitzOsbornes in Exile, which features a girl in a glamorous 1930s ballgown. One of the shadowy figures in the background is a young...
View ArticleHermione Granger Rules The World
I love the Harry Potter books, but I also agree with Sady Doyle’s feminist criticisms of them. Ms Doyle discusses the REAL hero(ine) of the books in her article, In Praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione...
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Just A Girls’ Book, Redux
Last year, I posted a rant about a couple of YA book reviews that had evoked my feminist rage. One of the book reviewers, Malcolm Tattersall, subsequently contacted me and expressed an interest in...
View ArticleGirls and Boys and Books, Yet Again
Oh, no! The YA publishing industry is dominated by girls! Girls reading books, girls writing books, girls actually allowed to be main characters in books . . . It’s out of control and it has to stop,...
View ArticleRegarding Internet Piracy
I’ve been contemplating this topic for a while, but put off blogging about it because . . . well, I suspected it would be a difficult and depressing experience. However, I’ve decided that writing this...
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Book Banned, Author Bemused
I’ve previously written about my books being edited so that the vocabulary, punctuation and spelling make sense to overseas readers. However, I didn’t mention another issue, which is that different...
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Looking For A Good, Clean Book
The first time I heard about this, I assumed it was a joke, but apparently this is an actual thing – librarians being asked by adult patrons to recommend ‘clean’ books. ‘Clean’ means different things...
View ArticleThe Creative Vision Versus The Marketing Department
If you know anything about the publishing industry, you’d be aware of how significant the marketing department has become in each large publishing house. The more difficult it becomes for publishers to...
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Some Thoughts On Reading
Gwenda Bond has a great post1 on her blog about what she calls “The Reading Police”, in which she says (among other things), “I have zero patience for reader shaming or for making people feel lesser...
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Five Feminist Books
Happy International Women’s Day! I thought I’d mark the occasion by recommending some feminist books. Social media has its uses and there are lots of interesting feminist blogs and online forums, but...
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Memoranda Turns Ten
Ten years ago today, I started this blog with a post about how I learned to hate poetry. Three hundred and twenty-one posts and about two hundred thousand words later, here I am, still blogging,...
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