May is just round the corner already, so what will we be reading this month?

Fallen – Lauren Kate

What if the person you were meant to be with could never be yours? 17-year-old Lucinda falls in love  with a gorgeous, intelligent boy, Daniel, at her new school, the grim, foreboding Sword & Cross …only to  find out that Daniel is a fallen angel, and that they have spent lifetimes finding and losing one another as  good & evil forces plot to keep them apart. Some angels are destined to fall…

Granny – Anthony Horowitz

Twelve-year-old Joe Warden isn’t happy. He has rich, uncaring parents and is virtually a prisoner in the huge family mansion, Thattlebee Hall. Worst of all, though, is his granny. Not only is she physically repulsive, she’s horribly mean. She has the look in her eye of a predatory crocodile and Joe starts to suspect that she has unpleasant designs on him. But what are they and how can he foil them?

Chips, Beans and Limousines – Leila Rasheed

Bathsheba Clarice de Trop thinks she’s a star. Well, her mum is a world-famous novelist whose books are all about the amazing adventures of her fabulous daughter, and of course the stories must be true. But when Bathsheba is confronted by her down-and-out father, and discovers that her role in the fantastic new Bathsheba film will be played by hot US actress Avocado Dieppe, she has to face reality. She might not be as famous as she liked to think, but maybe she can still be a star in her own right.

Pick whichever one appeals to you, or read all three with us. The books have been added to our book shop to make it easy for you to get a copy. To find out more about the authors, a link to their website is on our LitBits page and check out our Q&A with Leila Rasheed in our post on 17.04.2010 . Each book’s got a thread created for it in the forum, ready for you to go in and get chatting about it as soon as you want.

Until then, happy reading!

We’ve now been live for nearly a month, and our virtual appearance has changed 3 times, our widgets have been all over the place and we’ve learnt a thing or two about blogging.

It hasn’t all been about web design, though. Oh no, we have not been idle in sharing the babble. Twitter has been a fantastic revelation to us – why has it taken us so long to find it?! Our twitter wings have slowly been spreading and with a few tweets under our belt, we find we already have far flung followers numbering over 20 already, and none of them are our mates! Yes, we know people have hundreds and thousands following them, but give us a chance – it’s becoming our mission to work to double the number on a monthly basis, so 40+ for May and we’ll be delighted. It’s through twitter that we have made contact with several publishers and authors – one of whom has been kind enough to help us out with a members competition next month – more on that soon..

Whilst it’s been exciting to be designing, developing and basically messing about with things, we are now ready to get on with our main function – our book group. The website’s sorted (hope you like it, BTW) and we’re tweeting away happily so we can now get down to the good stuff – books. We confess with everything else we’ve been doing this month, there’s been little time for reading, which is madness for a book group and frustrating as it’s what we most love to do. From here on in, we’ll be busy enjoying books – hope you are, too…

Our top 10 tips to encourage young readers:

• Get in there early. At just 3 months old a baby can see pictures and will enjoy the sound of your voice reading. Making books a part of a routine early on should make it easier to just keep on reading.
• Read together. If you’re reading the same book together, bring it to life by talking about the characters e.g. ‘what would xxx do now?’ and so on. When they’re older, just take time out to both snuggle down with a good book each and relax together.
• Check out popular titles, recommended reads and reviews – it needs to be a good book if they’re to enjoy it!
• Link books to other interests. Often it can be a bit trickier to get boys into reading and authors and publishers are trying to address this by bringing out themed fiction to attract them. So, for example, for football mad fans you can try Tom Palmer‘s football academy series.
• A trip to the cinema or renting a DVD is always fun, so pick a film that could spark an interest by going for films based on books. Think Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, the Narnia films, Spiderwick Chronicles, Lord of the Rings – the list is endless, and all have lots of great books to be reading.
• Make outings to the book shop or library fun. Look forward to it, don’t rush your time there and give a free reign on a few book choices. This is especially the case in the library when the books are free – what does it matter that they’ve picked a book on snakes of the world if they’ve never shown an interest before?! The point is, they picked it.
• For older children, get them as interested in the author as they are in the books. Authors are often up there now with top celebrities, and with social networking sites, it’s never been easier to connect with your favourite author. By adding on Facebook or following on Twitter, you feel more connected during the writing of a new title and get to know when the new releases are due out.
• If books aren’t doing it, what about comics? An avid Beano reader is still a reader and sooner or later, a book’s bound to be picked up!
• An obvious and easy one – they can stay up later if they’re reading. Staying up late is great when you’re young (at what age does it change so the goal becomes getting more sleep??!), and winding down to sleep from a book tends to be far easier than winding down from jumping around on a Wii!
• A shameless plug – get them joining the Bookbabblers. We read books together, have a community springing up to talk about what we’re reading, share our reviewed books with each other, include author Q&A’s, and encourage members to ask the author questions, and most of all LOVE reading.

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Birmingham based Leila, author of the Bathsheba Clarice de Trop book series, spared us a few moments and gave herself a breather from preparing for the Stratford Literary Festival, running 25th April to 3rd May. As well as appearing at the festival, Leila was also asked to write a young adult novel based around Stratford being published just in time for the start of the festival. In Leila’s words ‘The cover has been created by a local art student, and is really impressive. The book is called The World Turned Upside Down and it’s the story of what happens when two time periods and four characters – two from 1642, in the English Civil War, and two from 2042, when a new civil war is taking place – meet.’ It’s out 19th April and you can order now from Amazon – it’s in our book shop ready for you!

Onto our questions:

Who was your favourite author when you were young and who is your favourite current author?

What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

You can find out more about Leila at www.leilarasheed.com.

Well, that’s a good question. Why would you poke around the site and then join us? There are plenty of reasons, so here are a few. We’d like anyone that enjoys reading to join us to show everyone that there are plenty of you out there!! It’s a bit of an experiment really to see how many members we can get, how many Twitter followers, how many becoming fans of our Facebook page, how the word can spread. If the idea of being a part of a new and growing group isn’t doing it for you, how about our main purpose – to get us all reading and chatting through our books. By being a part of our virtual group, you will know that others are reading the same book as you and you can then happily chat away about it in the forum and share your thoughts. In this case, it’s probably a good idea, as well as joining us by clicking to ‘register’ on the right of the homepage, that you click to subscribe to our emails as you will then get updates of what we’re doing and we’ll announce the books we’ll be reading the next month a week in advance so you can order copies in our shop or get them from the library ready. To follow us on Twitter, click on the ‘t’ at the top right of the page and to ‘like’ us on FaceBook just pop to our page by clicking on our FaceBook status on the right. A key part of being part of our group is that it’s very much your group, too. As such, we will regularly randomly choose members to decide on and contribute to what we are doing. For example, you may be asked to choose a ‘book of the month’ so you can tell us all what to be reading, you may be asked to submit questions for an author interview we have lined up, you may be asked what you want us including in our blog for the month or you may be asked to start a new ‘babble’ topic. Hopefully you’ll enjoy being a part of our group like this, but don’t worry if that’s not your thing – we’ll ask you but you can say no!! As our group is just starting out, register now as the chances of you being chosen to help us is good as there’s not many of you …yet!

Mentioning the forum there, we notice a few topics are starting up. Greeny isn’t too sure about New Moon, Pengy thinks The BFG’s Sophie is a good candidate for our babble lead female character and we’ve a few opinions about our favourite Roald Dahl book – go on, join now and chuck your views into the mix.

When we’re not blogging, reading or babbling, you’ll find us shopping for books! We have our link here on site directly to the Book Shop which includes Amazon’s children’s books range, and to make your lives nice and easy, we add our book of the months and any other books featured on this site to the first couple of pages. While we were browsing and picking a few new titles out, we spotted that Amazon currently have a load of children’s books on offer – just click here to go see - up to 40% off children’s books

Happy reading!

We hope you like the new addition allowing you to doodle on our homepage – we look forward to seeing some great masterpieces now!

We’re now part way through reading The Wind Singer, and enjoying it very much. The problem with reading books like this is that we know it’s just the first in the series and as we’re already hooked there’s no way back now, so we’ll be having to read every other book! How will we find the time??! It is always fun to discover new authors or series that we enjoy, though, so we are hoping that this is what our book group will be able to do for you. Even if our ‘book of the month’ isn’t an author/genre you would normally choose for your self, give it a whirl as you may discover something new that you like. We always do that whenever we go to the library – browse the shelves and authors we love and choose 2-3 like that and then pick up a random choice just by the cover or title. It’s hit and miss, but we have found a few books we’ve really enjoyed this way.

We’ve made a new section in the forum this week called ‘babble’. It’s where we’ll be having fun choosing our ‘dream team’ of the book world. It’s already created lots of conversations just with us when we added it. Where do you start? If you’ve read literally hundreds or maybe even thousands of books, trying to narrow it down to just 1 hero and 1 heroine is pretty tricky! We started to think of our favourite books and pretty much worked back from there. It led us to some of the people you see on this page, though this is by no means everyone we thought of. The shortlist is quite a long list! Harry Potter’s surely got to get a mention – hero in 7 books and our only hope against the Dark Lord? Edward Cullen, as a lead male character, also deserves a shout, but can vampire’s be heroes? He certainly looks out for Bella, so does that make him a hero? If he’s a candidate, should Bella be? We then popped over to thinking about our favourite classics, so we of course think Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet need to be in the mix, and perhaps Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff and Catherine? So we now await you to enter the ‘babble’ forum area and tell us what you think. We’ll be building our team together over the coming months, including best villains, homes, settings, animals, parents, siblings – whatever you want to chat about, so get in now and have your say.

In the meantime, happy reading!