Though our forum is always open for you to drop by and share your thoughts, we thought it would be nice to arrange a few online meeting times where you know that when you pop in for a chat, there’ll always be a few Bookbabblers hanging about to bounce ideas off. At these times, you can either go into our forum (you’ll need to be a registered member to add chat – it’s free and easy to join, so go on!) or to the ‘discussions’ tab on our Facebook wall. We’ll start a few threads and discussions up ourselves, but do feel free to start and add your own – it’s everyone’s group! We plan to add 2-3 themed discussions:

- Book of the Month reads – read with us! Every month we choose 3 books that we will be reading and ask you to join in. There will always be a forum thread for each book and from now on, we’ll add a discussion topic on Facebook for each of them, too.

- Bookbabblers recommend…’ – we plan to build up a bank of ‘best books for..’ type posts, with your input and suggestions. As such, we’ll often have list ideas running for you to all agree and add to. We’ll take the top 10 most popular choices to write our posts with and so will be building up some great recommended reads for all ages, genders, likes and so on.

- Our Literary Dream Team – always a fun topic to get babbling about. It might be ‘favourite hero’, ‘most evil villain’, ‘place I’d love to visit’ or any of your ideas. This one should be fun!

The meeting times we will start with are:

Sunday – 11-11.30am

Thursday – 7.30-8pm

And we’ll see which is easiest for people to make and watch how it goes! And don’t forget, even if you can’t be there for these times, the forum and discussion tabs are always there for you to drop by and tell us all what you think. And you don’t have to wait for our first meeting either – go babble now if you like!

Thanks, and hope to be chatting with lots of you tomorrow….

Just a short post to tell you what we’re up to…

We’re looking for 1000 fans, between the site, Twitter and Facebook. Once we have 1000, we’ll unlock a ‘Thank You!’ book giveaway, where all fans are automatically entered. The giveaway will include brand new books and some slightly thumbed by Bookbabblers (we do look after books here!), and are:

Granny – Anthony Horowitz

A Jiggy McCue Story: The Curse of the Poltergoose – Michael Lawrence

The Dragonfly Pool – Eva Ibbotson

I Coriander – Sally Gardner

Ondine – Ebony McKenna

Ginger Snaps – Cathy Cassidy

Just spread the word, retweet, suggest to people of Facebook. Once we have 1000, we’ll pick winners….

Thanks!!

We’ve now got a Bookbabbler review panel for baby books through to books for 6/7 year olds. Our brilliant parent panel is made up of Helen, Keris and Vicki – welcome all! This means we’ll be working on our ‘For Little Ones’ page, bringing you reviews, new releases and old favourites for younger readers. If there are other parents out there who would like to get involved with this, then do drop us a line.

We strongly believe that the earlier you can get a child interested in books, the more likely it will become a habit that sticks with them. It’s a fine line between encouraging a love of reading and forcing a reading time that then becomes an unwanted routine of the day. Start reading to your child when he/she is just a baby or toddler, so that books become a fun part of every day life. Read our tips to encourage readers here.

We can’t think of a better way to kick this off than sharing some of our all time favourites with you. We’ve asked for some Bookbabbler input on this, too, and we thought about what we would put in a top 10 list for a first time parent wanting to know which books to get for their child – here’s what we would recommend…

The Tiger Who Came To Tea – Judith Kerr

Mr Men books – Roger Hargreaves

Mog the Forgetful Cat – Judith Kerr

The Jolly Postman – Janet & Allan Ahlberg

Room on the Broom – Julia Donaldson

We’re Going On  A Bear Hunt – Michael Rosen & Helen Oxbury

Funny Bones – Janet & Allan Ahlberg

The Gruffalo – Julia Donaldson

We’ve picked just 10 out there, but the list could go on and on. A few others worth a mention, that Bookbabblers have reminded us about – the That’s Not My…books, Where The Wild Things Are, Dear Zoo, Guess How Much I Love You and on and on. Check out our Facebook page for a few more ideas from the babble! We’ve added a new section to our shop – For Little Ones – where you can find our favourites there, along with more information about each of them. We’ll also add in to that section any future reviewed or featured titles. We are reviewing some books now, so we’ll be bringing you more For Little Ones soon..

How’s everyone doing? The ‘book of the month’ reads going well? A few of you have let us know what you’re reading by voting in our poll, so do all tell us. There’s not many of you having your say in the forum yet, so hope you are all just too busy reading!!

We’ve been looking at all the great new books out there – so many to read and so little time! Though we love to bring new books to your attention, we wouldn’t want to overlook the many classics and favourites that we love, and there really are many!, so we thought we’d just bring you five at a time. We’ve used Amazon’s descriptions here to give you a feel for the story, if you’ve not read them yet…

Charlotte’s Web – E B White

The tale of how a little girl named Fern, with the help of a friendly spider, saved her pig Wilbur from the usual fate of nice fat little pigs.

Matilda – Roald Dahl

Five-year old Matilda longs for her parents to be good and loving and understanding, but they are none of these things. They are perfectly horrid to her. Matilda invents a game of punishing them each time they treat her badly and she soon discovers she has supernatural powers.

The Borrowers – Mary Norton

The Borrowers live in the secret places of quiet old houses; behind the mantelpiece, inside the harpsichord, under the kitchen clock. They own nothing, borrow everything, and think that human beings were invented just to do the dirty work. Arrietty’s father, Pod, was an expert Borrower. He could scale curtains using a hatpin, and bring back a doll’s teacup without breaking it. Girls weren’t supposed to go borrowing but as Arrietty was an only child her father broke the rule, and then something happened which changed their lives. She made friends with the human boy living in the house…

The St Clare’s books – Enid Blyton

School life has never been so splendid as in these editions of the classic series, St Clare’s. Full of dilemmas and school pranks, this best-selling series keeps young readers looking forward to each and every term at St Clare’s. Start with ‘The Twins’ as this is the first in the six part series.

The Animals of Farthing Wood –  Colin Dann

Farthing Wood is being bulldozed and a drought means the animals no longer have anywhere to live or drink. Fox, Badger, Toad, Tawny Owl, Mole and the other animals band together and leave their ancestral home and set off to move to a far-away nature reserve. Their journey is full of adventure and fraught with disasters: a fire, a storm, a treacherous river crossing and a hunt. The animals must unite in adversity and in doing so they learn about each other’s habits and limitations.

We’d highly recommend all of these, so if you can get copies from your library, give them a go. We have also added them to our shop, under featured/reviewed. Read them and tell us what you think. Feel free to let us know what would have to be included in your ‘favourites’ list, too, by commenting on this post or telling us in the forum. We’ll keep popping up with more old favourites from time to time, so do tell us what you think we should be featuring.

Coming up soon here at Bookbabblers – our stop on The Moonstone Legacy blog tour, Harriet Houdini’s hopping by to chat, get to know more about our review panel and read their reviews, our Q&A with ‘The Oldmoor Orphans’ author Simon B Nicholson, signed book giveaways…the list goes on!! Oh, and we’re debating our July Book of the Month choices this week, so have your say and help us to choose.

Until next time, happy reading!

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.

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!