I’m in something of a celebratory mood this morning as yesterday I managed to go to Worcester and back on the train, a round trip of about forty miles.  This may not seem earth-shattering to you, but for me it is a real mile-stone.  It is the farthest I’ve travelled for nearly two years and that I am well enough this morning to be able to sit here and write seems like a small miracle.   However, the fact the the medical profession and I are focusing our combined efforts on getting me mobile again does mean that there will be days when the only thing I’ll be doing is lying in a darkened room - like last Sunday - and coming into the Salon definitely won’t be an option.  I hope there won’t be too many days like that, but just so you know.

One of the many things that has changed in Worcester since I was last there is the number and nomenclature of the bookshops.  Their beautiful Ottakers is now part of the Waterstones’ chain and you can feel the corporate image the moment you walk in.  There is, however, a wonderful new second-hand shop that is going to have me visiting again and again - one of the poky, what am I going to find round the corner, type of shops that just lures you into spending far more than is good for your bank manager’s blood pressure.  Sometimes I think it was the BM that wished this travelling affliction on me simply to stop me from visiting my favourite bookshop in the entire world, Wenlock Books in Much Wenlock.  Be warned BM, it’s my ultimate goal!

Into yesterday’s supplements, where Philip Pullman in the Guardian is explaining why he and many other children’s authors are protesting against the decision by publishers to put an age-guidance figure on their books.  When I first heard about this proposal I felt like getting out my soap-box and letting the world know what a stupid idea this was and so obviously one done with sales in mind rather than with any understanding of the way in which reading works.  As Pullman says

To write as well as I can and then find someone at the door turning readers away, is something I find simply repugnant.  It’s based on a one-dimensional view of growth, which regards growing older as moving along a line like a monkey climbing a stick: now you’re seven, so you read those books; now you’re nine so you read these.

But growth isn’t like that.  We grow by getting bigger and including more things, and a child of 11 still includes the nine-year-old and the seven-year-old he was.  And if he wants to read a book he might love, it’s a bitter shame if some distant adult, out of what she perceives as her commercial necessity, puts him off by labelling it with an age that makes him feel babyish, or exposes him to ridicule.

I know there will be lots of parents saying, “Yes, but how do I know what to buy for my children if there isn’t this sort of guidance?”  And I know what the answer ought to be.  Ask.  Ask the bookseller, ask the teacher, ask the librarian.  There are, however, two difficulties there.  The first is that with some very honourable exceptions, the people who ought to know about these things, don’t.  I spent twenty years trying to get validating bodies to recognise that I needed time with trainee teachers to soak them in children’s literature so that they would be able to make informed recommendations; I made very little head-way.  The specialist is too often sacrificed in favour of the generalist and not just in the teaching world.

The second is something even more difficult to overcome.  It’s called uniqueness.  Every child is different.  Every reader is different.  I wouldn’t presume to classify a book as right for a 46 year old because it would depend on the previous experiences that reader had had, their tastes, their reading stamina.  I need to know the reader.  So does the person making the recommendation for a child.  I’ve angered a number of teachers because I’ve refused to give them a list of books that they could just send into the booksellers in order to restock their libraries over night.  But how could I when I didn’t know the current library stock or the readers for whom the purchases were being made?

So, the answer has to be ask the child.  Ask the child in the presence of an adult who does know their stock, their field, and involve the reader in the business of choosing.  Learning to choose wisely, to expand your reading horizons is a real skill and one that can be developed from very early on if you go about it the right way.  Having someone else do the choosing for you on the basis of one size fits all is not an answer.

A lot of my reading over the past week has been deliberately chosen to help me relax.  So there’s been a fair sprinkling of crime fiction in there.  But, The Bears and I have read and very much enjoyed the Heaney translation of Beowulf interspersed, of course, with chapters from their Oxfam Paddington bargain.  At the moment I’m about half-way through the fourth of Angie Sage’s books about Septimus Heap, Queste. I probably won’t post about this so a world of warning.  If you haven’t read the earlier books, don’t try starting here.  She isn’t very good at building in the information you need to follow the plot if you don’t know what’s gone before.  Then I’m going to re-read On Chesil Beach for one of my reading groups before starting on the second Ariana Franklin historical crime novel, The Death Maze, which has just made an appearance in the UK.  I really enjoyed Mistress of the Art of Death, but this has had mixed reviews, so we’ll have to see.