25.Mar.2010 What? Another blog?
I might be mad but I’ve decided to give yet another blog a go. This time I’m going to try talking about some of the books I’ve been reading to my children.
As a family we’ve read some great books but increasingly I’ve become frustrated by the lack of decent fiction to read as the children grow up. I’m not naive enough to think that ‘it used to be better in the old days’ – but do think that as book publishing has become cheaper, the market has become saturated and it is more difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I’d like to think the the Web has made it easier to find the good stuff – as it has for so many other forms of media – but there’s something tactile and essential about flicking through a children’s book in a bookshop that isn’t yet replicated on the Web.
In fact, I’d expect that children’s books are undergoing an evolutionary leap as the iPad, the Kindle and other tablet devices take over. Children’s books will become ‘interactive’ by default – not just the experiments of a few like Penguin NZ.
It’ll be a while before I start writing about those though.
For now, I’m going through the shelves here at home and picking out a few favourites.
I hope you enjoy the selections.
(Oh, and the title image comes from the spines of some of my Ruth Manning-Sanders collections of fairy tales from the 1970s. I used to love the fairy tales from around the globe that they contained but on re-reading them to my own children I’ve been struck by how dated some of them feel.)
chantalK 
Bim