Most peo­ple are pretty happy to fin­ish up with high school. No more exams, assign­ments or using school toi­lets (which are a pub­lic toilet’s poor man’s toi­let). Of course, there are some things to be missed. Like the daily, after-school con­sump­tion of chicken-salted chips. My body still hasn’t adjusted to the lack of chicken salt that came in the years after high school. I am con­stantly lick­ing the sweat off my own fore­arms in an attempt to relive the salty, hal­cyon days of my youth.

There are plenty of good books on Eng­lish syl­labi that should be missed upon leav­ing high school too. And yet they are not for the sim­ple fact that dur­ing school they are end­lessly dis­cussed, dissected, analysed, read, reread, never-read, dic­tated, per­formed and ulti­mately used as a mea­sur­ing stick of lan­guage and lit­er­acy skills. Doesn’t that sound like fun? No, maybe it doesn’t. It’s cer­tainly not the way I enjoy books these days.

There’s no get­ting around the fact that to study a text you need to know it inside out and do all the dis­sect­ing, etc well. And occa­sion­ally you’ll find a book that is so good it out­weighs the amount of in-class scrutiny. But there is now another way to study books on the Eng­lish syl­labus, which is fun and insight­ful. I’m speak­ing [shame­less self-promotion alert, eek!] about the Wheeler Centre’s Texts in the City series, which this year I am co-hosting.

Every week at Texts in the City a dif­fer­ent book from the VCE Eng­lish syl­labus is selected and an expert is invited along to talk about it. Every week either myself or the delight­ful Ruby J Mur­ray host the con­ver­sa­tion with that guest. One week Ruby hosts, the next week I do and so on. The Wheeler Cen­tre is like a shared beach house that we take turns at vis­it­ing on Tues­day afternoons.

We’re only a few weeks into this year’s pro­gram but I’ve already been wowed by the weekly turnouts (mostly VCE stu­dents, but some other inter­ested folk too) and the thought­ful ques­tions that have come so far in the Q&As fol­low­ing the ses­sions. It’s amaz­ing how good the audi­ence ques­tions are when they really want an inci­sive answer. Each ses­sion is free but they book out quickly so get thee to the Wheeler Cen­tre and book your­self — or your class — in now.

Next week author Ben­jamin Law joins me to dis­cuss Grow­ing Up Asian In Aus­tralia, the anthol­ogy edited by Alice Pung a cou­ple of years back. Mr Law, of course, has a cou­ple of pieces in the book and will no doubt be talk­ing about them, while simul­ta­ne­ously being funny/charming/rude/etc. More info and book­ing deets here. 

In the com­ing weeks we’re look­ing at a range of texts includ­ing Ran­som by David Mal­ouf, The Quiet Amer­i­can by Gra­ham Green, A Street­car Named Desire by Ten­nessee Williams, The Rug­maker of Mazar-e-Sharif by Robert Hill­man and Najaf Mazari and Cosi by Louis Nowra.

Hope­fully these ses­sions will help make the texts last beyond high school for the attend­ing stu­dents. To the point that they read in the future, the same way I lick my arms for salt now.

Hav­ing a blog is hard. You have to, like, remem­ber to blog and stuff. How awful it that! The only thing more awful is when blog­gers don’t post for ages and then come back and blog about how they haven’t been blogging.

And while it can be a bit lamo, this kind of post is under­stand­able. Return­ing to one’s blog after a long absence is like crawl­ing out of a hole in the ground, all squinty-eyed after a long under­ground sab­bat­i­cal. So to avoid bor­ing you any longer with my I’m blog­ging again blog post, here are some pho­tos of ani­mals emerg­ing from holes. It’s quite a stir­ring trib­ute to the con­cept of blog­ger rebirth, if I do say so myself.

Hi all, just a quick note to let you know that the books pages of the cur­rent issue of The Big Issue — the inde­pen­dent Aus­tralian mag­a­zine sold by friendly ven­dors all over the place (and hope­fully near you) — are guest edited by yours truly.

Coin­cid­ing with Book Week this week, there is a heavy focus on children’s and Young Adult lit­er­a­ture in the issue including:

* An inter­view with Patrick Ness, author of A Mon­ster Calls and the Chaos Walk­ing series

* A col­umn by Melina Mar­che­tta on YA sub­ject mat­ter, gate­keep­ers and that WSJ arti­cle

* Lili Wikin­son reviews Karen Healy’s YA novel The Shat­ter­ing

* Holly Harper reviews this year’s highly-paid mid­dle fic­tion novel The Emer­ald Atlas

* I review Mandy Ord’s col­lec­tion of graphic sto­ries Sen­si­tive Creatures

* And I talk up Book Week and lament the fact it’s not a big­ger media event in Australia

I think it’s awe­some that The Big Issue gives over so many of its pages to kids’ and YA books dur­ing Book Week, so do grab a copy (with poor old Amy on the front cover) if you see one when you’re out and about this week.

I was watch­ing a news report of 96-year old artist Dickie Miny­in­tiri win­ning the National Abo­rig­i­nal and Tor­res Strait Island Art Award last week and couldn’t help but gawk wide-eyed when the cam­eras showed us his and a hand­ful of other art­works that had been nom­i­nated for the prize. They’re cur­rently on dis­play at the Museum and Art Gallery of the North­ern Ter­ri­tory and you can view them online too – it’s worth tak­ing a few moments to browse through. They’re beau­ti­ful, strik­ing pieces of art and I remem­ber sit­ting there think­ing, I have no idea how the judges set­tled on one piece of art when each looks to be its own unique and won­drous beast.

And I realised I’d done exactly that myself only a month or so ago when I judged the Young Adult cat­e­gory of the Vic­to­rian Premier’s Lit­er­ary Awards. No doubt judg­ing indige­nous art seemed like a her­culean task to me because I don’t have the same expe­ri­ence and cul­tural ref­er­ence points that I do for teen lit­er­a­ture, although Aus­tralian YA also had its fair share of unique and won­drous beasts pub­lished over the past year.

The actual judg­ing of the Vic Premier’s awards with Mike Shut­tle­worth and Leesa Lam­bert of The Lit­tle Book­room was a blast. With so many books to dis­cuss, each meet­ing we had was like tak­ing part in a book club on steroids. There were opin­ions fly­ing every­where, books being waved pas­sion­ately about in the air and a truck­load of fun being had (by me any­way, who knows what Mike and Leesa thought of all my opin­ions and book waving).

One of the most pleas­ant things about judg­ing the awards was read­ing each of the 70 or so books we were sent and for each one think­ing: Yep, I can see who the reader of this book would be. It’s for adven­tur­ous boys with a sen­si­tive side, it’s for slightly with­drawn girls aged 13–15, it’s for ‘class clowns’ at around 14 years, etc. Not that match­ing a per­ceived audi­ence to a book is part of the judg­ing process, and maybe it’s the tiny bit of book­seller inside me, but I found it com­fort­ing as I read through the books to match each one up with a reader in my mind.

I read a lot of teen fic­tion over the course of two months and got a pretty good idea of the spread of YA pub­lish­ing in Aus­tralia at the moment. It was par­tic­u­larly cool to see the rise of the urban fan­tasy novel, as noted in our judges’ obser­va­tions, where we were also able to name drop some nov­els that didn’t make the short­list, namely Lili Wikinson’s A Pock­et­ful of Eyes, Mar­i­anne de Pierre’s Burn Bright, Scot Gardner’s The Dead I Know, Rebecca Lim’s Mercy, Rebecca Burton’s Beyond Evie, Leanne Hall’s This Is Shy­ness, Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Golden Day and Laura Buzo’s Good Oil. Hooray for all of these books. They deserve to be bor­rowed from libraries, writ­ten on shop­ping lists and marked as ‘to-read’ on book­wormy social net­work­ing sites.

But of course the biggest to-dos must be saved for the three books on the short­list: The Life of a Teenage Body-Snatcher by Doug McLeod, The Three Loves of Per­sim­mon by Cas­san­dra Golds and Graf­fiti Moon by Cath Crow­ley. Three highly orig­i­nal nov­els, each more than wor­thy of win­ning the over­all YA award. I’ll be at the awards din­ner next month, cheer­ing all three of them on – even though I already know who wins.