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.

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.

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.

The kids wrote some super short stories together and illustrated book covers to go with them too. They were an energetic bunch and we came up with a couple of pretty compelling tales. Here they are for your enjoyment.

THE LONELIEST GNOME EVER

by 3/4H, St Peter Julian Eymard Primary School

There once lived an angry garden gnome lonely inside. The gnome looked outside and saw all the other, colourful happy gnomes. He was angry that he couldn’t be like them. So he started wearing black overalls and a black T-shirt and a black top hat which unimpressed his owners so they put him outside and his clothes turned colourful and his moustache turned orange.

THE TIME TRAVELING SCIENTIST WITH BAD HAIR

By 5/6J, St Peter Julian Eymard Primary School

Fred was a scientist. He was very smart but had lava lamp hair. He built a time machine in his backyard and went back in time to his most recent haircut. Turns out, it was himself cutting his own hair. He ends up giving himself a concussion with the lava lamp that inspired his haircut.

it is fascinating to think back to the days when there was no internet and a lot of communication took place via telegrams STOP and so I have decided to write this blog post in the style of a telegram from yesteryear COLON without punctuation STOP you may have already noticed just how hard it is to read a piece of writing COMMA or anything for that matter COMMA when there is no punctuation STOP it is kind of like listening to a person talking in a monosyllabic style EN DASH is anyone else reading this in a stephen hawking voice or is it just me QUESTION MARK anyways I wonder what the old timey people would have thought of a word like anyways being in a telegram ELLIPSIS FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT they probably would have thought it was just a typo or as they would have called it a QUOTE MARKS typographical error END QUOTE MARKS AND STOP yes COMMA indeed COMMA telegrams sure would have made peoples APOSTROPHE NO WAIT DOESNT THE APOSTROPHE GO AT THE END IF THE WORD AFTER IT IS POSSESSED BY SOMETHING PLURAL LIKE PEOPLE NO WAIT SORRY I GOT IT WRONG THE APOSTROPHE GOES AFTER THE S OF PEOPLES AND BEFORE WE GET TO LIVES SORRY CARRY ON AS YOU WERE lives easier but they would have been painful to read all the time STOP wow EXCLAMATION MARK is anyone still reading this after all that QUESTION MARK personally I think I’m done with this telegram style of punctuation STOP I am not really a fan of reading text without paragraphs HASHTAG firstworldproblems STOP over and out STOP andrew KISS AND HUG