ACHUKA: August 2003 Archives
Working full-out to get the site revamp ready for Sep 1st. Niggly things going wrong mid-afternoon with the database connection, but making better progress with everything now.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Children's author faces Jewish wrath
previously reported in the Glasgow Herald:
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/archive/22-8-19103-0-25-5.html
"Jewish pressure groups are calling on a publisher to withdraw a children's book about a Palestinian boy growing up amid the intifada on the West Bank..."
The publisher is Macmillan, and the book is A Little Piece of Ground by Elizabeth Laird.
Faber have announced that Warner Bros. Pictures has optioned feature film rights to Philip Ardagh's best-selling Eddie Dickens novels in a deal with Circle of Confusion, the production company responsible for the first The Matrix film.
In the US, the Eddie Dickens trilogy is published in hardback by Henry Holt and in audio by Random House?s Listening Library. The first Eddie Dickens book Awful End (A House Called Awful End in America) is about to be launched as a lead paperback for the autumn by Scholastic, US.
Jason Lust of Circle of Confusion is lined-up to co-produce the live-action project with Lawrence Mattis. Philip Ardagh comments, ?I?m delighted by the deal. Eddie?s adventures aren?t the easiest of books to bring to the screen because it?s they way they?re told as much as the action that makes them different, and I very much like Jason?s potential vision of Eddie?s world?.
This film deal comes at a time when Ardagh?s popularity is soaring in the UK and internationally and coincides with the launch of the first of The Further Adventures of Eddie Dickens, with the publication of Dubious Deeds by Faber in hardback in the UK in September.
Sales of the UK edition have now topped 250,000 copies and the Eddie Dickens titles are published in 25 different languages all over the world.
Stephen Page, Chief Executive of Faber and Faber, said ?Ardagh?s talent was obvious from the beginning and we always knew there was strong development potential with the right partner who would understand and be true to Philip?s extraordinary imagination.?
The Scotsman - Entertainment- Rowling prize is a Nobel cause
The Scotsman reports that a US author, James Downey, has launched a global internet campaign
http://www.nobelprizeforjo.com/
to have the Scottish writer nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature. Over to you, as they say.
News: Adults are spellbound by Harry
While checking for today's news stories, I came across this site for the first time. Don't know how it's eluded me for so long. Extremely useful, especially for Potter fan(atic)s!
The new wave in juvenile fiction is a shallow one
GINIA BELLAFANTE of THE NEW YORK TIMES writes about the Gossip Girl series:
"No one feels too much of anything in the "Gossip Girl" books, and rarely does anyone feel very badly, at least for long..."
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Reading takes a holiday
Short report of a summer holiday reading survey carried out by W H Smith.
All those who have become familiar with my tastes as a reader will know that I struggle with long fantasies. In that respect, it has been an arduous year. Harry Potter And The Order of the Phoenix, although (for an adult reader) by far the most enjoyable Potter title yet, was still an extraordinarily long book, and I had to read it in a weekend. Cornelia Funke's Inkheart, a different sort of fantasy, is also a long, long read. And Garth Nix's Lirael, in the American paperback edition I was reading before attending the launch dinner at L'Escargot in Greek Street, topped 700 pages.
In the six years that ACHUKA has been online, we have seen the buzz move from one publisher to another. The buzz is difficult to define. It is to some extent capricious. Marketing gurus would have us think that it is all to do with sales. And certainly sans sales, sans buzz. But there are perfectly successful companies that feel, well, rather flat.
Is it just me, or do others find Hodder's promotion of its excellent list a little lacking in razzmatazz? They are very efficient at sending out review copies but seem too content to let the quality of their product do the talking. They haven't latched on to the notion that children's literature is now well-and-truly part of an entertainment industry that feeds on puff and (I'm afraid so) spin. Of course, I stand to be corrected. It's possible that there have been dozens of Hodder promotions and events that ACHUKA hasn't been made aware of, though if that were the case it would, in itself, support my point.
[See comments and also August 16th entry.]
If the buzz is not, currently, with Hodder, it most certainly is with HarperCollins. In today's edition of Publishing News, Jane Friedman, President and CEO, commenting on record operating profits is quoted: "If I had to single out one division, it would have to be Children''s - who had a terrific year with a fantastic programme of books including Sabriel by Garth Nix..."
I never quite saw eye-to-eye with Philip Pullman's enthusiastic covernote: "Sabriel is a winner, a fantasy that reads like realism." To me, it read very much like fantasy and not at all like realism. And the relationship between Sabriel and the damnably annoying Touchstone didn't work for me. But it demonstrably worked for other readers. And Lirael is working much better for me. (No, I still haven't got to the end.) It includes a cricket match, which is a touch of realsim that goes down well. And the banter between Lirael and the (talking) Disreputable Dog is a lot more amusing than the exchanges between Sabriel and Touchstone.
Nix in person is unassuming. He had to be positively cajoled into giving an afterdinner speech. My interest in a writer grows in inverse proportion to their fluency as a public speaker. Impromptu public speaking is not Garth Nix's forte. I am the more interested in what he has to say on the page as a result.
Halfway through the meal he had taken a between-courses stroll to intoduce himself. At my end of the table a somewhat gross and grisly converation about plastic surgery and facial tumours (a subject that fascinated a bookseller, who claimed to have discovered a rather significant error - not connected with surgery - in one of the books longlisted for The Guardian award, a librarian and someone from HarperCollins) had to be temporarily shut down while Nix sympathised with ACHUKA's recent telephone line troubles. He is. this proved, a regular reader of the blog.
[Garth Nix has an official publisher's website
http://www.garthnix.co.uk
as well as a more personal one
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~garthnix]
Sitting on the last train home, (the dreaded 00:005 from Victoria, which last night entailed a bus from Lewes for the last part of the journey) I plugged in my new birthday toy, an Atrac3Plus CDPlayer 
(really got for the Berlingo, but useful too on long train journeys) which can condense up to 30 audio CDs onto one CD-R, put it on shuffle play, and continued with Lirael. After a while, I switched books to the signed proof copy of Mister Monday, gvien out at the dinner. This is the first book in The Keys To The Kingdom series and will be launched in January 2004, when Nix is due to return to the UK.
I have only read the Prologue. It is a stunning piece of writing. If it sets the tone for the whole series, HarperCollins' buzz is set to go buzzerk.
Slightly weirdly, BT having finally unscrambled the line, I spent the afternoon and evening going through a mountain of newspapers, tearing and scissoring out the cuttings for eventual addition to the database. It needed doing, but site updates needed doing more urgently. Sometimes, though, body & mind decide to disregard the obvious priorites.
Similarly, although I have many many ch.books on the Read Next list, I have begun a Stephen King novel and a Robert Winder cricket book. These high temperatures (mid 30s C - though not at Bexhill beach this afternoon, which was under a grey seagloom) also encourage a back-tunring attitude towards those 'obvious priorities'.
