Susan’s early memories of books and reading:

I do not know if it is possible to express adequately what sharing another world and space or being part and parcel of an exciting creative process, and to feel that it is acceptable as well as good to imagine means even to a young mind. As a child, in books I found the power to dream, to laugh to hide my face behind my palms in pure terror. This is where I could think freely and sympathise with children unjustly treated by friends and adults, it was the corner where I was allowed to gawk at illustrations of delicious food without being reminded to mind my manners! I loved the words and the pictures with their strong primary colours.

Susan’s books:

With a book I thought I was allowed to ask endless questions and some of the books had the most exciting and adventurous tales. I remember the story in our English Nile Course Book Two which read like this “Kapere went to the river. Kapere sat on a stone. The stone got up. Kapere ran and ran and ran.” The illustration showed poor Kapere sitting on a hippo in the river and then taking off like a concord. Oh I wonder what could ever beat the pleasure of those illustrations and stories.
I also suppose that reading became so pleasurable because in my and siblings’ case , it was a progressive transition from the primary skills of speaking and listening in both Luganda and English. Sometimes our mum and the teachers recited rhymes to us and later we found they were also written in a book. One of my favourite rhymes which I remember so vividly to this day was: Once there was a rabbit grey/Met a hunter on his way/ “Wait a minute”, Rabbit cried/ Shook his head/ and suddenly said/ ” Why did you? said he/ set your dogs on me? ” With the singsong rhythm when recited and the fabulous pictures when read in a book, it was simply magnetic. I believe I loved books as a child because they gave me the exceptional gift of freedom to be in a space occupied by, as I fancied then, me alone. May be the above explanation will make you understand why I loved the Lucy Maud Montgomery Anne series, particularly Anne of Green Gables, Anne of the Island and Anne’s House of Dreams. I also thought Barbara Kimenye’s books an enchanting read especially the Moses series and Kalasanda revisited. If one has ever been in boarding school in Uganda, then Kimenye’s book Moses in Trouble cannot be anything but fascinating and almost real. In Luganda, I read a variety of books and some of my favourites were Michael Bazzebulala Nsimbi’s Kitagenda ne Kagenda, Njize Okusoma Kato ne Nnaku and later I read Solomon Mpalanyi’s books.

Susan, as an adult, on reading with children:
I still think that nothing beats reading especially if all children could have adults willing to first read to them aloud. I think it is a magical experience. I have written a poem about reading which is published in the Anthology : Gifts of Harvest published by Femrite publishers Kampala. It summarises my feeling on reading, but hope this also communicates an overall impression of what I think about childhood reading experiences.

Betty Kituyi on Rapture and Reading
From a FEMRITE Public dialogue held on the 14th March, 2008

There needs to be a complete rapture between pre-colonial and rural traditions of story telling which give women significant roles as preservers of the social order. More women writers need to engage in performing arts. Write film and drama scripts to reach the growing television audience. We need to confront ourselves and insert our stories into the public domain to live audiences. For example, we should recite and perform our poetry in public gatherings like funerals, weddings and conferences. When given chance, politically committed writers should always sell their works and view points at rallies. … Perhaps we need to reconstruct our voices to make our literature, relevant, urgent and to cater for the future needs of our readers; Literature that will inspire and enable tomorrow’s reader to form meaningful social connections, towards social transformation.

Dr. Susan Kiguli (1998) in her poem ‘Deconstructing you’, seems to tell us to do just that:

I want to deconstruct the
Codes that make you
Separate each piece and
See what makes it you.
I want to read those codes
So I probe your identity
Possibly understand difference.
I want to turn over each piece
Slowly read the centre
And the margin
I want to study how they merge.
I want to pore over your
Lack of explicit boundaries
Toss and turn the reflections
And capture representations.
Trying to open you up
I discover the maze
Of tiny well-woven delights.
I get lost in these
And discard my mission.
Now that I have failed
To deconstruct you
What should I label you?
Whatever you are
You are our most intriguing Experience.

[Read more from the presentation on Literature and Social Sustainability: The Woman’s Creative Potential at BBCF]

Aims of The Little Hands Trust
• To support initiatives that promote reading for enjoyment.
• To mentor African literary artists, including writers, illustrators and editors, to produce creative, suitable and appropriate children’s storybooks for children of various ages with a focus on early childhood (ages 0 to 9 years).
• To collaborate with African publishers to increase and sustain publication of children’s books in African languages. To initiate and support translations of stories between African languages, from African languages to ex-colonial languages and from ex-colonial languages to African languages.
• To help to orientate and educate adults in the importance and significance of reading to and with children.

In the far, far away Midlands were the Wulfrunians live in a wicked city called Wolverhampton, in a time long before she ever thought she’d one day live Cape Town and be a genre-crossing writer of short stories, screenplays, and novels, like Pompidou Posse, and the hotly anticipated crime novel, Exhibit A, Sarah Lotz had little hands and this is what she read …

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Sarah’s earliest memory of books and reading:

My earliest memory is being shocked senseless by Beatrix Potter. Is there anything more disturbing than The Tale of Samuel Whiskers? The image of Tom Kitten being casually rolled into a roly-poly pudding by a giant rat gave me claustrophobia and nightmares well into my twenties, and I blame Ms Potter for my obsession with horror literature. I was equally terrified by Dr Seuss’s warped illustrations (still am).

Tom Kitten wriggled and squirmed until he was quite exhausted.
Presently the rats came back and set to work to make him into a dumpling. First they smeared him with butter, and then they rolled him in the dough.
“Will not the string be very indigestible, Anna Maria?” inquired Samuel Whiskers.
Anna Maria said she thought that it was of no consequence; but she wished that Tom Kitten would hold his head still, as it disarranged the pastry. She laid hold of his ears.
Tom Kitten bit and spat, and mewed and wriggled; and the rolling-pin went roly- poly, roly; roly, poly, roly. The rats each held an end.
“His tail is sticking out! You did not fetch enough dough, Anna Maria.”
[From The Roly-Poly Pudding by Beatrix Potter]

Sarah’s picture books:

Eric Carle’s The Hungry Caterpillar: Who didn’t grow up with this book? I loved it. Eric Carle - what a genius. It was only after I tried acid that I realised where he got his ideas.

Eric Carle said, “I long dreamt of a museum for children and families,” and now his dream has come true… [Visit the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art -- send Eric Carle E-cards!]

I also loved all the Richard Scarry books, and like Henrietta Rose-Innes, Lowly Worm was by far my favourite character. I recently read them to my husband’s nephews, and discovered that they’ve all been updated, toned down and made less gender specific (which made me feel strangely depressed).
I was also addicted to my dad’s old Eagle Annuals. I couldn’t read the words at that age, but I was totally fascinated by the Mekon’s giant alien head.

I grew up in Wolverhampton in the Midlands, perhaps best known for being the butt of stand-up comedians’ jokes as the crappiest place in England. Fortunately, my parents loved books and my dad built his own library in our house – a large square room devoid of any natural light. My dad was and is an indiscriminate reader, and the library was packed floor to ceiling with classical literature, contemporary fiction, sci-fi and utter trash. As my parents didn’t believe in censoring my reading, I read the lot. I was hooked on the novels of Philip K Dick, Stephen King, Fay Weldon, Richard Matheson, Isaac Asimov and John Updike, but I also had a nice little earner renting out Jackie Collins novels to my classmates. Somewhere there’s a generation of middle-aged Birmingham women whose sexual identities were warped by the naughty bits in The Stud. When I moved to secondary school, Mrs Wallbank, my elderly and eccentric English teacher, introduced me to the school library, which soon became my second home – it was wood-panelled, perennially deserted and smelled of dust and sneaky cigarettes. Mrs Wallbank would terrify me by misquoting Milton and declaring that ‘books are not entirely dead’ (which stopped me drawing horses on my English set-works). She also told me that if I loved books, I’d never be lonely. It’s the best advice I’ve ever received.

Sarah, as an adult, reading with her daughter:

I started reading to my daughter Savannah when she was three months old. Although this makes me sound like a literate and obsessive mother, it was partly selfish – I couldn’t wait to revisit Roald Dahl – and we worked our way through the whole lot. The Twits, Matilda and Revolting Rhymes were a big hit, and a story or poem every night quickly became a ritual, and continued even when she could read to herself. When she was three or so, I read her the entire The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe series, blissfully unaware that it was a thinly disguised exercise in Christian morality, and it’s telling that neither of us could get on with the po-faced Last Battle (poor old Susan). Other favourites were Shel Silverstein’s Falling Up,

“When I was a kid—12, 14, around there—I would much rather have been a good baseball player or a hit with the girls. But I couldn’t play ball, I couldn’t dance. Luckily, the girls didn’t want me; not much I could do about that. So I started to draw and to write. I was also lucky that I didn’t have anybody to copy, be impressed by. I had developed my own style; I was creating before I knew there was a Thurber, a Benchley, a Price, and a Steinberg. I never saw their work till I was around 30. By the time I got to where I was attracting girls, I was already into work, and it was more important to me. Not that I wouldn’t rather make love, but the work has become a habit.”
–(Shel Silverstein in , Publishers Weekly, February 24, 1975; Shel Silverstein’s webpage is very worth a visit.).

Michael Rosen’s Hairy Tales and Nursery Crimes and Terry Jones’s (of Monty Python fame) warped Fairy Tales. We also share an affinity for Neil Gaiman novels, Harry Potter and anything and everything by SE Hinton.

Less successful were my pre-teen favourites: Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, John Christopher’s Tripods Trilogy and Susan Hill’s The Dark is Rising. I thought they were compelling and terrifying, but Savannah (who was a feminist at age ten) was disturbed by the lack of strong female characters. And she’s never forgiven me for Black Beauty or A Little Princess – we both spent nights sobbing uncontrollably after finishing these.

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Voted No. 2 of 50 greatest villains in literature:

Second only to Satan, was Samuel Whiskers from The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, by Beatrix Potter
To the stark terror of generations of toddlers, this chimney-dwelling monster rat ambushes Tom Kitten and does everything in his ratty power to bake him into a roly-poly pudding and eat him. Shudder-making terror from the doyenne of anthropomorphic animal evil. [ Read on for 49 more literary villains at the Telegraph]

Roly-Poly’s Heart of Darkness: One of the most horrific stories in the history of literature?

In my case, it was with Potter that I learned that books were places of great terror. The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, or, The Roly-Poly Pudding, I present as one of the most horrific stories in the history of literature. In it, a mischievous and disobedient kitten, Tom, gets lost in the hidden places of “an old, old house, full of cupboards and passages”. He is then captured by a pair of rats, who tie him up and set about turning him into “a kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding”.
It must have been 1967 when I first had the bejesus scared out of me by this tale – and then learned the strange attraction of re-exposing oneself to this waking nightmare. Tom Kitten’s doom – wretched, bound, and lost – seemed so inevitable that the details of his rescue struck me as unconvincing. The book’s message – that fears can be instilled and insurmountable (Tom “never durst face anything bigger than – A Mouse”) – seemed, on the other hand, bleakly irrefutable. That the book was dedicated to a rat didn’t help matters in the least. [Read on at the Guardian]

The Very Hungry Caterpillar turns 40 this year

So many creeping, crawling critters appear in your work. Where did your affinity for insects come from?In my books, I honor my father by writing about nature, animals and insects. When I was a boy my father liked to take me for walks in the woods and he would lift a stone or peel back the bark of a tree and show me the living things that would scurry about.

Also in Syracuse, where I was born, my parents belonged to a nature club and we’d go on trips to the Finger Lakes with the club and stay in log cabins. I remember catching a snake on one of our outings. The snake scared the other adults, but my father explained to me that it was only a harmless garter snake. [Read more of Eric Carle's answers to 6 questions about his formative reading and writing experiences]

King of the Wonderfully Warped and Wicked! 4 BBC Interviews with Roald Dahl

Some critics have commented adversely on the preoccupation with greed, revenge and the dark side of human nature that runs through most of Dahl’s work. However, many believe it may actually be the key to his success with young readers. “I never get any protests from children,” he claimed. “All you get is giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what young children like.”

The four BBC interviews cover: The importance of reading ,Childrens’ love of laughter and attraction to rudeness ,
His views on the conditioning of children and their relationship with adults , and The world he creates for his child characters

Aims of The Little Hands Trust
• To support initiatives that promote reading for enjoyment.
• To mentor African literary artists, including writers, illustrators and editors, to produce creative, suitable and appropriate children’s storybooks for children of various ages with a focus on early childhood (ages 0 to 9 years).
• To collaborate with African publishers to increase and sustain publication of children’s books in African languages. To initiate and support translations of stories between African languages, from African languages to ex-colonial languages and from ex-colonial languages to African languages.
• To help to orientate and educate adults in the importance and significance of reading to and with children.

Karen’s earliest memory of books and reading:

Every birthday and Christmas we were given big A4 hardcover picture books (annuals) which my brother, sister and I would pore over and then swop, like Bunty for Girls and Mandy for Girls, getting lost in the characters of the 1970’s.

In a girls’ comic you could not solve plot difficulties by blowing someone’s head off.
Mel Gibson, University of Sunderland in Lost Culture of Bunty for Girls

Karen’s picture books:
I loved taking the Score Annual off my brother and sneaking away to have a look at what boys read!

Karen, as an adult, reading with and writing for children and young adults:

My megan loves being read to, rather than reading herself (though she is only 4)…the pictures hold a fascination for her, but once we’ve read it to her once, she wants us to do it again and again and likes repeating the words with us on the next reading. My ‘day’ job, as an Entrepreneur, Coach and Facilitator (with a BA.Psychology attained at 34 yrs old) is very fulfilling. It allows me insight into people’s inner workings – our likes, dislikes, wants, needs, ticks, habits, fantasies and foibles. My passion is people, the inner working of our mind and putting words on paper.
I love working with teenagers and young adults and have written the first book in the Scroll of Seven Series, Emily and the Battle of the Veil, to encourage exploration into both our inner and outer worlds. The novel introduces Emily May Harrison, her strange birth and mother’s death, her father’s disappearance, the experiences she has in Paradise Beach, where she has grown up with her Gran and friend Sam, and her move towards boarding school in Kingstown, where her access to the world of Aurana really begins. I enjoy fantasy fiction just as much as the next generation.

Just Call Me Bob: Mandy for Girls: a feminist perspective…

The 1975 Mandy Annual was about as subtle as a sledge hammer in its attempt to stop young girls becoming feminists. The resulting portrayal of a ‘women’s libber’ has got to be seen to be believed.Think feminists have a bad rep today? Well it was just as bad, if not worse, in the Seventies. But back then they were called women’s libbers, and somebody must have been feeling threatened, because in 1975 the Mandy annual for Girls ran a story about one of them. I think it’s a fascinating example of how feminists were viewed, and how the writers tried to influence the young readers’ opinions against feminists.[Read on at the F-word]

3 Facts from Why girls’ comics were wonderful, by Jac Rayner.

Characters in Bunty were frequently seen to be reading Bunty the comic, but never commented on the fact that their lives were being laid out in pictures inside.

*
Statistics show that you’re most likely to get your own story in a girls’ comic if you’re a sporty, disabled, artistic Victorian orphan who lives with a violent aunt or uncle, having a hurt sister/brother/pet who you need to earn money for, but don’t realise that your best friend secretly resents you, the snobs are plotting against you, and an evil mastermind is attempting to take over your school and you’re the only one who can resist her powers. However, this will count for nothing if your name doesn’t lend itself to a clever titular pun.
*
Over forty-three years (Jan 1958 to Feb 2001), Bunty’s The Four Marys went through several looks, lots of school hols and a change of headmistress, but the girls stayed in the Third Form throughout. [Read more in BBC Cult]

First Two Pages of Emily and the Battle of the Veil

Emily was scared but she didn’t know why.
She stretched her arms above her head, rippling her back
straight, after spending most of the afternoon with her head
buried in a book. Emily loved reading because she could
escape into worlds unknown, strange, foreign and exciting –
a definite need in the small seaside town she lived in.
Emily looked around her at the library as she stood up,
pushing her books into her huge loose floppy carry-all bag.
The library was like a small hall, slightly bigger than a room
in a house but not by much, with shelving all the way around
the outside groaning at the weight of old books. Some
shelves jutted into the middle of the floor, trying to make
crevices and hiding places for people, to cosy them into
staying. Not many did, but Emily supposed in a town of
about a hundred people (with sixty of them being children),
what did they expect. She seemed to be the libraries the most
regular visitor.
Emily flicked her long thick brown plait out of the way,
as she swung her bag onto her shoulder. Walking towards the
door she waved goodbye voicelessly, heard the librarians,
‘Come again soon Em!’ opened the screen door and winced
as it sprang shut behind her with a bang.
I must remember to hold on to that stupid thing, Emily
thought for the thousandth time, spying Sam on the swings to
her left.
She and Sam were a little old to use the swings but it had
become their meeting place of late. Sam, her best friend,
wasn’t into books like she was, preferring the live company
of other girls and boys. Almost as much as I like reading,
thought Em
They made an unlikely pair, so the older folk in the
village said, but they didn’t care what other people thought
anymore. They liked each other and that was that. Emily
often thought they brought out the best in each other,
opposites that they were.
‘Hiya Em’ said Sam ‘Been waiting and waiting and
waiting for you! What took you so long today?’
Emily hurried over, dropping her book bag at the corner
of the outside face brick library wall, ‘Sorry Sam, got stuck,
you know I lose time when I read – come fetch me if you
want. You know you can!’
Emily sat on the swing next to Sam and started pushing
her legs in and out to get up to speed. In front of them lay the
ocean, the tar road running all the way to their right down to
the local tea-room, the only ‘real’ shop in the village. The tea
room sat on the edge of the sea with the only parking lot in
town. They got day visitors coming to the village in the
summer months, so the town council had decided to make
sure there was enough parking for them.

Aims of The Little Hands Trust
• To support initiatives that promote reading for enjoyment.
• To mentor African literary artists, including writers, illustrators and editors, to produce creative, suitable and appropriate children’s storybooks for children of various ages with a focus on early childhood (ages 0 to 9 years).
• To collaborate with African publishers to increase and sustain publication of children’s books in African languages. To initiate and support translations of stories between African languages, from African languages to ex-colonial languages and from ex-colonial languages to African languages.
• To help to orientate and educate adults in the importance and significance of reading to and with children.

Joanne’s earliest memory of books and reading:

My mother used to read me a chapter from a storybook every night before bedtime. We devoured The Chronicles of Narnia (though I only really remember The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe), The Borrowers and, my favourite – The Secret Garden. It was a classic case of “just one more story, mom” as a vain attempt at bedtime procrastination. And it’s coming back to bite me, since my 3-year old son does the same thing to me now with Mr Men and Hairy Maclary.

I have really fond memories of the Muizenberg library. Every year over the December holidays, we came down to Cape Town from Johannesburg. My parents had a flat in Muizenberg and the first day’s destinations were always the Old Cape Farm Stall in Tokai for food shopping, and the Muizenberg library for holiday reading. I had a battered blue library card that I kept in a special draw in my room, and I would fish it out as soon as we arrived. Then we’d all traipse down to the library, sit on those grey reading stools that look like upturned waste-paper baskets, and page through our selections for the month. It was always quiet in there, especially compared to the holiday mayhem outside its doors; it seemed a world away from the sickly-sweet coconut oil, screeching seagulls and blustery southeasters of a standard December day in Muizies. It never occurred to me that I could swap out my books if I finished them during the holiday; I always felt I had to pick out those that would last me the longest, and to hoard as many as I could on that first visit.

Joanne’s picture books:

I just loved The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr: I always fantasized that a tiger might really come to tea with me one day, and probably hoarded biscuits and buns should that day ever arrive! I also loved The Greedy Dragon by Bronnie Cunningham; as a child, the idea of a sweet shop overflowing with candies, cakes and ice cream was just heavenly. Of course Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak was a regular feature, tapping into every child’s need to control their world and be the master of their own destiny. My mother kept all these old books and I now read them to my son, who loves them almost as much as I did.

Joanne, as an adult, reading with children:

It is one of parenting’s greatest joys to be able to read to your child. I love the time spent reading to my son, both in terms of watching the delight play out on his face, and in terms of my own enjoyment of certain books and rhymes. The Julia Donaldson books (The Gruffalo, The Snail &The Whale, Room On The Broom etc) are my favourite read-aloud books: the rhythms and rhymes are unique, and so much fun. It is fascinating to learn about the world from a child’s point of view: the questions they come up with during a story shed such light on the way their minds work. I sometimes change a storyline of a book if I don’t particularly like its message or (mistakenly?) want to protect my son from scary or hurtful plots. But the illustrations speak volumes and he often sees right through my deception, saying something like: “No, Mommy, Thomas the Train looks cross in this picture, not happy. Why is he cross?” From the mouths of babes…

*

We love The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe because of a convergence of six elements writes Earl F. Palmer in his review A Fairy Tale for All Ages, which begins:

C. S. Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950 as a gift for his godchild, Lucy Barfield. He explained the gift to her in his preface to the book: “I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.”
Lewis later told a friend that he intended to write only the one story, but we know that something happened to this Oxford don, because his story asserted itself into his heart and mind and became seven stories, The Chronicles of Narnia. We are grateful that he was carried away and into Narnia, because we are too!
[Read on for the six elements]

Author of the UK’s best-selling picture book, Julia Donaldson, began her career writing songs for children’s TV

I grew up not just with my parents, but with my lovely grandmother and my very nice aunt and uncle. None of them could afford a house in Hampstead on their own so they all clubbed together. My grandmother (my father’s mother) lived on the top floor, my father’s sister and her husband in the middle and my nuclear family on the ground floor, which was just as well because when I was six my father got polio and from then on he was in a wheelchair.

My parents were quite leftwing. Not radical or militant but liberal left. My father hated Monopoly. My uncle and aunt taught it to me and my sister, and we were capitalist as anything. When we tried to get my father to play he said he wouldn’t play “that horrible game where you ruin people”. I later discovered that my grandmother voted Conservative. I was amazed. I’d never heard of anyone I knew voting Conservative. [Full article at The Guardian online]

Aims of The Little Hands Trust
• To support initiatives that promote reading for enjoyment.
• To mentor African literary artists, including writers, illustrators and editors, to produce creative, suitable and appropriate children’s storybooks for children of various ages with a focus on early childhood (ages 0 to 9 years).
• To collaborate with African publishers to increase and sustain publication of children’s books in African languages. To initiate and support translations of stories between African languages, from African languages to ex-colonial languages and from ex-colonial languages to African languages.
• To help to orientate and educate adults in the importance and significance of reading to and with children.

Tracey’s earliest memory of books and reading:

I used to watch my older brother learning to read. I soon realized that I recognized the words! It upset my brother terribly, so I kept quiet and read over his shoulder. I felt like a spy in an older child’s world. The characters, ‘Carol and Roy’ were sedate and tall. They were mature, like my brother. I had this nervous fear that they might find me out.

Tracey’s picture books:

I was mad about Noddy. His blue hat never ever faded and I could rely on his good cheer. South Africa was always atmospherically fraught and home was definitely less predictable than Noddyland. I still feel nostalgic about that ordered little world where the police always come.

Tracey, as an adult, reading with children:

When I had my own children, I delighted in the rhythm and the madness of Dr Seuss. I related especially to the monster with blue spots who wanted so badly to be ‘somebody new.’* I found Alice in Wonderland too creepy to finish reading aloud to the kids, but discovered Tolkien with my ten year old son. It was a breathtaking release from the leaden routine I established in my efforts to be a good wife and mother.

*I Want To Be Somebody New (By Robert Lopshire, in the Dr Seuss ‘Beginner Books’ series).

———————————–

Noddy in the News

A Sampling from the Enid Blyton Society Web Page (many more Noddy reviews at the site):
It’s worth a look at the elements in Blyton’s success, her compound of virtue and vice. She absorbed the world of children and gave it back to them. As someone said of her, “she knew just how children like a story to be.” That was the ace in her pack. She fed the children from four to fourteen, on themselves. She satisfied them and left them hungry for more of the same. She gave children what they liked, though never what they wanted. She did not allow her readers to advance a fraction beyond where she held them. There is part of every child that does not want to grow up, and she catered for this part. Keen reading children will return to Blyton, when they are tired or ill.

(Reading and Righting, Leeson — c.1985)
——————————————————————————–
Enid Blyton Lives.

After three decades of banishment to Politically Incorrect Land, a literary persona non grata, Blyton has been rehabilitated. Blyton’s public face was left mainly to the deliciously wicked television parodies of the 80s (Comic Strip!) but now Blyton rules, okay. She’s back and definitely commercial. Children are asking libraries for Blyton books and after decades, the librarians are taking notice.

(Press Assn — c.August, 1997)
——————————————————————————–
Most people remember today in history as the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated but few realize November 22nd is the day Noddy was ‘born’ 50 years ago. The small fresh-faced picture of an innocent English toy is still going strong with four million Noddy books being sold world-wide every year. Such is his fame, and that of his wise companion Big Ears, that the colour of Noddy’s car, driven on unleaded these days, has become a children’s Trivial Pursuit question. Noddy’s red and yellow car has been seen around the world in 200 million books in forty languages since 1949, according to Enid Blyton Ltd.

(Press Assn — c.November, 1999).

Aims of The Little Hands Trust
• To support initiatives that promote reading for enjoyment.
• To mentor African literary artists, including writers, illustrators and editors, to produce creative, suitable and appropriate children’s storybooks for children of various ages with a focus on early childhood (ages 0 to 9 years).
• To collaborate with African publishers to increase and sustain publication of children’s books in African languages. To initiate and support translations of stories between African languages, from African languages to ex-colonial languages and from ex-colonial languages to African languages.
• To help to orientate and educate adults in the importance and significance of reading to and with children.

Darrel’s first reading experiences:
My father never finished high school. He taught himself his various livelihoods – nightclub bouncer, welder, sewing-machine salesman, security guard – and he believed in reading. He believed that whatever you read, if done with the right heart, makes you grow bigger on the inside. After he became ill he read me books and told me stories about his life. Not all the stories of his life were true, but the same can be said of the books and I don’t see why one form of storytelling should be held to a sterner test than the other. I lay in bed night after night with my head on his chest and smelt soap and Old Fox Rum ‘n Maple pipe tobacco and listened to his voice, and I learnt that words and stories are the things that hold life in place, that keep it going. Fathers teach their sons about being men, even when that is not what they’re intending to do. I learnt that a man is someone who tells good stories, and has good stories to tell.

My father read me many books, but I most remember Just William’s Luck, by Richmal Crompton, because my mother thought I might be too young to follow it, but I wasn’t. He read me Tom Sawyer and Enid Blyton. He read me Biggles and Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators series, with Jupiter Jones and Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews. Once I’d learnt to read he bought me the complete hardcover Hardy Boys series, second-hand but good-as-new, from a man he met at the hospital. I started reading The Mystery of the Whale Tattoo to him but I was too slow and we never finished it.

I read everything I could find after my father died: Marvel comics, DC comics, Archie comics (swapped for 2c apiece at the Lighthouse Book Exchange on Sunday afternoons), Enid Blyton, the William books, the Jennings books by Anthony Buckridge, Tintin and Asterix, Mad magazine, my father’s Louis L’Amour cowboy books and Ian Flemings, the series of books by Willard Price (Underwater Adventure, Amazon Adventure, Elephant Adventure, etc) about Hal and Roger Hunt, who travel the world capturing animals for zoos for their father. It didn’t matter what it was, it was the reading that mattered. Reading meant being told stories, and being told stories felt like a strong heart still beating in the chest beneath my head. Growing up means accepting that it’s becoming your responsibility to tell stories to someone else.

Darrel’s picture books and such:

My mother was in charge of the picture books. She read me Sammy Joins a Circus, about a misfit seal who finds a home with a travelling caravan of frightening outcasts and oddities. The story seemed set entirely at night in a bleak and silvered Eastern Europe landscape of castles and plains beneath a pale moon. I was glad Sammy finally found friends but even that fate made me sad. I wished he’d had more of a choice. She read me Dr Seuss, especially the Sneetches, and Richard Scarry. We used to lie in bed and hunt through the pictures of What People Do All Day, looking for the small worm wearing an alpine hat.
Years later I left home to go to university in another city and found my first lover, feeling grown-up and sophisticated on the nights when her fiance, a doctor, worked all-night shifts repairing bodies and lives in the emergency room. It was my first time as an adult in a bed with an adult woman, my first opportunity for pillow-talk. We lay on summer sheets listening for sounds of the doctor coming home too soon, and we had all the world and art to talk about, our bodies and the stars. I found myself at 2am telephoning my mother in Durban.

“Ma, what was the name of that worm in Richard Scarry?”

“Wh- … what time is it?”

“The one with the feather in his hat. I can’t remember his name.”

“Is … are you …”

“Ma! What was his name? The worm?”

I put down the phone and turned in triumph to my lover in bed beside me. “Lowly!” I said. “His name was Lowly Worm!”

It astounds me that I have only just this moment thought about all the implications of that scene.

Darrel reading with children:

From time to time I read bedtime stories to five-year-old twin girls, who take turns: one sits on my lap while the other wedges herself under my right arm and against my chest so that she can see the page while I read. After the first chapter, they swap. They aren’t my children but I wish they were. I do my best to make the reading interesting – funny voices where required, sound effects, dramatic pauses and theatrical hushes to simulate spookiness and suspense. If the narrative is flagging I’ll make up a paragraph of humorous incident and pretend it’s part of the story, although I suspect I won’t get away with that much longer. Humorous incidents involving pieces of buttered toast misplaced, sat upon, upended or lost down trousers are currently highly successful. Just the word “trousers” is good for a laugh. One of the twin girls responds very well to words; the other laughs easily. These are both qualities I admire in people. One of them asked me recently to make up a story for them, and then to write it down so that they can read it for themselves some day. This terrifies me more than any other request I have ever had.

BBC World Service– Darrel Bristow-Bovey reading from ‘A Joburg story’ and interviewed about being shortlisted for 2006 Caine Prize for African Writing. (Scroll down the linked page and click to listen to each of the shortlisted authors.)

Aims of The Little Hands Trust
• To support initiatives that promote reading for enjoyment.
• To mentor African literary artists, including writers, illustrators and editors, to produce creative, suitable and appropriate children’s storybooks for children of various ages with a focus on early childhood (ages 0 to 9 years).
• To collaborate with African publishers to increase and sustain publication of children’s books in African languages. To initiate and support translations of stories between African languages, from African languages to ex-colonial languages and from ex-colonial languages to African languages.
• To help to orientate and educate adults in the importance and significance of reading to and with children.

Terry’s earliest memory of books and reading:

I remember reading and re-reading (or being read to I can’t remember) a rather scary book Struwwelpeter that was both horrifying and yet fascinating. By today’s standards people would never allow their children to read such scary stories at such a young age but I think children love this kind of thing (and actually it had some very stern perspectives on misbehaving and the consequences).

See this frowsy “cratur”
Pah! it’s Struwwelpeter
On his fingers rusty,
On his two-head musty,
Scissors seldom come;
Lets his talons grow a year
Do any loathe him? Some!
They hail him “Modern satyr -
Disgusting Struwwelpeter.”

From Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffmann translated by Mark Twain

Terry’s picture books:
I loved the Maurice Sendak Where the Wild Things Are and also an amazing book about a tiger that travels the world (for the life of me I can’t remember the title but I am going to track it down). As an independent reader I loved Flat Stanley.

“Let the wild rumpus start!”
– so said Max, in his wolf suit, in Where the Wild Things Are.
Here is a Wild Things video link, but the book is much better, although this reader’s gruff voice is quite impressive!

Terry, as an adult, reading with children:

I don’t have my own children but I love to see other children’s reactions to the wonderful world of books, be they interactive books like jigsaw books or touch and feel’s for newborns. I love watching children learn to turn the pages of their books and retell their favourite stories.

——
Extract from Terry’s paper at the Wiser symposium on The Politics of Publishing in South Africa, reproduced in the Mail&Guardian’s article: Local Books Boom and some more sobering facts from Terry in the Sunday Times article: How to get into bed with a publisher

Great artist or a mere illustrator?

He [Maurice Sendak] is plagued by the question that has repeatedly been asked about Norman Rockwell: was he a great artist or a mere illustrator?
“Mere illustrator,” he said, repeating the phrase with contempt. It’s not that Mr. Sendak, who has illustrated more than 100 books, including many he wrote, is angry that people question Rockwell’s talent; rather, he fears he has not risen above the “mere illustrator” label himself.
Never mind that Mr. Sendak’s originality and emotional honesty have changed the shape of children’s literature; that his work is featured in museums; that he has designed costumes and sets for operas, ballets and theater; that he has won a chest full of awards and prizes including a National Medal of the Arts. As the playwright Tony Kushner, one of his collaborators, said, “He’s one of the most important, if not the most important, writers and artists ever to work in children’s literature. In fact, he’s a significant writer and artist in literature. Period.”
–Read the rest of this article Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are in the New York Times

Another helping of Struwwel anyone?

The Story of Fidgety Philip
From Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffmann

“Let me see if Philip can
Be a little gentleman;
Let me see if he is able
To sit still for once at table.”
Thus spoke, in earnest tone,
The father to his son;
And the mother looked very grave
To see Philip so misbehave.
But Philip he did not mind
His father who was so kind.
He wriggled
And giggled,
And then, I declare,
Swung backward and forward
And tilted his chair,
Just like any rocking horse;-
“Philip! I am getting cross!”
See the naughty, restless child,
Growing still more rude and wild,
Till his chair falls over quite.
Philip screams with all his might,
Catches at the cloth, but then
That makes matters worse again.
Down upon the ground they fall,
Glasses, bread, knives forks and all.
How Mamma did fret and frown,
When she saw them tumbling down!
And Papa made such a face!
Philip is in sad disgrace.
Where is Philip? Where is he?
Fairly cover’d up, you see!
Cloth and ll are lying on him;
He has pull’d down all upon him!
What a terrible to-do!
Dishes, glasses, snapt in two!
Here a knife, and ther fork!
Philip, this is naughty work.
Table all so bare, and ah!
Poor Papa and poor Mamma
Look quite cross, and wonder how
They shall make their dinner now.

Nein! Nine! More wicked Struwwelpeter stories with illustrations at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Foreign Languages

Another Struwwelpeter survivor (in Greece) says:

In German with English subtitles. Not for kids. An interpretation of Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann’s appalling 19th century book of children’s stories, ‘Struwwelpeter.’
When I was 4, my mother showed me this book saying, ‘See? This is what BAD mothers show their children.’ Well, parents, be careful what you show your kids. Decades later, I woke up one morning and started making this[video].

Aims of The Little Hands Trust
• To support initiatives that promote reading for enjoyment.
• To mentor African literary artists, including writers, illustrators and editors, to produce creative, suitable and appropriate children’s storybooks for children of various ages with a focus on early childhood (ages 0 to 9 years).
• To collaborate with African publishers to increase and sustain publication of children’s books in African languages. To initiate and support translations of stories between African languages, from African languages to ex-colonial languages and from ex-colonial languages to African languages.
• To help to orientate and educate adults in the importance and significance of reading to and with children.

Namhla’s earliest memories of reading:

I honestly don’t remember how old I was when I started to have an interest in books, but I clearly remember that I was more interested in adult books than children’s ones. One children’s book that I read was a Xhosa book called URampasintilintili about a little man who helped a poor miller’s daughter to make gold out of grass for the king. That was a fascinating book and I read it more than ten times.
Reading was my favourite thing to do. I read everything I came across: newspapers, old magazines, pieces of papers. I remember reading this piece of fiction torn from a magazine in 2005. It was about a woman who was in a relationship with a guy who had an affair with his PA. She fell pregnant (not the PA). She was confident that she’d win him back, but the guy had already decided he would choose his PA because the other woman was too uptight and self-absorbed. The guy hadn’t told anyone who he would choose, but before I could read more I realised the piece torn from the magazine had more than a few pages missing. To this day I wonder about the ending.

Namhla’s first books:

As a teenager I became more open minded. I started reading books by Shakespeare. I read stories like Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and others, but I can’t remember the titles.
I also read Xhosa novels like Iintombi zinecebo: isiyoliso sothando (Girls Always Have A Plan), Kusa Kusihlwa (There’s Always Light At The End of The Tunnel), Unyana womntu(Someone’s Son), Ingqumbo yeminyanya(Anger of the Ancestors), and many more. I also came across a poem called Death be not proud and I wrote my own version of Death be not proud. I also read William Shakespeare’s poem that goes Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove: On no it is an ever-fixed mark and is never shaken. For a while I couldn’t understand the old English, but I became better and better and now it makes perfect sense. I also read a book called Why Bother. It was about teenagers who lived reckless lives until nature took its course. There was another book too, Nosel’ Eyibethile Akakayoji written by N.T. Gwegwe (Even the One Who Has Caught the Bird Has Not Braaied It Yet), based in Cape Town, by a Cape Town author.

I started writing my own stuff too, like poems and other pieces. I’ve even started writing a book about me, but now I’m too busy to focus on it. I will get back to it some time.

Namhla as an adult on reading with children:
Unfortunately I don’t have any experience of reading with children, except for helping my cousin with her grade 1 homework, but that’s it.

—
LINK TO 160 PAGE CATALOGUE OF ISIXHOSA FICTION AND NON-FICTION FOR YOUNG READERS PUBLISHED BY VARIOUS PUBLISHERS IN SOUTH AFRICA. With cover pictures, age group guide and descriptions of books in Xhosa and English.
—

Aims of The Little Hands Trust
• To support initiatives that promote reading for enjoyment.
• To mentor African literary artists, including writers, illustrators and editors, to produce creative, suitable and appropriate children’s storybooks for children of various ages with a focus on early childhood (ages 0 to 9 years).
• To collaborate with African publishers to increase and sustain publication of children’s books in African languages. To initiate and support translations of stories between African languages, from African languages to ex-colonial languages and from ex-colonial languages to African languages.
• To help to orientate and educate adults in the importance and significance of reading to and with children.

I have a mixture of memories and feelings about my childhood reading. I have always loved losing myself in a story. How amazing to sit with a book and forget where you are because your head and heart are somewhere else! Stories can take you to any place in the world, real and imaginary. You can travel backwards and forwards in time. You can even go inside other people, learning their innermost secrets and thoughts. Extraordinary, nê?
I especially remember four volumes of fairytales, each with a different coloured cover. I still have my copy of the Blue Fairy Book in which Andrew Lang brought together tales from earlier great story collectors, such as the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. These tales could send shivers down my spine and I loved them! In them I learned about anger, jealousy and hate as well kindness, loyalty and love. But these tales were largely set in far away Europe, just as my Enid Blyton’s stories were all set in England. Most of my books opened windows onto far-away lands. The exceptions were the animal tales with pictures where the landscape was like our South African bush.
It was only years later that I realised the problems with my childhood reading. It was like discovering that some of the ‘sweeties’ that I had eaten contained serious traces of poison. In consuming my books, I had also consumed a good deal of colonial racist stereotyping. Most of the characters in the stories were white and when there were black characters, they tended to be shown as savages, servants or comic buffoons. It still disturbs me to think how easily children’s minds can be influenced and distorted while they are being entertained. When I became an education adviser, it became part of my mission to encourage teachers, librarians and young people themselves to think about questions of representation, stereotyping and underlying messages in books for children. I became committed to critical reading because I had been such an uncritical reader as a child.
But there were also book-related incidents while I was growing up that did puzzle me at the time. Believe it or not, the library at my school was kept locked! I cannot recall once going inside and choosing a book for myself. What’s more, in my matric year, when I asked our vice-principal to sign a form so that I could join the Johannesburg city library, she refused. I can still hear her voice with her Irish lilt…
‘And what would you be wanting to read more books for, Beverley? Have you not got enough with your text books already?’

I was baffled by her refusal, but later I realised that the nuns who had taught me felt that it was their duty to control the books we read. In class, when we read a story, a poem, a novel or a play by Shakespeare, we were told what the author meant. Our teachers told us to write down what they said and learn it. To them, teaching included teaching us what to think. Reading was certainly not about encouraging dialogue! So at least I was lucky to have some books at home that I would read for pleasure and where my imagination would roam.
This was all well over 50 years ago, but the idea of keeping young people away from books and controlling their ideas still angers me. I was a white child in a whites-only school and none of my white teachers encouraged me to ask questions, let alone question apartheid and the racism all around us. It’s a bit like we children were little donkeys with blinkers who had to follow instructions from teachers and adults who also wore blinkers.
After I left school, I was very fortunate to make friends at Wits University with people who helped me tear away the blinkers. It was the year after the Sharpeville massacre and, for the first time, in my late teens, I began to read books that invited me to see the world around me in new ways. I was given a banned copy of Es’kia (then known as Ezekiel) Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue about his childhood in Marabastad. That wasn’t so far from where I’d grown up but it could have been on another planet. My eyes opened as he took me down his streets and into his home. I began to realise that our country was like a vast prison for black South Africans and I began to ask the questions that I’d never asked before. What I saw now was shocking, but at least I was beginning to choose my own journey… and books were vital ‘mind food’ along the way.

It was many years later that I began writing for children. Our family was living in exile in England and I wanted to find a way for our two children, and other young people, to imagine what apartheid was like. If I could tell them a gripping story, they might want to know more…
That was the beginning of Journey to Jo’burg. Once it was published, the story quickly travelled around the world in many different languages. I began to receive hundreds of letters from readers telling me their thoughts and asking me questions. But there were no letters from South Africa because the apartheid rulers banned it until the year after Nelson Mandela was released from jail.
Not having books is not always just about lack of money. It’s also about those in power recognising how important and valuable books are as ‘mind food’. We need to remind our leaders that young people should have the freedom to read, imagine, think and ask their own questions about the world which is already passing into their young hands.

Beverley Naidoo, 13th January 2009

*Read the first chapter of Beverley Naidoo’s The Other Side of Truth*

I hope Beverley will not mind if I include this list of recognitions she has received for her work:

Web of Lies
The New York Public Library – Books for the Teen Age 2007

The Playground
Time Out Critics’ Choice 2004: Best Plays for Children and Young People.

Out of Bounds
A Best Book for Young Adults, American Library Association, USA 2004
Riverbank Review Children’s Book of Distinction, USA 2004
Jane Addams Peace Association Book Award for Older Children, USA 2004
African Studies Association Children’s Africana Book Award (Older Readers), USA 2004
Parents’ Choice Silver Honor Award, USA 2003

The Other Side of Truth
Sankei Children’s Book Award, Japan 2003
International Board on Books for Young People Honour Book, 2002
Jane Addams Book Award (older children category), USA 2002
American Library Association Booklist Top of the List, USA 2001
A Best Book for Young Adults American Library Association, USA 2001
Notable Children’s Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, USA 2001
Smarties Book Prize Silver Medal, UK 2000
Carnegie Medal, UK 2000

No Turning Back
International Reading Association Teachers Choices for 1998 Josette Frank Award (Child Study Children’s Book Committee Award)1998
Notable Children’s Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies 1998
Book Trust 100 Best Books of 1997
Shortlisted for the Smarties Prize 1995
Shortlisted for The Guardian Fiction Prize 1996

Chain of Fire
‘Vlag en Wimpel’ Award 1991
American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults list 1991
Notable Children’s Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies 1990
Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal 1990
Shortlisted for the Smarties Prize 1989

Journey to Jo’burg
Notable Children’s Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies 1986
Parents’ Choice Honor Book for Paperback Literature 1986 for
Child Study Children’s Book Committee Award1986
The Other Award 1985

Extract from an interview on The Other Side of Truth

Have you ever felt, or had any criticism lodged, that you are unqualified, as a white South African, to write from a black perspective?
I believe we have to be very careful about censoring who writes about whom. Is someone from the 20th century not allowed to write about someone from the 19th century or the 16th century? Is a man not able to write about a woman? Where is the cut off point? What makes us human is that we have actually got imagination to help extend our own experience. The writer must have the freedom to write. The key question is whether the writer writes credibly and well. But of course the political issue still has to be addressed of why more black writers are not being published. There are very few black editors here in the UK. We need to open up the publishing industry, mainstream publishing. It will benefit greatly from a diversity of talent.

What is your opinion of the treatment of asylum seekers within the UK?

I’m extremely unhappy with how asylum seekers are being used as political footballs. Of course every country is entitled to a system of immigration controls but we have an obligation under international law to give refuge to people genuinely fleeing persecution. There is now such a culture of hostility to asylum seekers that I don’t believe we can trust all the decisions about who should enter. Some people, including children, are being sent back to countries where their lives are endangered. It is appalling that Mr Blair’s government should choose to opt out of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child with regard to child asylum-seekers. Our current system lacks a human face. You take someone who has been tortured or persecuted in the country from which they have fled, and push them through a system that sends out the message ‘You are not wanted.’ It is not a system that recognises that asylum seekers are often extremely resourceful people who have qualities that any reasonable society should value. They are people who will contribute to and enrich our society. The system also encourages unscrupulous people to make money out of refugees. You know, this whole business of housing asylum seekers all over the country. Some people are converting terrible accommodation that neither you nor I would want to live in and saying that this is fit for an asylum seeker. Government pays them for this accommodation. They are using our money, our taxpayers’ money, to pay them! That horrifies me. As the government makes it increasingly difficult to seek asylum here, it forces people, with genuine concerns for their safety, underground. As soon as you do that you encourage corruption. In my view our present system encourages ‘people smugglers’.

Initially, everything I read as a child was in Zulu. English books would come later. The earliest memory of my early reading years is of me as a boy reading scripture from the Bible at prayer time in the evenings at home. I must have been seven and living in Durban. I read well, faithfully observing the rules of proper reading speed and voice rhythm. For someone my age, my Bible reading seemed precocious. Impressed by my reading ability, my dad often asked me to read whenever we prayed with guests. I could not shake off the feeling that there was an element of showoff in the request. But I didn’t mind. It made him proud and I got to be the centre of attention despite being a shy little fella.

Phakama’s books and heroes

Of course, as a child you don’t just start reading a heavy text like the Bible. Some kind of reading lead to it. For me, schools textbooks, the ones with lots of pictures and simple tales, paved the way. Having learned to read at an early age, I acquired a healthy appetite stories. I longed to read something substantial, something books in my grade never provided. My two older brothers’ school books came in handy. That is how I came to read books with stories several grades higher than my own.

When I started reading books in English, the children’s section at the City Hall Library in Durban was a treasure trove. It was well stocked. No particular titles I read stand out in my mind. It was a question of choosing any book that caught one’s fancy and loaning it for two weeks at a time. Or following the librarian’s recommendation. It was fun. New, exciting worlds opened. Even as a teenager in boarding school, I kept returning to the Durban Library. It remained special. By then I played tennis at school. It was late 1980s. Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg were dominant figures in the world of tennis and everyone who played the game at school sought to emulate them. Since we had no tennis coach, during school holidays I used books from this library to learn about the intricacies of hitting deadly backhands, accurate volleys and unreachable drop shots. It worked. Sadly, advancing age and a lack of match practice, now deny me the ability to even toss the ball in the air in the right manner and serve nor the confidence to attempt running after any drop shot.

Phakama, as an adult, on reading and children

Because I do not have children of my own, and do not live with children, I have not yet had a chance to read to a child. If I did have children I’d certainly impress the importance of reading. I’d tell them about the magical worlds that exist within books, waiting to be explored. I’d tell them about the power of words in conveying ideas and improving conceptual skills. I’d also tell them about the books’ ability to foster self-education, that not everything they will learn in this world will necessarily come from a teacher in class or a coach at the tennis court. I’d also tell them that reading books in indigenous languages is important and must be strongly encouraged even outside the classroom.

Visit www.wordsetc.co.za. Subscription is R170 for four editions.

Aims of The Little Hands Trust
• To support initiatives that promote reading for enjoyment.
• To mentor African literary artists, including writers, illustrators and editors, to produce creative, suitable and appropriate children’s storybooks for children of various ages with a focus on early childhood (ages 0 to 9 years).
• To collaborate with African publishers to increase and sustain publication of children’s books in African languages. To initiate and support translations of stories between African languages, from African languages to ex-colonial languages and from ex-colonial languages to African languages.
• To help to orientate and educate adults in the importance and significance of reading to and with children.