Authors Electric

Having a competitive nature, whenever a special book list is compiled, I immediately scan the list and count how many I have read. The BIG READ list in 2003 was decided by three quarters of a million votes from the British public, to determine the nation’s best loved novel. There are 200 books listed, many popular novelists feature more than once, including Pratchett, Rowling and Austen, so if you have devoured any of their writing you can score highly. I admit I have read all of the Harry Potter books and all of Jane Austen’s novels and my total for the Big Read List is approximately 50 out of the 200. I’ll say approximately because some I think I remember reading at school and might have skipped a few pages and then there are audio books – do they properly count? But even allowing for the multiple books by a single author my tally isn’t as great as I thought it would be. The BIG JUBLIEE READ of just seventy books has been drawn up with totally different criteria. There w...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Those of you of a certain age will recognize the “will go” element of my title as part of the way we were taught Maths (division) in the 1970s. Without a love of stories, which comes from a love of reading, a love to write will be hard to develop. It will be even harder to maintain. I should have realised the writing life was beckoning me sooner than I did. I loved “composition” lessons during English where we had to invent stories. It was even better when the teacher didn’t set a theme. To this day I prefer open-ended writing competitions! My colleagues all groaned when told to do this. I couldn’t wait to get started.  There were also SRA cards which were colour-coded depending on how well you could read. On one side was the story. On the other were questions about the story. Loved those. Story analysis right there at junior school level! I just didn’t realise it. Breaking down what makes a story work has help...