Thank you all for enduring my rushed presentation at the English Faculty staff meeting yesterday evening. I thought I would follow up with a few longer form notes on the books that I spoke about and some that I didn’t.

Firstly, I have written reviews of Nanberry: Black Brother White by Jackie French and Crow Country by Kate Constable that you can access by clicking the links.

The ACARA website has some advice on selecting literary texts here. This page also includes a helpful list of links which aren’t very helpful (such as a link to the Victorian PRC Booklist where you can narrow down your list of potentials to a mere few hundred or the broken links to Asia Education, dreamtime.net and the State Library of Queensland).

The other books that I talked about were Stolen by Lucy Christopher (Shona Cowell had read that) and Run by Tim Sinclair (Leah Christou had read that). Also at the conference where I saw Tim speak, I saw Alison Croggon talk about her new book, Black Spring, which is her interpretation of Wuthering Heights and Gab Williams talk about her new book, The Reluctant Hallelujah, which is about some kids who find Jesus’ corpse in their Sydney cellar. Sounds really funny. We will be getting both of those books next term.

I also spoke about the more high-interest books Don’t call me Ismael by Michael Gerard Bauer and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Don’t write these off out of hand, there is a lot to be said for the way that high-interest texts can create positive attitudes to reading. We really want kids to leave school wanting to pick up a book.

I hope I’ve given you guys something to think about. If you want to talk about any of these books some more, feel free to come and see me. Also, if you want to borrow any of them, drop into the library.