KYD YA Championship

Kill Your Darlings have asked a whole lot of book-reading, YA-loving, story-defending people to passionately put forward the case for a particular Australian young adult book from the past 30 years. The posts will go up between July 30 and August 17 on their blog.

Then, it's over to everyone else. That's you. Once you've calmly and rationally read all the persuasive posts and weighed the choices and considered it properly and seriously, you can vote for my chosen book to win. How fun!

Actually, you can vote for whichever title you would like, and there will be a top three. You'll also be in the running to win a whole bunch of books from Penguin, Allen & Unwin and Hardie Grant Egmont*.

The book I'm championing is one of these ones. It also appears here ... though perhaps not one of the ones pictured *hint hint*.

But what was really hard is that there are so many amazing, brilliant, canonical, damn-tootin' excellent and fab Australian YA books from the past thirty years (which is almost my whole lifetime) that I wished I could have campaigned heartily for more. But I could only stand behind one, so I've gathered my lackies and we're getting behind my title with - err - croquet mallets (?) in hand.

Visit the Killings blog here.

*Disclaimer, or whatever: I work for HGE. 

so apparently it is july

it's cold where i am,

not actually taken this winter, but in january 2006 at a famous castle in france. this is how cold i feel though

but we built a tent in the lounge room.

this is actually my house. we are real grown ups

it's super hot where the rejectionist is

here are some texts from jane eyre

lala over at the joy of mediocrity saw take this waltz and had the same reaction as me. it was so beautifully filmed, a brilliant soundtrack, great cast ... but just a little over-wrought and seemed to take itself quite seriously. the beautiful michelle williams' character margo was really quite unlikable, the handsome stranger kind of dull. there were elongated silences that were supposed to be Poignant but could have used banter. and early on margo gives a little speech that basically baldly states the entire subtext of her character and this was a moment we could have used a Poignant Silence.

i have sonya hartnett's latest book to read, as well as sarah waters' fingersmith and courtney summers' this is not a test, but i spend most of my time on suri's burn book and when in melbourne.

but last night i saw simone felice and josh ritter play and sing and read at readings carlton. it was very nice.