Finding books that are just the right fit

Choosing the right books to nurture a love of reading is vital and this week’s guest author taps into personal and professional knowledge gained as a bookseller and a parent. Read on for some great insights and suggested titles to whet the reading appetite for different aged readers.

As a bookseller and a parent I thought I’d share with you what my kids have been reading over summer and our families journey in reading so far.

 

My husband grew up in a bookshop and whilst his bookselling parents read to him often and shared books, he regards himself as a reluctant reader until he found the ‘Tomorrow When the War Began’ book series by John Marsden as a teen.  So my message here is, “don’t panic if your kid isn’t a reader yet,” maybe they just haven’t found what they love.

 

I was a voracious reader who happily accompanied my grandparents on their weekly library trip as well as made great use of my school libraries as a child and teen.  Yes, I’ve tried to make my kids love the books I loved growing up.  Sadly, nothing captured them quite like it did me, but we’ve found that letting them discover what interests them is more likely to keep them reading.

 

We have three boys and whilst two are now independent readers and in high school, the third Mr6 is still emerging and we continue to grow his confidence in learning to read.  So lets starts with what’s been working to engage my smallest (I’d rather be outdoors) child in reading.

 

We’ve been loving Sally Rippin’s School of Monster series, we started with me reading the majority of the words and him just reading the coloured word at the end of each sentence (this took the pressure off and made it easy for him at the end of a long day as we usually read before bed).  He’s now following the stories and adding in extra words as he recognises them and particularly likes the green/yellow/red new word breakdown at the end of each story in the bind-up sets.

 

I also like to have a novel we’re reading together that’s just for the joy of sharing a story, a recent read we enjoyed was Bravepaw and the Heartstone of Alluria by L M Wilkinson. And on those nights where we just need a quick read to share we still return to picture books, a recent favourite is When the Lights Went Out by Lian Tanner. 

 

My middle child Mr12 while now a fully independent reader, found the move from illustrated chapter books to chapter books harder as he loved the easy read and dislikes change.  He struggled to find what he liked on offer in upper primary reads.  After many try’s and fail’s we figured out he likes a puzzle or a mystery to solve and interpersonal dynamics at play. Some titles that have worked for him in the last year are:

 

*  Escape Room by Christopher Edge was the book that helped me find what he liked.

* We loved Stewart Foster’s Books, Check Mates and All the Way Down being two popular titles.

* The Spy Academy series by Jack Heath have been a great quick action packed read for him.

* The Cherub series by Robert Muchamore kept him busy for a while thanks to the number of titles on offer.

*  His most recent read was The Bletchley Riddle by Ruth Sepetys & Steve Sheinkin.

My eldest Mr14 has always been a book lover, he just reads and reads and reads. His upper primary years had him bent over the pages of both fiction and non-fiction war stories which then progressed to the dystopian offerings of The Maze Runner, The Divergent series and the Gone series. He loved Tomorrow when the War Began by John Marsden and The Cherub series by Robert Muchamore just to name a few.

 

These were some of his summer reads (I’m jealous of all the time he has to dive into a great book);

 

*  The Outsiders by S E Hinton

*  The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku 

*  The Last Reality series by Jason Segel 

*  The Jack West Jnr series  and the Scarecrow series and everything else he could get his hands on by Matthew Reilly.

Andy Durkin

Bookseller at Petrarch’s Bookshop

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Editor’s note: It is wonderful to see such an exciting list of titles that will appeal to boys! Just a note of caution that as the main characters in the Cherub series age and mature, so too do some of the themes.

Share a book on International Children’s Book Day

Have you ever enjoyed a book so much, you have wanted to tell everyone about it, rushed out to buy copies for family and friends or placed holds on copies of the author’s other titles? Research by Clarke et al. (2017) found that many Tasmanian adults enjoy sharing books as members of book clubs. IBBY Tasmanian members are providing a similar opportunity through ‘book sharing’ for young readers across Tasmania to talk about and promote their favourite books.

At last year’s IBBY Congress in Trieste, approximately 20 students from several European countries complained bitterly that adults were not sharing good books and that young adults themselves had little opportunity to share their favourites with other young adults. This led to a small group of enthusiastic IBBY/CBCA members deciding to encourage Tasmanian teachers, parents and grandparents to set aside 20 minutes on April 2 for students/children to share the books they love. Why that date? Wednesday April 2 is Hans Christian Andersen’s birthday also known as International Children’s Book Day.

Bradley (2018) champions recommendations from peers as the best way to inspire students to read. For suggestions on starting a culture of book sharing, Miller considers the importance of adults in sharing their own favourites but that ultimately “No matter how good we are at making book recommendations to a fifth grader, the best person to make a book recommendation to a fifth grader is another fifth grader” (Colby Sharp, 2017). 

Another idea drawn from Miller (2014) and expanded on by Jennifer Findley (n.d.) is book commercials along with other suggestions for providing opportunities for students to make personalised recommendations to their peers of the books that they have read and enjoyed. Further suggestions for celebrating books and reading can be found on BubbleUpClassroom. 

As well as providing young readers with the opportunity to talk about their favourite recent reads, IBBY, Tasmanian children and teenagers are invited to submit a brief paragraph (no more than 50 words) to promote their chosen book and convince others that the book is so good that they want others to read and enjoy it. There are some engaging examples of peer book recommendations on a recent CBCA Tas blog post: What are teenage boys reading for pleasure? Insights from a school library. For those who need some guidance the following prompts provide some pointers to get started: 

• Why did you enjoy the book so much?
• What did you find most thought-provoking or compelling about the storyline or characters? (Don’t re-tell the story!)
• What is the main reason you’d recommend this book to someone else/ what would be the main reason you'd give them to convince them to give it a read? 
• Who do you think would enjoy reading this book?

Email your submission to ibbyicbdau@gmail.com  

Please include the child’s given name, age, and location. Selected reviews will be added to IBBY Australia website. Submissions close Friday 11 April.

 

References

 

Bradely, L. (2018, 27 Feb). How to get your students to read more? Peer recommendations. KQED: In the Classroom. https://www.kqed.org/education/530724/how-to-get-your-students-to-read-more-peer-recommendations

 

Clarke,  R., Hookway, N. & Burgess, R.  (2017). Reading in community, reading for community: A survey of book clubs in regional Australia. Journal of Australian Studies,  41(2), 171-183. https://doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2017.1312484

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317280010_Reading_in_Community_Reading_for_Community_A_Survey_of_Book_Clubs_in_Regional_Australia 

Colby Sharp. (2017, 25 October). The book Whisperer Donalyn Miller talks about books. YouTube. https://youtu.be/5aVS_Gmi1ls?si=nJVknMfu61cdDlMM 

Miller, D. (2014). Reading in the wild: the book whisperer’s keys to cultivating lifelong reading habits. Jossey-Bass.
[Held by Libraries Tasmania along with other books by this inspiring advocate for reading.]

 

Nella Pickup, reader, grandparent of readers, IBBY & CBCA TAS member 

Jennie Bales, CBCA Tasmania Social Media Coordinator, retired teacher librarian and adjunct lecturer.

Editor’s note: Although written submissions are limited to Tasmanian entries, anyone, anywhere, can set up a book sharing session – at school, at home, in a library, in a bookshop or with friends. Join in and celebrate International Children’s Book Day on April 2.

Why not share a favourite children’s book here?

Celebrating 80 years of CBCA

This year, and into 2026, the Children’s Book Council of Australia is celebrating 80 years of Australian stories. What a proud and dynamic time this has been for children’s book publishing with some significant highlights shared here.

2025 marks 80 years since CBCA commenced in Australia, with the aim to promote and foster quality literature for children. The first Book of the Year was awarded in 1946, to Leslie Rees’ book Karrawingi the Emu (illustrated by Walter Cunningham and published by John Sands). Nan Chauncy Award winner, Mem Fox (2017) mentions, (in her award speech), about the joy of reading Leslie Rees’ books whilst living in South Africa as a child, and then being able to meet him in person, on her return to Australia as an adult. 

Celebrations will continue into 2026 as we commemorate 80 years of the Awards. In 1946 (and previous years) there were few books being published specifically for children, and it is of note that in 1952 an additional category (Picture Book of the Year) was established; perhaps the awards sparked interest in writing for children. In 1982 the Book of the Year Award was separated into Younger Readers and Older Readers categories. In 1988 the Eve Pownall (non-fiction) and New Illustrator Awards commenced; and finally in 2001 Early Childhood category was first presented. You can view the list of these awards on the CBCA website.

CBCA is also well known for the quality merchandise created each year to support the Children’s Book Week theme: in 2025 we are invited to Book an Adventure! (with artwork by Jess McGeachin). As well as the usual items, you are able to purchase a ‘passport’ for you/your child/your students to record a year of adventures. There will be more merchandise lines added to the website soon – so maybe wait a bit if you intend to buy! If you have not done so already, you can access your free year planner on the home page of the CBCA website.

Each year many schools and public libraries celebrate Children’s Book Week by hosting dress-up days/parades. A wonderful way to bring books to life.

In recent years CBCA has also commenced Shadow Judging of the Book of the Year Awards. Schools register to judge the shortlisted books in one of the categories and based on the same criteria used by the Book of the Year Judges, they nominate the book they deem worthy of the Award. These are now announced at the same time as the Book of the Year Awards. We witnessed at the 2024 Book Week celebration at Government House the depth to which these young people consider their choice.

What is your favourite title that has won a CBCA Award? Ivan Southall’s Ash Road won in 1966. In 1967 I was in Grade 4 at school in Hobart when the Black Tuesday bushfires swept through southern Tasmania on the first day of term. When I came across this book in Grade 6 it took no imagination to identify with the children’s experiences. In my first year as a teacher-librarian, I was thrilled when Ruth Park’s Playing Beattie Bow won. I also recall the excitement when Robin Klein and Emily Rodda suddenly appeared in the short lists in 1983 and 1984.

I look forward to February 25 when the notables are announced and March 25 when the shortlists are announced.

Felicity Sly is Treasurer of CBCA Tasmania, and a recently retired teacher-librarian.

Editor’s note: Thanks Felicity, you have certainly jogged my memories and provided inspiration for the celebrations to come. I too loved Playing Beattie Bow. 

My pick in my first year as a teacher librarian way back in 1984 was Bertie and the Bear by Pamela Allen – a book that still delights today as a read aloud AND, of course, Possum Magic by Mem Fox. This year also heralded the introduction of Penny Pollard in Penny Pollard’s Diary, by Robin Klein. The original cover was perfect!!!!

Are you a reader?

Happy new year to all our readers, and welcome back to another year of the CBCA Tas blog. Thanks to Maureen Mann for starting the year with a challenge to examine our own reading commitment.

As this new year begins, my social media seems to have been filled with book related items. Many of them I ignored, but every so often something piqued my interest. Are you a reader of books or listener of audiobooks? 

We all read every day but it’s frequently not sustained reading. Our reading ranges from the incidental of signs and notices in our everyday lives. It includes the time, (and for so many) it’s probably too long, on social media. Or all the reading we do within our working days, while looking at screens. 

But reading a book or listening to an audiobook requires us to concentrate for a much longer period. So, this time I am focussing on some of the things I have found, hoping to inspire the less frequent readers among you to do more.

100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul, published 2021. The title intrigued me and so I thought of some of the things I have lost. These include: the excitement of seeing photos just back from the developer; hard copy newspapers every day; not making eye contact with people outside: everyone is glued to their device; maps and atlases for serendipitous travelling. 

A review by Kate W in booksaremyfavouriteandbest lists them all with her comments. What have you lost? 

 

66 days to learn to love reading again, an article published in the online Guardian newspaper, by the Australian journalist Doosie Morris (8 January, 2025), encourages those who have lost the mojo for reading in a sustained way. She says that all one needs is just under 10 weeks to change your habits. 

The CBCA Tas Facebook page reposted Mike Lucas’s Book Week poem, celebrating 80 years of the CBCA Book of the Year Awards. It’s the first I have seen of many which will celebrate this year’s milestone. 

Brisbane Libraries are encouraging children to register to create their own library display. Each month someone is chosen as Kid Librarian. What a fantastic idea. Wish I had thought of it while I was still working. What theme would you choose to highlight, even though you’re probably not a kid librarian?

Libraries Tasmania recently released the most popular books of 2024, over several categories, and for physical as well as eLibrary items. Does this kind of list help you in your reading journey? If you haven’t already seen it, have a look here. 

Do you have a new year reading goal? Is your aim to read more than you did last year? Or expand your reading beyond your normal choices? 

And finally, a few books which I have enjoyed recently.

Maureen Mann
Retired teacher librarian and avid reader

The Bookmarked Life: Saving a Place for Reading

The final post for 2024 is a thought-provoking piece from regular contributor, Lyndon Riggall, highlights the importance of regular sustained reading. Lyndon provides a compelling impetuous to set some goals for personal reading practices and to encourage the youngsters in our lives to build healthy and sustained reading habits.

 

In a recent article that has been doing the rounds online, titled simply The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books, Rose Horowitch (2024) outlines an ongoing crisis in higher education: even in top-tier university English Departments, students are arriving not only unprepared for a standard reading load of a book a week, but also sometimes having never read a full-length novel from cover-to-cover at all. She notes: “In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.” Horowitch points to an EdWeek Research Center Survey by Stephen Sawchuk (2024) of third-to-eighth-grade educators in which only 17 percent said that they “primarily teach whole texts.” The knock-on effect of this is that students reach a point where even a short novel can feel like an insurmountable hurdle in a world of rapid-fire information dispensed in bright, bite-sized chunks. When I was a primary school student, my Grade 6 teacher called the first half an hour or so after lunch “SQUIRT”: “Sustained, Quiet, Uninterrupted, Individual Reading Time.” What a privilege that feels like in 2024… perhaps even an impossibility.

 

As the Department for Education, Children and Young People here in Tasmania continues its focus on literacy and reading across the school years, I had the fortune to attend a recent full-day workshop with reading expert Emina McLean, who discussed the science of reading with an eye to the specific strategies that are most effective in developing this skill. At the heart of her work is the skill of fluency: being able to read a text out loud, clearly, accurately and with expression. There is certainly no denying that the complex processes of unpacking words, tone and meaning are neither easy nor simple, but if we can achieve them—and even sustain them—then certainty of our reading level follows. It starts early, and, if we are successful, that journey that never ends, and whole texts are a large part of it.

Earlier this week I saw a TikTok video making fun of the typical middle-school literary canon of books and their absurd titles like Biffs, Barfs and my Big Brother’s Farts, The Too-Cool-For-School Ultimate Guide to Pranks or Don’t Read This Unless You Want to be Scared! While I have concerns about what it means for the state of publishing that there are so many books that are easily marketable, in general I’m a supporter of the idea that almost all reading is good reading. Ideas, certainly, can be dangerous, but I’ve never been particularly afraid of heavily franchised books like those connected to the films of Disney or videogames like Minecraft. As we grow up, all stories qualify as lessons in the power of writing for good and evil. And if what we read makes us laugh, or makes us afraid, or makes us blush, why should there be any shame in enjoying a narrative for what it is?

It is unfathomable to me that we might live in a world where an English Major at any university cannot read a novel. Reading, in my experience, is the gateway to all of the ideas of the world, but the progress of Tasmania’s dreams of literacy will never be possible without a focus on the skill of sustained focus. Listening recently on Radio National to an interview with American psychologist Jonathan Haidt, I was struck by his overwhelming enthusiasm for the government’s recent announcement of a social media ban for young people under the age of sixteen. I have had my concerns about the ban (primarily due to its potential to push the online behaviour of children away from their family’s notice and into private spaces on the fringes), but it seems hard to argue that social media isn’t dangerous when most of the adults that I’ve spoken to feel that their own ability to focus has been significantly diminished—at least in some part—by it. 

Whenever I look at the “Screen Time” section of my iPhone, I find myself baffled by the fact that I can so easily use my device for three hours a day or more while barely noticing. An hour reading some fiction before bed in comparison to an hour spent scrolling social media can make me feel like an entirely different person in the morning, and I have to remind myself of this regularly, yet I was born before the era of the smartphone. How can we possibly imagine what life could be like with less addiction to technology if we have never seen it?

As we head towards Christmas and the summer holidays, now seems like as good a time as any to think about how we spend those precious snatches of free time. The “Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” are the evolution of “The Children Who Don’t Read Books.” For all of our strategies, there is nothing to my mind that will be more effective to building fluency, understanding and knowledge than simply reading—as actively, widely and frequently as possible. 

 

Margaret Atwood once said that “a word after a word after a word is power.” What a gift to be able to harness that power, and what a tragedy when we can’t.

 

It’s a huge mission, but with a simple beginning: 

 

The first turn of a page…

 

 

Lyndon Riggall

Lyndon Riggall is a writer, teacher, and co-president of the Tamar Valley Writers Festival. He has written the picture books Becoming Ellie and Tamar the Thief, and is a 2024 Premier’s Reading Challenge Reading Champion. You can find out more about him at www.lyndonriggall.com or on social media @lyndonriggall. 

New Books for Summer Reading

What’s new and popular in YA and children’s reading this year? This week Bronwyn, from the Hobart Bookshop, introduces some great titles to hook readers of all ages. There might be something here for the Christmas stocking!

Looking back on 2024, there have been many highlights in children’s fiction, including new releases from favourite authors who have returned to capture the imaginations of new readers.

Philip Reeve wrote the first book in the Mortal Engines series in 2001, with the fourth book in the main quartet, A Darkling Plain, released in 2006. While there have been subsequent releases since, the brand-new Thunder City marks a return to the same world as the first Mortal Engines book. Revisiting a series after such a long break can be challenging, as the original audience for these books are no longer children. Reeve hopes to attract a new audience by introducing an entirely new cast of characters. The book has only just been released in Australia, so we eagerly wait to see if it will captivate readers as the original did.

Emily Rodda, beloved for her Rowan of Rin and Deltora Quest series, has returned with an epic simultaneous three-book release. This is an unusual move, as none of the books are available individually. The Landovel series is beautifully presented as a box set—a bold commitment that only an author who has already captured the hearts of many readers could undertake.

Another emerging trend that many may have noticed is the growing abundance of YA books about murder and mystery. Thanks to the popularity of series by Holly Jackson and Karen McManus, and spurred on by the way YA readers use TikTok to discover books, the number of titles in this space has grown significantly. These books vary greatly in tone and depth, but they often succeed in holding the attention of readers who might not otherwise immerse themselves in a book. Speaking with readers of this genre reveals a common thread: the need to know how the story ends.

The murder-mystery genre also allows YA readers to examine human motivations, fostering an understanding that people don’t always act as they should—a key part of adolescent development. These aren’t the only books exploring the human condition; character diversity is also increasing. Traditionally marginalised characters are being more frequently placed at the centre of stories rather than relegated to the sidelines.

Some standout recent examples include Thunderhead by Sophie Beer, where the protagonist shares the same disability as the author, lending the story a palpable resonance and authenticity. Maggie O’Farrell, the award-winning author of Hamnet, has written a children’s picture book, When the Stammer Came to Stay, featuring a character who begins to struggle with speech—a challenge the author herself experienced. Both of these books offer profound understanding and empathy, making them powerful additions to children’s literature.

Bronwyn Chalke
The Hobart Bookshop

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