What is the Children’s Bookroom?

I’m pinning this to the sidebar as a guide to new readers.  It should briefly lay out to you the Narrative Rules of this Land, as it were.  After all, if you’re after reading an Epic, and you end up reading an Allegory, that’s no fun, is it?  So better to find out what you’re reading at first and make sure you’re in the right part of the Library for you.  So here goes:

  1. What am I going to write about?  I want to write about books.  I read a lot of books, and I like them, so I’m going to write about the books I like.  I’ll give a little overview of the book, and then write about what I like.  (I don’t think I’d bother writing about books I don’t like, because where’s the fun in that?)  This will probably be mostly children’s books, because, well, I love children’s books, and also I’m a mother, so I read a lot of books with my Changeling.
  2. Will these be old or new books?  It will be a gory party of whatever I pull out of my library, or whatever I’m reading.  That means some will be old or obscure favourites, or Canadian books I’ll be railing at the world to notice, and a lot will be new children’s publications because I do try to keep up with those.
  3. Who am I talking to here? Myself, pretty much.  I’ll write about what I like, and think about books the way I like them, and if anyone else wants to join the party, welcome!  But this is really my space to think about books I like, and that’s it.
  4. Why the name?  When I was thinking about starting this, the image that popped to mind is one of an old favourite of mine, Eleanor Farjeon’s The Little Bookroom.  Well, that name was taken, and, anyway, I wanted something that got more closely at the children’s literature focus I’ll probably take here, but I still liked the idea of giving the nod to Eleanor Farjeon.  She has a quality I love of steeping herself in the traditional, the old, the literary– and producing something entirely quirky, original, and new.  I want this space to be something like that: a space where I can steep myself in all the books I know and love, and perhaps that process will bring me somewhere entirely new, original, and hopefully a little quirky.