Discover Magic - Read!

Finally! Our big wall visuals have gone up and they look awesome! For the front window, we chose a fantastically atmospheric poster from the American Library Association with Gandalf and a huge tome of some ancient book of wisdom in front of him. On the poster are the words: Discover Magic - Read. That sums up our philosophy completely - reading and the written word really do have the power to work magic in our lives. As Walt Disney once said, "There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island." Yo, ho, ho to that!

Our storytelling corner features a picture of a dragon wending his way up to a castle perched on top of a mountain. It is taken from a richly illustrated book called "The Kiss That Missed" by David Melling. We think it provides the kind of atmosphere children tend to lose themselves in when they read stories of brave knights and gutsy heroines, dragons and unicorns and flying horses. We all need to escape once in a while into the place of our imaginations and try out roles where we can be the epitomes of courage as we set out on quests and defeat whatever is threatening our world and all that is good.

Behind our counter is a picture by one of my favourite illustrators - Jane Ray. It is a picture of the tree of life - an important symbol in many cultures. For me, it symbolises the unity and beauty of creation and is in fact taken from a book called "The Story of Creation", one of her many books that have won awards for illustration. In a way it is even symbolic of what sustains us spiritually and keeps us connected with the true meaning and purpose of our lives.

Books can help us understand what that purpose is and how we might live our lives. On our journey through life there is always a time and a place for the written and spoken word: lullabies soothe babies to sleep, verses and rhymes satisfy our need for rhythm and cadence and word play, stories draw us into new and imagined worlds away from and yet reflective of our daily dramas, great literary works inspire and uplift us, and so the list goes on.

Come and discover some of the magic for yourself and for your children - there be plenty of treasure for everyone in Bookaburra, me hearties!

Parents as reading role models

I read this article quite a while ago on the website of a great Sydney bookstore called Gleebooks. I hope they don't mind me reprinting it here. I do recommend people use their online services if they want to save money sending heavy parcels of books back to Australia on birthdays and other occasions so look them up at www.gleebooks.com.au soon. Now, here's the article:

"Over the last few years of teaching at universities I have conducted a poll amongst my students. I ask how many of them were read to as children. I then ask them if they can describe for me the first image they can recall from a book. I tell them of my image.

My past and present students are creative writers; budding poets, novelists and/or literary critics. The results are stacked I guess. But roughly eight out of ten students were read to by both or one of their parents. I do not question the others any further. Literacy is not a sign of goodness or worthiness and many literate people find reading aloud uncomfortable. I do however recommend to the 'read to's' that they pick up some whiskey on the way home for Dad and flowers for Mum, or the other way around depending on what tempos, what structures govern their domestic lives.

The subjective response to a work of art is not commonly regarded as a 'true' form of criticism, but for a creative writer and a creative reader it may provide clues to the sources of your own mind. (Try it at home, with or without adult supervision. What is your earliest memory of a book?). The gut response is informed certainly by genetics, environment, amount of alcohol consumed prior to the act of engagement etc... Consider, though, that Nabokov said we read with our spines, awaiting the telltale tingle between the shoulder blades. Consider Marianne Moore's definition of poetry as … imaginary gardens with real toads.

My students are incredibly responsive to the question, it is almost possible to observe the connections, synapse to synapse, being retraced in their own minds, to see memory at work. Some remember red tugboats, others popguns, goblins and witches. The memory is translated into speech, often breathlessly.

I ask them then to tell me why every culture tells stories and why stories of monsters and gods and the foolish and the greedy are repeated in all cultures? We are all children of storytelling cultures, our lives are moored to stories, whether they be written or oral, epic or anecdotal, sung or sermonised. We are all, of course, 'read to' as children.

How long has it been since you read a book to a child? How long has it been since you were read to, how long since you re-read your favourite book from childhood, how long since you read as a child? Can you remember that tingle of childhood when the story scared or lulled you into dream, when the resonances could be seen in a cobweb of your home, in the alley behind your house, or behind the cupboard door, real beds with imaginary trolls beneath.

When, as a student, I was first asked to recall my earliest remembered image from a book, I remembered a golliwog with a lollipop. My lecturer at the time then asked me to consider why I might have retained that image for twenty-odd years. I thought about it over days, over weeks, over the seas and back again, and then, in one moment I slipped through the looking-glass into my own head. I remembered - though I cannot tell you the title of the book, whether it is famous or popular or obscure and out of print - I remembered that the golliwog was given the lollipop to exclude him from a game, to quieten him in a corner, whilst the real fun was had elsewhere. The lollipop was not a reward but a punishment for difference, a pay-off. And though I could not see him in my mind's eye, I knew that my migrant father had read that book to me and I knew, I remembered, finding comfort in the sorrow of that story and in the voice of the reader."

Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you.
Winnie the Pooh

Christopher Cyrill is a novelist and fiction editor
of Heat magazine.