Musings on 2014... Carnegie time of year...

The New Year is bringing an urge to pontificate very slightly on the good and bad of last year.

The annual announcement of the Carnegie Medal shortlist is always the starting gun as I do a Shadowing Group with some old friends.  Oddly enough you could say it’s one thing that I still do annually from my CILIP Trustee days. And that amuses me greatly. Not that it was directly anything to do with Trustee duties at all evens then, but one of my fellow Trustees of the time came up with the notion it would be fun to have a Trustee shadowing group. Folk have come and gone, but the two of us are still going, and that's nice...

Some years have passed since we began. It’s now an ex-Trustees Shadowing Group, and we’re not that good at it to be fair (though we always mean to be better next year), it’s a bit of scramble. But I have completed the shortlist reading in time every year, including this year, and that’s an achievement in itself.

This year’s was won by Kevin Brooks for The Bunker Diary. I retain a memory of finishing that in a bus shelter in the pouring rain as I’d just got to the last few pages when I reached my bus stop and didn't want to have to stop.

I've been saying for years that the shortlist can be a bit harrowing to read through in concentrated form in terms of themes. I do very definitely now figure out what are likely to be lighter reads and ones that sit more firmly within my own preferred normal reading categories, and make sure they’re interspersed between the bleaker subjects.

But it’s also one reason I really like the Carnegie, it will take me outside of my own preferred choices and reading habits, it does broaden your reading.  I used to think that one year I really must read the Booker shortlist – and I've never done that, but I don’t regret it or feel the urge anymore, because I know I do the Carnegie. I rather like the fact that I can open the Edinburgh Book Festival programme at the Children’s section and see so many authors whose work I know now.

There was a virtual screencast of the Carnegie Ceremony this year, so I got to watch the ceremony from my desk in work during my lunch break, and that was also a really positive thing.  I enjoyed the discussion, and Kevin Brooks discussion of the unpleasant things in life, children, and getting such things published as childrens' literature.

Carnegie Shadowing is a good thing. I've never understood leaving 'childrens' things to children as thought adults can't enjoy just as much. It's good for anyone as a broadening and fresh air of usual reading habits.