sallymurphy.com.au

Sally Murphy, Australian author

SCBWI, Matt Ottley and Harry

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I spent three days in Perth over the weekend, partly doing family stuff, but I also attended a meeting of the Western Australian branch of SCBWI (The Society of Children’s Book Writer and Illustrators). It’s always wonderful to connect with other authors and illustrators – both the well established and the aspiring. We were lucky enough to have Matt Ottley speak to us about his latest book, Requiem for a Beast, which is an incredible offering – part graphic novel, part multimedia performance, it really defies categorisation. If you get a chance, check it out, but don’t be fooled by its picture book size – this one is really for young adults and would be a wonderful classroom tool.

Among other things, the meeting discussed the upcoming SCBWI state conference, planned for February 17 2008, which will be a wonderful opportunity for West Aussie authors and illustrators to meet with publishers and with each other to learn and to network and for fellowship. I can’t wait!

After the meeting, I took the new Harry Potter back to my children. Murphlet three grabbed it and read it in one gulp. I took a little longer, but had finished it my midnight Saturday. Am still digesting it, really, but I think I liked it.

As always, it was nice to come home and back to my desk and my home comforts. Lots of writing and reviewing to do this week.

100 Books

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I came across a blog I’d never visited before, and on it a meme regarding the 100 greatest books of all time as voted by the general public (I didn’t dig far enough to find out who this general public were – ie where the original survey as and what form it took, which would influence who voted). The idea is to read the list and identify which you’ve read and/or own. I consider myself widely read so was surprised by the number I hadn’t even heard of, but then when I added up I’d read 48 of the 100 which is nearly 50 percent, so figured that wasn’t a bad number. Instead of just identifying those I’d read, I also added a category for those I’d read more than once, though this list is a little skewed by my years of studying literature at school and university and my subsequent years a high school English teacher.

Anyway, here’s my list and you can see the blog entry which inspired me at Bubandpie’s blog, here.

Books I’ve Read More Than Once
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
34. 1984 (Orwell)37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)

Books I’ve Read Once
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
45. The Bible 46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Books I’ve Never Read But Might One Day
1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)4
7. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)

Books I’ve Heard of But Don’t Plan on Reading
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)

Books I’ve Never Heard Of
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
17. Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
42. Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
76. Tigana (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)

One of the things you’re supposed to do with memes is tag someone else to complete the meme in their blog, but I don’t like to dob people in. If you are interested, have a go and leave a comment here to let me know to check it out.

Lots More Pemberthy Sightings

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I’ve been surfing the net and have spotted lots of copies of Pemberthy in libraries. How wonderful!


The Bayside Library Service in Melbourne has not one but THREE copies – two in the Beaumaris Library and one in Brighton. And, joy of joys, my search of their catalogue showed they are all on loan.


The Brisbane City Library Service has FIFTEEN copies of Pemberthy. The Ashgrove Library, Bulimba Library, Coopers Plains Library, Everton Park Library, Grange Library, Indooroopilly Library, Sunnybank Hills Library and the Sandgate Library have one copy each, whilst the Carindale Library, Fairfield Library, Grange Library and Inala Library have two copies each. Nine of the copies are out on loan.

I’ve added the new dots around Melbourne and Brisbane. They’re both looking pretty colorful and very dotty now.

In Western Australia, I found Pemberthy in seven libraries. In Perth it’s in the Battye library, the Bayswater Library and the Dianella Library. In country Western Australia it’s in the Busselton, Katanning, Mount Barker and Kojonup libraries.

It’s wonderful to see so many spots in my home state. Come to think of it, Pemberthy is also in the school library in my town, so I’ve added a dot for that, too. It’s pretty cool to see my students borrowing my books from the library.

I’ll be checking out more libraries to see where else Pemberthy can be seen, but in the meantime if YOU have seen Pemberthy, drop me a line or leave a comment and I’ll add a dot. If you’ve just tuned in and am wondering what I’m on about you can read about my quest to record Pemberthy sightings here.

3 Days to Harry Potter

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Only three days till the final instalment of Harry Potter goes on sale. The older Murphlets are pretty excited and are trying to convince me that we need two copies so that we can all read it before the ending is revealed online or in the media.

Yes, I’ll admit I’m a big fan of the series. I do think I’ll be able to survive post-Harry, but I have enjoyed the series. Back when the first title came out, I remember no hype at all. The first I knew of it was when Murphlet 1 came home with a copy borrowed from his friend Nathan, who had just returned from a holiday in England. I remember Murphlet 1 loving it, but didn’t pay much attention to the book myself.

I only started reading the series after the third title came out. I bought the first three for the Murphlets and then proceeded to read them – three in three days, after which time I emerged from a fog and was glad to see the world had carried on without me and my kids were all safe.

Since then I’ve awaited each new release almost as keenly as the older three Murphlets. It’s a funny thing, but Murphlet 4 shows little interest in the series. I suspect it’s because the movies drew him in before he was old enough to attempt the books, and now he feels like he knows what’s going to happen, thus why read the books. He’s not the biggest reader in the family, anyway, preferring short, funny books.

Back to Harry. No, it isn’t the most brilliant book (or series) I’ve ever read, but they are highly enjoyable and I’ll be buying at least one copy on Saturday morning and trying to get it read asap. I’ve been trying to predict just who it is that will die. I’m a bit torn between thinking JK won’t kill Harry off, because readers want to see good overcoming evil and Harry triumphing, and thinking that he’ll have to die in order to vanquish Voldermot – ie they both die, with Harry making the sacrifice for the good of all.

Murphlet 3 is predicting Ron and Lupin will be the two to die. I hope not – I like Ron. But he also thinks Voldermort will die – so that makes three characters. Hmmm.

Maybe Snape will die, after (or in the process of) proving that he isn’t really a baddie and has really been a good guy all along. I’ve always thought Snape will be proven to be good, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, it isn’t long to wait and see. In the meantime I’ve writing to do and marking to do and reviews to complete. Busy busy busy.

Aussiereviews Updated

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I’ve just updated Aussiereviews with thirteen new reviews, all children’s and young adult books. Probably my favourite in this batch was Dragon Moon, by Carole Wilkinson (Black Dog), the final title in the Dragonkeeper trilogy. I was at the launch of the first title at the CBCA conference in Hobart in 2004, and remember Gary Crew singing its praises. He said something along the lines that the book would be the making of Carole and of Black Dog (I hope I haven’t misremembered this). I agree with him. This whole trilogy has been just beautiful, and, though Black Dog do produce oodles of good books, these are the nest.

Murphlet three enjoyed the two Jackie French books – Rotters and Squatters and Gold, Graves and Glory – which he read while he was sick and subsequently reviewed for the site. He gets a buzz out of reviewing for me, and his mother gets a buzz out of having a son who shows writing talent and an interest in what I do.

My ftp has been slow uploading the new pages today so while I was waiting I went back and looked at some my older reviews – the very first ones I wrote for the site, actually­ ­­­­– and fixed some typos and broken links. It was pleasing for me to see that my reviewing skills have grown since I started the site. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since I’ve written over a thousand reviews over the years. When I started the site I had no idea just what it would evolve into, but I’m pretty proud of it.

I think if you can look at what you’re doing and feel proud of it, you’re doing okay.

A Good Day

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Some days are so good you wish you could bottle them. Today’s been one of those days. I started with a buzz when I read my weekly Pass It On newsletter.

First, there were two little articles in there that I’d written. Of course I knew these would be there, but it’s still nice to see stuff you’ve contributed appearing in your favourite newsletter.

Then, in the reviews section was a glowing review of Pemberthy Bear, by the newsletter compiler Jackie Hosking, who said, in part:
Sally Murphy has written a lovely tale in rhyme that is complimented by Jacqui Grantford’s exquisite illustrations. New Frontier certainly have a knack of matching writers with illustrators to produce gorgeous picture books.
Wow! That had me singing.

Then there was a message in the newsletter from Moira, responding to my search for Pemberthy. She has seen Pemberthy no less than three times – in her home, in the Chatswood library (where, she reports, it was looking well-loved), and at a bookstore called Book Review, in St Ives! Moira, it turns out was also the proofreader for Pemberthy Bear, and loves Pemberthy so much that she recently brought a Pemberthy look-alike bear which sits on the shelf with her copy of the book. How cool is that?

So, with Moira’s three new dots added, the map now looks this:

The new dots are the pink, lime green and purple ones on the east coast, part of the cluster around Sydney.

With that kind of start to the day, I found myself singing and humming and working hard. I’m always more productive when I feel good. Today I finished a batch of marking, wrote two new reviews and a new article (about getting going after a slump), prepared and posted a new submission and did a few other odds and ends. I also managed some housework and spent time with my kids, who are still on their mid year holiday.

I also did some random browsing of some other writers’ blogs. I love seeing the variety of styles and formats and even subject matter.

All in all it’s been a good day.