John Agard

John Agard is a poet who always has a sense of fun tucked away somewhere in the background of his work, even when he's dealing with serious subjects, and he particularly enjoys bringing apparently incongruous ideas together. There's a lot of this in Travel light, travel dark - Handel's Water Music takes on the slave trade, a racist Saxon complains in a pub about Norse immigrants, Old Father Thames contemplates a sex-change, and so on. I particularly liked "Prospero Caliban Cricket", an show more hommage to C.L.R. James, in which he puts new life into the most overworked postcolonial literary allusion with a calypso-style cricket commentary:

Caliban arcing de ball
like an unpredictable whip
Prospero foot it like chain to de ground.
Before he could mek a move
de ball gone thru to de slip.

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My name is book and I'll tell you the story of my life.

This little guy is probably getting judged unfairly; judged based on the shelf I found him on in the library, which was in the adult non-fiction section.

Based on that shelf, this book was juvenile and cloyingly written.

But if this had been shelved appropriately, for young readers, I'd say it's a fun book with solid information about the history of books, starting from oral tradition. The eye-catching illustrations add visual interest show more and the interspersed quotes and poetry about books could send those kids in new reading directions.

So, if you know of a young bibliophile in the making and you see this book, it might be worth a look. show less

This really isn't so much an autobiography of the Book as a history from oral retelling through to the book. Perhaps it was the mood I was in when I read it, but it didn't satisfy me as a reader. I wanted to know more from Gutenberg on, not from the emergence of cave drawings. To me, this wasn't so much an autobiography of Book so much as it was an autobiography of Print. Seemed misnamed.

That said, the redeeming page is p. 128 -- but you have to read it for yourself. Believe it or not, I show more found a copy on Amazon SPECIFICALLY for p. 128. I may or may not keep the rest of the book (who am I kidding, I'm a librarian!), but p. 128 describes me as well as Malorie Blackman. Could it be that it's because we're only two years apart in age? show less

Comedy and charm abound in this quirky story about different personalities. Shona and her dad are just returning from a trip to the Natural History Museum when - oh no! - their train comes to a halt. What can Shona do to pass the time except study the passengers in her carriage? Fun, light-hearted comedy. Particularly suitable for struggling, reluctant and dyslexic readers aged 7+