Feel like reading Neil Gaiman’s wonderful, Newbery Award winning The graveyard book but too lazy to do so for yourself and feel that listening to an audio book doesn’t quite cut the mustard? Perhaps you would rather watch a video of Neil himself reading the books. Well, now you can. Head over to mousecircus, his site for young readers and you’ll find videos of Neil reading The graveyard book, chapter by chapter.

While there, you can watch the Coraline movie trailer, download wallpapers, screensavers and printable posters. Watch more videos. Read about his books old and new, and more. Well worth a look for fans of the great man.

Wherever you happen to be reading it now, Jonathan published this post at: BookBoy.net

I have a guest post up at Blurb it, a blog run by the Gold Coast City Library. It lists some of my favourite books of recent times and will be followed soon by a post of books I am looking forward to reading this year.

For book lovers in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, Vetti has been posting about some of her local second hand bookstores here, and here.

On the writing front, I recently read an article by Cory Doctorow with a few writing tips including a target of 250 words per day, every day. His logic being that this can be done in 20 minutes and could get you a novel in less than a year. My previous target of 4-5000 words per week was not happening. Even 2000 per week was hard as I would end up trying to do it all on Sunday night. But 250 words, he’s right, I can do that in 20 minutes. Even less. I can do it on the short train ride between Ashburton and Camberwell. I also leave what he calls a “rough edge”, in the form of a short comment describing what is going to happen next. So when I start the next day, I don’t have to think about what’s going to happen in the story. So far, so good. We’ll see how long I last.

For what it’s worth, my would-be novel has just passed the 25,000 word mark. Still nowhere near the 50,000 I had aimed to write by the end of last November, but it still feels like quite an achievement.

Wherever you happen to be reading it now, Jonathan published this post at: BookBoy.net

Cake Wrecks blog has posted pictures of some beautiful book related cakes. Very hungry caterpillar, Where the wild things are, Dr Seuss, and others are all deliciously presented.

[via abby the librarian]

Wherever you happen to be reading it now, Jonathan published this post at: BookBoy.net

Wondering what to buy for the reader who has everything?

Get them from Peter Alexander.

[seen at booktagger, via @twitofalili]

Wherever you happen to be reading it now, Jonathan published this post at: BookBoy.net