cread | read & see

Just in time for late night shopping, Cread is entering the books for Father's Day fray with its very own list of top gift ideas. Tall tales at number 8: every dad secretly wants to be a bushranger, at least for a few minutes while queueing for the bus in the morning. So what better book to read than Wild Colonial Boys by Geoff Hocking from The Five Mile Press.  Promising a bold and exciting look at Australian bushrangers, dads will not only release their inner bushranger but learn a bit of Australian history, all for under $30. Buy here. Number 7 with a touch of heaven: It might seem a bit grim for Father's Day but actually Jim Stynes' My Journey is a celebration of making the most of every moment of life. Including Jim's touching revelations of how much he loved the simple moments playing with his kids, it will do every dad's heart good - and remind them how lucky they are. There's a fair bit of footy going on as well, so that's a bonus. My Journ

With nearly half the Australian population struggling with basic literacy for every day life, 2012 has been declared a National Year of Reading by Australia's libraries and library associations. They are promoting all things books and reading-related in 2012 with programs and events taking place across the country and online with the aim of helping people discover or rediscover the joy of reading. In the spirit of National Year of Reading 2012, here's a look at some of the activities going on in the near future. Reading and counting It is Literacy and Numeracy week, and nationwide events include: Read for Australia – which occurred today at 2pm - a synchronised national reading of Aaron Blabey's Pearl Barley and Charlie Parsley; The Dorothea McKellar Poetry Awards, the winners of which will be announced at Gunnedah in NSW on August 31. Feast of festivals Turning the page, other events in the NYOR12 include the Melbourne Writers Festival which continues this week. Mo

Impoverished pop-fiction with "flat characters" such as in Fifty Shade of Grey was cheating young women of a dignified view of themselves, according to the author of a new book, Unseduced and Unshaken: The Place of Dignity in a Young Woman's Choices . Dr Rosalie de Rosset says the success of books like Fifty Shades and the Twilight series represents a frustrating trend among today’s women, but she is no less complimentary of Christian writing. Of the vast array of Christian books targetting women, Dr de Rosset says much of it consists of "Jesus fixes everything” scenarios that do not reflect anything like the complexity and depth of real life. “They are not well written and they are not theological.” she says.  Dr de Rosset is a Professor of Literature, English and Homiletics with a 42-year connection with Moody Bible Institute and a PhD in Language, Literacy, and Rhetoric from The University of Illinois,  Chicago. In an interview published on the Chr

We're back with week two of Creview, reviewing the weekend reviews of another three newspapers. This week in honour of Melbourne Writers Festival we feature The Age , along with the UK's The Independent , and the Los Angeles Times .(And list the LA Time's bestsellers.) Nine Days by Toni Jordan was reviewed by Thuy On of The Age , who considered the use of nine characters' perspectives spanning a four generation time frame, a tad ambitious: “The novel feels like a series of postcards that offer colourful but tantalisingly brief episodes in the lives of nine individuals.” Kate Holden, also of The Age , reviewed Our Kind of People: Thoughts on the HIV/AIDS Epidemic by Uzodinma Iweala. Holden calls it a  “passionately argued lecture on survival, stigma, African (read: human) dignity and misconceived Western attitudes.” She comments on how it challenged her with its cranky tone while praising its beautifully drawn portraits of people of the people of whom Iweala write

The Melbourne Writers Festival is nearly through its first weekend and already the inspiration, ideas and social media praise are flowing freely. Cread, sadly not at the Festival in the flesh, is like many others following by social media. Here's a Storify wrap-up of what's happened in the first few days... Presumably the tweets and posts will be highly literary. [ View the story "Melbourne Writers Festival" on Storify ] Melbourne Writers Festival Check out the social media buzz so far from MWF - featuring a selection of the world's best novelists, playwrights, poets, screenwriters, journalists, songwriters, bloggers – anyone who's part of the world of words. The 27th Melbourne Writers Festival runs from August 23 to September 2. Storified by Cread · Sun, Aug 26 2012 02:57:03 Cheers #mwf opening night. http://instagr.am/p/Ov1p3YOd_W/Bronwen Clune At Melbourne writers festival to see Rober Forster @ Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) http:

"As long as there are history books, Neil Armstrong will be included in them, remembered for taking humankind's first small step on a world beyond our own." NASA chief Charles Bolden on the death of Neil Armstrong. Neil Armstrong has taken another giant leap into a world beyond this, but we'll have to wait for our turn to see what he discovers. Not so with his other small step/giant leap - his Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969 - which was broadcast live around the world and has been chronicle in hundreds of books ever since. Like many Australian families, my parents owned an Apollo 11 photo book which I recall reading again and again in the early 70s. It was a large format photo book, with brief accounts of each phase of the Apollo mission including the moon landing. My next mission will be to see if we still own the book! In the meantime, the somewhat reclusive Armstrong authorised only one biography, First Man: The Life of Neil A Armstrong , written by

I began reading Thomas Keneally's The Daughters of Mars while travelling in Europe, a deliberate plan to bring alive both the landscape and text. In a very Australian way, this is one of the attractions of the many world war books that we consume - they reflect back to us the experiences our parents and grandparents and our own pilgrimages to those distant shores. Just as sisters Sally and Naomi Durance walk the narrow streets of Rouen, wondering at the cathedral and the place where Joan was martyred, or travel to Paris through Gare du Nord, or feel afraid in Amiens, so too countless Australians will be instantly drawn back to their own moments in these locations. And all the more along the shores of Gallipoli where the sisters from the Macleay Valley, NSW, begin their WWI nursing services on the hospital ship Archimedes. It's not just a tourist's "I've been there", it's more the feeling that we share a common legacy and longing in these far-from-ho