Thursday was a day in which to recover from the London Book Fair; catch up with email and manuscripts; and, for Kate, to bake cakes for a children’s TV expert, Alison Warner of Cookie Jar, to whom cakes – and really good cakes at that – had been promised.
Kate then procrastinated like crazy to avoid thinking about the no-safety-net trapeze act that is CANONtales: a pecha kucha -style session with twelve speakers, each with 20 slides and each slide up for 21 seconds. It was a great evening. Kate was amazed by the courage and youth of the people there who were all experimenting in bold and clever ways with bringing reading and creativity and readers together, whether they were the brilliantly funny Ramy Habeeb of Kotobarabia from Cairo, or the attempts to make words into pictures described by Stephanie Posavec (pictured, doing her CANONtales thing). It was an evening to make you think that the book, and reading, had a future in the hands of a passionate, capable and committed generation.
