AS IN THE LONG AGO

Yes, I am getting close to the end. This month I read   Maggot Moon   by Sally Gardner, the 2013 Carnegie Winner, and   The Bunker Diary   by Kevin Brooks from 2014. Neither book did much to cheer me up, even though both are about the human spirit in the face of adversity. Both books (spoiler alert) end in death, and in the case of   The Bunker Diary   (even more spoiler alert)   everyone   dies. I found things to admire in both books. In  Maggot Moon  Standish Treadwell is a wonderful creation and his relationship with his friend Hector is touching and beautifully drawn. But the future dystopian world where Standish lives—or is it a 1950s world where the Nazis won the war?—that world seems to me very like the unconvincing stage-set the authorities of Motherland have built to fake a moon landing. There's not much to it—a street, a school, a housing estate and a weird building. It's like a TV series that's been shot on a very tight budget...

I've always been happy to abandon a book after 50 pages (or less) if I'm not enjoying it.  Occasionally the first page is enough. Then, in March 2020, just before the first lockdown, I decided to read all the Carnegie winners in order, and write about the experience here. I don't think I realised how long it was going to take (maths was never my strongest subject) and here I am, starting on my fifth year of reading.  There have been 84 winners of the Carnegie Medal so far and it was too much to hope that I would like all of them. When I haven't enjoyed a book I've found myself quite reluctant to write about it, but I'm interested in describing the  experience  of reading all these books as well as in saying a bit about the books themselves, and that means that occasionally I need to find ways of saying what I didn't like, or felt didn't work. And that, of course, is as much about me as about the book.   Patrick Ness won the Carnegie twice in 2011 and 201...