What's with today, today?

Childhood books part 3 When I was a kid, I tended to prefer happy endings, and as I said before I even liked books where nothing too bad happens to the main characters. In fact, I think I still do! But there are some exceptions to this rule. I think I have come to appreciate sad books, and there are a bunch of books I read as a child that helped me to do that. There are so many degrees of 'sad', so many different feeling books, but I think there is something of a theme: the books I found most sad and discomfitting as a child are about growing up and about death. Here are some that I loved even though they made me sad: The Little Prince -  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry When going through the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die with some friends, we came across this book. Neither of them had read it. That made me realise that this is a book that I think everyone should have read. How can you not have read The Little Prince? As Vizzini would say: inconceivable! It confused...

I honestly think that I read much more prolifically when I was a kid than I do now. At least, that's my excuse for having forgotten so many books. But not all forgotten books are forgotten in the same way. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: there are books I remember, books I remember I have forgotten and books I forget I have forgotten altogether. For example... Witch Week- Dianna Wynne Jones I knew part of the plot of this story, but I'd forgotten the book. It drove me crazy, the story as I remembered did not match with 'Witch Week' so I knew it couldn't be it. Until I read it one day.  Turns out it was... Indian Captive: The Mary Jemison Story- Lois Lensk i  I read this book back in year 5 or 6, but completely forgot its existence until the other day. Reading a website dedicated to finding forgotten books, I came across one that reminded me of the existence of this book, reading something like 'girl is kidnapped by Indians'. There are millions of books with...

A while ago I thought I would write a blog post about my favourite childhood books. But as I came to think about it, I remembered more and more, too many to fit into one blog post. So a whole series of blog posts seems more appropriate. Various happenings (mostly assignments) have conspired to keep me from writing any of them. But today, since fate seems to be conspiring to keep me from my uni work, it seems appropriate to talk about comfort books. When I was in Year 12 at school we had to study speeches, and one of the speeches happened to be by Margaret Attwood talking about writing  and feminism. In it she describes how her young daughter and friend put on a play, in which all they did was eat breakfast, which was pretty dull because narrative needs to be 'more than breakfast'. Well when I was younger I was quite happy to read about 'breakfast'. I remember once complaining to my mum about all the horrible things happening to characters in a book I was reading, to w...