When I was a child my father read the Lord of the Rings every Christmas. Each year he found something new. My own ambitions are shorter, perhaps indicative of the rushed pace of our modern world. The last few years I've read and re-read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence. Each of the five novellas are part of the same imaginary world, and each has at least one character from the other. The setting is an idealized England sometime in the early 1960s. THe books fall in that category of what used to be called Junior Fiction; the step between children's picture books and adult fiction. The joy of them to me is the immidate transportation into the world of the children who are the protaganists, I am with them as they adventure and discover with the collusion of a few of the in the know adults.
What do you read at Christmas?
Thank you. I shall order the series, and read them - perhaps over that odious, cultural space called "Christmas."
ReplyDeleteThese volu8mes may well be a good alternative to Tolkien.
Himself