Children’s books week
And, while I’m on a roll: Happy Children’s Books Week! I read so many books as a kid that it’s sometimes hard to remember which ones I liked best. But my favorite author was Joan Aiken, who wrote a whole series of novels set in a kind of alternate-history England in the 18th century. Years later, I realized that her fictional England was the result of the premise "What if the Stuarts had stayed in power instead of being ousted in 1688?" (There’s a Pretender to the Throne in these books, and he’s not a Stuart but a Hanoverian, i.e. a member of the royal family from which George I et al. came. A character in Black Hearts in Battersea, one of the early novels in the series, lurches drunkenly into a room singing "My bonny lies over the North Sea, / My bonny lies over in Hanover, / My bonny lies over the North Sea, / Oh why won’t they bring that young man over?")
Even though the history went over my head at the time, I loved those books intensely. The heroine of the series is a girl named Dido, who first appears in Black Hearts in Battersea as a bad-tempered guttersnipe, befriends the hero, Simon (who turns out to be the lost heir to a Duke), and is lost at sea at the end of the novel. But she turns up again in Night Birds on Nantucket, a spoof on Moby-Dick that involves a demented Quaker whaling captain chasing a great pink whale. She gets taken to South America, meets the reincarnation of King Arthur, and thwarts a seriously creepy set of villians in The Stolen Lake, and returns to England just in time to foil a plot against the new Stuart king in The Cuckoo Tree. I’ve still got most of those books; they’re among the very few from my childhood that I wouldn’t let my mother give away to younger relatives.
Other childhood favorites: Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, especially the title book; The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; Helen Cresswell’s Bagthorpe family saga; and my much-beloved Faber Book of Children’s Verse. I was also an Edward Gorey fan at a tender age, thanks to the animated title sequences for Mystery! on PBS, but I didn’t discover his books until a bit later.
What were your favorite childhood books?
Like you, I adored the Dido Twite books, though I have a hard time calling the series that, because I found my way into it through The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, in which she’s not featured. And I really wanted to find out what happened to Simon and Sophie!
And I loved the Arabel and Mortimer books, as well.
And The Dark Is Rising series: love, love, love!
Did you ever run into Pat Shea’s The Hounds of the Morrigan? It was another one of my favorites.
Mary Stewart’s Merlin series (Crystal Cave, Hollow Hills, Last Enchantment), her This Rough Magic, and T.H. White’s Once & Future King. Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy. Tolkien, of course, too.
Oh, yes, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase! That was the first one I read, too.
I missed The Once and Future King, somehow, though I did like Mistress Masham’s Repose. And there’s a ton of LeGuin I haven’t read yet. Fortunately, there’s always time to rectify that.