22 Thursday Nov 2018
I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time now – and I mean quite some time. Last Spring, as I adapted Puck of Pook’s Hill for the stage and chose Rackham illustrations to make into scenery, and later, as I rehearsed the thing with my cherry-picked cast, and then as our Monday drew close – and later again, when all was done and gone well… Only, there was always something else to post about, or perhaps it was too soon, or… you know how it goes.
But at last, here we go. Continue reading
03 Thursday Dec 2015
Posted in Books
Tags
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, François Villon, Francie Nolan, If I Were King, Justin Huntly McCarthy, Project Gutenberg, Reading
For a long time, thanks to a middle-grade anthology, all I knew of Francie Nolan was that she borrowed a book every day – two on Saturdays. And that every Saturday the second book was If I Were King.
The story of François Villon was more wonderful each time she read it. Sometimes she worried for fear the book would be lost in the library and she’d never be able to read it again…
Francie even begins to copy it on a notebook – and then gives up, because it’s not like the book. Being blessed with a house full of books, I seldom used borrowed from the library as a child – but I could understand both the urge to read a beloved book again and again, and the pang at the idea of not being able to read it anymore. Continue reading
05 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted in Books
Do you remember a time before the Internet, when looking for a book could entail a good deal of leg-work, physically visiting bookshops, bookstalls and suchlike places?
I am old enough to have spent my adolescence doing just that: always wanting something that was, hard to find at best, but more often not available or no longer in print – and forever scouring bookshops and bookstalls… Continue reading
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