What other author are you reading at the moment?

[Courtenay]

I hope you enjoy Greenwild, Courtenay. It sweeps the reader into a magical world and is beautifully illustrated by Elisa Paganelli, though I did notice that one or two things the artist had drawn (fairly complex things, admittedly!) didn't quite tally with the text.

That sometimes happens with illustrators, unfortunately, if they miss little details in the text. Getting back to Narnia, which I mentioned in another thread, one of Pauline Baynes' illustrations for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader shows Caspian's cabin on board the ship, and there's a globe of the world on the desk there. Yet later in the book, we discover that Narnia's world is flat, and Caspian is amazed to hear that his companions from Earth come from a round world and he says he wishes he could visit one of those!

I also remember when I was in primary school, we had a talk from a local lady who'd had a children's mystery / adventure book published, and she told us a bit about the process it went through. One thing she remarked on was that the youngest of the children in the story — a boy who is the central character — wears glasses, and this is mentioned several times throughout the story (including on the first page, as I recall!), and his glasses play a significant role at one point in the plot. But the artist who was commissioned to do the illustrations didn't give this kid glasses in any of the pictures of him! I think the author didn't get a chance to comment on the illustrations before publication went ahead, or otherwise she would have had that changed.

At least none of that is nearly as bad as at least a couple of the Famous Five covers by Laura Ellen Anderson (for the 2017 editions), including Five Go Adventuring Again depicting the Five in a sunny bluebell wood when that's the story where it's winter and they get snowed in at Kirrin Cottage — or Five Go Down to the Sea, showing them building sandcastles on the beach when the story has them chasing drug smugglers using the secret "Wreckers' Way"!! I can only conclude that illustrator didn't actually read the books she was illustrating at all...

[Anita Bensoussane]

Totally agree about Laura Ellen Anderson's covers for Five Go Adventuring Again and Five Go Down to the Sea.

Heh - The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is my favourite Narnia title but the globe anomaly has never occurred to me, even though I've read the book numerous times and I enjoy looking at Pauline Baynes' illustrations!

[Chrissie777]

I'm reading the 5th part of Carol Drinkwater's Olive Farm autobiographies on their lives in the South of France and it's as beautiful as the first ones.

[Chrissie777]

Yesterday the Stephen King biography by Bev Vincent arrived from amazon.de. I ordered it in German.
Well, I was hoping it's a 600+ pages and thorough biography on Stephen King's life, books and film adaptations, but it's actually a 240 pages coffee table book. It's not bad, just not what I hoped it would be.

[Lenoir]

I have been reading a few novels by other authors, as I usually do.
But I think I have enough of "grown ups" books for the time being.
So I am reading Bill Badger's Winter cruise (by BB or DJ Watkins-Pitchford). It's the quintessential winter read, transporting the reader out of the cold and icy conditions of the canal into the cosy cabin of the barge "Wandering Wind", warmed by the little stove. And it works even here in the southern hemisphere where the December evenings are long and golden rather than dark and freezing. I only have 2 or 3 of these books, as they are certainly not easy to come by.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Sounds wonderful, Lenoir. I read BB's The Little Grey Men and Down the Bright Stream as a child, and I loved being taken into a tranquil (though at times challenging) world.

[Chrissie777]

I tried to order "Brendan Chase" by BB, but it was too expensive.

[Chrissie777]

On Wednesday at our local library I discovered a new book on Anne Frank by Hannah Pick_Goslar called "My Friend Anne Frank". I devoured it. It's very well-written.

[Chrissie777]

I'm also rereading "Winter Solstice" by Rosamunde Pilcher which I never was able to read in December before (it takes place in December and in Scotland).

[Judith Crabb]

I've just finished one of Max Fatchen's books for children, 'The Spirit Wind', set at the time of the squareriggers in and about one of the South Australian gulfs, subject to fierce weather. Fatchen was a local journalist with a great love of SA's coastal waters and his descriptions are magnificent, but the main attractions of this frightening adventure story are the three children central to it - Jarl Hansen (a Jack Trent type, practical and courageous) who jumps ship in order to escape a sadistic mate and Jill and Kate, dauntless daughters of a local police officer - and Nunganee an aboriginal from the inland who had settled south to escape tribal retribution, as well as totally believable villains. Highly recommended. I must read Fatchen's River Murray adventures.

[Anita Bensoussane]

On Wednesday at our local library I discovered a new book on Anne Frank by Hannah Pick_Goslar called "My Friend Anne Frank". I devoured it. It's very well-written.

I read a review of that some months ago and it sounds like an interesting, though inevitably poignant, read.

Judith, The Spirit Wind sounds exciting. Reading your post reminded me of an Australian children's TV serial I used to watch in the 1970s - The Lost Islands:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqR08FFx22M

[Susie9598]

I want to read Winter Solstice, Chrissie. It’s driving me mad because I know we have a copy in the house but I can’t find it!

[Kate Mary]

I’m reading Shadow over the Alps by Mabel Esther Allan which was recently reprinted by Girls Gone By. It’s a super read. A group of teenagers are on a school trip to Switzerland and one of the company confides to her friends that she believes someone is trying to kill her. The climax comes when they are cut off in a mountain hotel with the railway out of action due to an avalanche. I’m finding it hard to put down. Mabel’s books are always good and this is a cracker. It is unusual in that it is told in the first person by a male character, perhaps Mabel was hoping this title would appeal as much to boys as to girls.

[RDMorrell]

I've never read anything by Mabel Esther Allan, but I have bought Shadow Over the Alps, because it's in my favourite mystery/adventure genre. So I'm looking forward to reading that at some stage.

Meanwhile, I'm currently reading A Sailor in Spite of Himself by Harry Castlemon, whose real name was Charles Austin Fosdick. He wrote a lot of small adventure series (comprising 2-3 books each) for boys in the second half of the 19th Century. This book is part of a three-volume series called "Afloat and Ashore". I actually read the second book in the series first, thinking it was the first one. That book is called A Rebellion in Dixie, and the action of it takes place before the events of A Sailor in Spite of Himself. So the series has a rather unusual chronology in that it starts after the Civil War, then goes back to when the war was being fought, and then jumps back forward in time again for the final voiume.

The premise of A Rebellion in Dixie was rather fascinating, in that it involved a group of people deep in the heart of Mississippi (and thus Confederate country) who decided that their county should secede from the Confederacy, just as the latter had seceded from the Union. They form their own army (wearing Union uniforms) and government, and everything. (Ultimately though, they want to rejoin the Union.) Since it's set in the war, there's a fair amount of fighting and bloodshed, but also some decent adventure elements (like kidnapping and daring escapes from tight spots). A Sailor in Spite of Himself is less bloody, but still has plenty of exciting action. One thing I have learned in this book is that unscrupulous ship captains sometimes supplemented their crew if they were short-changed by kidnapping people and forcing them to work on their ships (at least, until they could find cheaper labour offshore). So that is a fairly central plotline to this book.

These books being written in the mid-19th Century, they both have some language that we would consider racist nowadays, although the same words are found in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which was written at about the same time as these books by Castlemon. While I naturally flinch a bit reading these words, they're not being used in a malicious way in the books (although some of the attitudes towards black characters are not the best). In the mid-19th Century, these words were common slang, a bit like how we might call an Australian an "Aussie" today. Over time though, they have become offensive. But at the time these books were written, I don't think they were the bad words that they are now. I might add that when I read Huckleberry Finn as a child, the use of racist language in that book didn't give me any negative attitudes to people with other skin colours. Actually, the book includes quite a lovely interracial friendship between Huck and Jim that was probably quite daring for the culture of its day. But anyway, when you're reading adventure books from the 19th Century (or early 20th Century, for that matter), this sort of language is a bit of an occupational hazard. That aside though, they're quite rollicking reads.

[Chrissie777]

I'm almost through Linwood Barclay's new crime novel "The Lie Maker".
I can highly recommend it to everyone who is interested in WITSEC aka witness security program.