Looking at the list of items to come though, I can see there are a couple of questions that look to the future or the what-if. The future and the what-if are places the mind can really run riot and create whole libraries of loved stories without the effort or cost of writing or buying them. I look forward to those challenges when they come round.

But rather than go on with the past right now, I thought I’d change today’s questions a little and look at some ‘might have beens …’ – some of the books that might have been childhood favourites if I’d read them as a child or at all.

I start with the Narnia books. I read the first one as a young adult and quite liked it, but having seen two great films made out of them, I think I should have persisted and really got into the Narnia world.

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, would definitely be among my childhood favourites if it had been published when I was a child and if I’d read it. I could say the same of Harry Potter.

E. E. Nesbit is an author quite a number of my friends praise and say they loved. Far too late for any of any of her books to become childhood faves of mine and I doubt if I’ll ever read them. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome is another series I missed out on.

None of these are individual books and most are in series. Is this because people remember them better having read several? or is it because something only becomes a favourite if one can immerse oneself in its world at intervals?

Picture from Harper Collins.

The stand-out contender for an emotionally draining book is, for me, beyond doubt Dracula by Bram Stoker.

I read this when I was a teenager, and it is still the scariest novel I’ve ever read. So terrifying did I find it that I could only read a few pages at a time. Then I had to put the book somewhere I couldn’t see it (not in my bedroom!) and leave it for a few days while I recovered from the frights.

As I progressed I got so that I could read a whole chapter at a time, but I still took weeks to finish it.

This experience has become my standard of scariness, and all other horror books have fallen far short of it, producing more disappointment than fear. In fact the overwhelming emotion of disappointment has caused me to set several aside – permanently rather than for a few days.

I have never re-read Dracula. If I did would it too produce  disappointment? Maybe one day I’ll find out.

Cover art from Page Pulp, which has an article on the Many Covers of Dracula.

A quick google brought up several websites devoted to the day. Interestingly, many of them were for celebrations in places other than Rotuma – Australia and New Zealand in particular.

Like all peoples, Rotumans have their poets.  To me Fiji is an exotic place and I wasn’t disappointed in some of the exotic imagery its poets use. I love this one from The Dew Eaters by Mere Taito:

… he catches shingles of moisture from

The ringlets of dawn …

and I really got caught up in this one from At the Othman Affan Ibn Street Lights by Maniue Vilsoni:

I thought of Rotuma’s sandy roads

where kids could eye-dee the bi-ki

by the sound of his engine’s vroom-broom;

Nostalgia is a subject that appears in a number of poems. I found the straightforward descriptions of what has gone and how the poet feels about it very close to my own feelings, but with the added savour of the, to me, unusual. The long poem, ‘Ahau Nostalgia by Harieta and Sylvia Vilsoni, gives a vivid example. It’s well worth reading in full for the description of Rotuma through the eyes of memory.

That lone hifau tree on the cliff edge

shaded the chapel on many hot Sundays;

to fight boredom we’d look to the east

ahhh, panoramic Mt. Sarafui on Uea

awesome sight in the shimmering light.

Nostalgia is one of those emotions that can be both pleasant and unhappy – a secret store of joyful memories to lighten dark moments or a heap of regrets. I wish all Rotumans a happy national day with good memories to buoy them up.

The proper title of today’s challenge is A Book that made me Fall in Love with Reading, but I find this unanswerable – I can’t remember such a book – so I’m doing A Book that made me Grateful I can Read.

There are, of course, many books that have had that effect. One of the most recent was John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. It is such a powerful story with strong, memorable characters and an interesting historical background.

Another recent one was Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which I love for its beautiful prose and original idea.

On the non-fiction front (I read a lot of non-fiction) the one I’m reading now, William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, looks like it’s destined to be a favourite. It contains interviews with nine people who have taken a spiritual path. Their stories are fascinating and very varied: monks, nuns, devadasi, dancers possessed by gods and  others seek the spiritual in strikingly different ways.

I am constantly grateful I can read. Through reading I can visit worlds I would never travel to – the far past, the far away, the imaginary, even the possible future; I can hear the voices of people I could never hear – the long dead, the unborn, animals, or the mythological.

Film, radio and TV bear the same gifts, but they require equipment or special places and do so at their producers’ rate. Reading I do at my pace, in my time and with as many back-tracks as I like.

Cover art Goodreads, Waterstones, Goodreads.

This is a double challenge for me as I know nothing about tarot. I googled it and the Wikipedia article was most interesting.

I also went through the haiku listed on the website and found an amazing array of interpretations of the word, many of them illustrated. I strongly recommend them.

Since I’m not one to keep quiet just because I don’t know anything about the subject, I’ve done a contribution to today’s poems:

An old tarot card:

the Emperor. Chance deals it

from a tattered pack.

I’d never heard of this position before so googled it and as usual the trusty Wikipedia had an article. The makar is an ‘official’ poet, though some people seem to acquire the position just by being famous and brilliant.

According to Wikipedia:

Qualities in verse especially prized by many of these writers included the combination of skilful artifice with natural diction, concision and “quickness” of expression.

The article then goes on to say that the Scots called this ability glegness (apparently more often used as an adjective – gleg). I’d never met this word before: it’s means brisk, adroit, skilful or clever.

Poetry has to be both brisk and skilful, or it’s boring, and it’s great to have a word that combines these ideas together into one concept.

Being able to name something makes it possible to think of it clearly – to study it, test its truthfulness, look for its opposite and create similes, among other mental manipulations.

I would love to see this word used in job ads: ‘… applicants must be well educated, enthusiastic and gleg’. Would it put applicants off? or encourage them to use a dictionary to expand their knowledge?

The first stories I read for myself and remember with any clarity are the Milly Molly Mandy Stories. These are short tales by Joyce Lankester Brisley about a little girl who lives in an English village. They were published, and are set, in the 1920′s, but at the time I read them that meant nothing to me. Anything longer ago than a few months was in a sort of  pre-history limbo where parents and grandparents were young and might have shaken hands with Good Queen Bess.

But this 30-day challenge is for a novel and I have no idea which one I read first. It was most likely something like Alice in Wonderland. I can clearly recall reading Alice through the Looking Glass and I’d already read Wonderland by then. We had ancient, illustrated editions of both around our house – not bought for us children but inherited from some other household.

These are all children’s books, as would be true of almost anyone’s first reading experiences. As I wrote this sentence something occurred to me that I’ve not realised before.

Books intended for children are usually referred to as ‘children’s books’ or ‘children’s stories’. Why not ‘children’s novels’ or ‘children’s short story collections’? Just because they are aimed at a young readership doesn’t make them a radically different kind of thing to adult novels. I think this is some kind of ageism.

Whatever. I enjoyed all these books, but have never re-read them so my memories of them are a bit hazy.

Cover art cqout.

In the modern world it’s moved around to fall on the first Monday of the month and be added to a weekend. Only Christmas and New Year get to keep a mid-week position if they happen to fall that way.

In Britain there are a lot of traditions associated with today.

I can remember as a child at primary school being taught to dance around a maypole. In this dance each child holds one end of a ribbon the other end of which is tied to the top of the pole. As you dance you weave in and out of the other dancers and this causes the ribbons to plait into a complex figure a bit like a plaited tent – if you’ve done the dance properly. If you haven’t the whole thing ends up with some very interesting knots.

One of the things I inherited from my father, is an ability to undo almost any knot. He didn’t teach me this; I did it naturally from an early age. I find it interesting that every cell in my body contains DNA that codes for knot-untangling. So at school I was the one assigned to deal with the maypole-dance disasters. I liked doing it (exercising any skill is enjoyable) and it gave me a chance to slightly impress my fellow students.

May Day is an old festival and a joyful one, so not surprisingly there’s a good deal of poetry and song about it. In some the day is only mentioned obliquely, as in this one by Keats:

The book is Josephine Tey‘s Daughter of Time. It was first published in 1951, but in my opinion has aged well and is still relevant and fun.

A detective, Alan Grant, is convalescing in hospital and is bored. A friend suggests that he puts his skills to work on a historical crime. Grant selects Richard III and the question of whether or not he murdered the princes in the Tower.

With friends doing any actual legwork, Grant reassesses the evidence and comes to the conclusion that Richard has suffered from a bad press and was probably not as evil as history (and Shakespeare) has painted him.

I think that today there’s enough doubt about Richard’s wickedness for most people to regard him as possibly maligned. But this is a recent happening and he has been held up as an example of evil for centuries.

As a revelation of the effect of ‘PR’ this book is shocking. Those who get to write history (not Richard who died before he could write his version) get the last word and can condemn someone to be blamed for something horrible that they never did. I doubt if Richard III’s reputation is the only one that has come down to us distorted, and it certainly won’t be the last.

As a work of scholarship the book is light and easy to read but appears to be historically accurate. As a detective story it works well with several suspects and an satisfying ending. Would that all history books were so easy to read.

I think I can safely say this is one of my all-time favourites and I may well read it again sometime.

Cover art from Goodreads.

It’s Arthur Marshall‘s autobiography, up to the point where he started appearing on Call My Bluff. If you’ve never seen this, you’ve missed a treat. It’s a TV quiz about words and their meanings and is peopled by entertaining broadcasters and their guests.

It’s a book of smiles. Despite the quotes from the famous on the cover claiming it to be hilarious there were only a few places where I laughed out loud. But there was a smile, not to say a grin, in almost every paragraph.

The world the author grew up in, starting before WW1, is long gone, but appreciation of the humour in life transcends time.  Mr Marshall certainly saw humour wherever he went. A tendency to laugh at the slightest excuse got him into trouble several times.

He introduces an array of characters, famous and unknown, and we learn nice things about all of them – if the author knew any horrid people he didn’t write about them.

His life was varied and eventful, including several jobs, service in WW2, a devotion to the theatre both professional and amateur and a lot of broadcasting.

I recommend this book to anyone who likes to smile broadly, laugh loudly and see the nice side of their fellow people.

Picture from ebay.