30 Day Book Challenge – day 13: A favourite childhood book (maybe)
Doing this challenge, I’ve written about several childhood books already. So many of the questions are about things from the past. Unavoidable I suppose, how can something be my ‘fave’ or ‘most hated’ or ‘too emotional’ if I haven’t read it in the past.
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.
e a m harris 