The four school novels and Peter's Room. I seem to be in a minority (and I think AF may have written those bits with a certain degree of tongue-in-cheek glee) but I really enjoy the Gondal bits and occasionally just read the first chapter with Peter out in the wonderfully evocative cold and then the parts in italics. I also think it's important for the beginning of the Ginty/Nicola/Patrick mess - in many ways it and The Attic Term go together for me, and I couldn't have one without the other.
The Marlows And The Traitor I first read as an adult, and it doesn't quite feel as woven into my life as the ones I found between the ages of nine-or-so and fourteen. Ditto for Falconer's Lure; I like the neat, unsparing, unemotional portrayal of the internal and external upheavals caused by Jon's death, but like Nicola with The Lamplighter, I'm not making room on my desert island for a book with even the offstage death of a cat in it, and that's that.
The Ready-Made Family and The Thuggery Affair are both 'issue' books and both give too much time, in my opinion, to characters I'm not particularly interested in - I'd be sorry to leave them, but not sorry enough to leave Autumn Term or End Of Term out of the suitcase in their favour.
I can put the historicals back on the shelf without a pang.
Run Away Home, again, I'd be sorry to leave - but I didn't even realise it existed until the 1990s, so it hasn't made quite such a place for itself in my mental reading-room. Ask me again in twenty-five years. :)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-10-12 05:46 pm (UTC)The Marlows And The Traitor I first read as an adult, and it doesn't quite feel as woven into my life as the ones I found between the ages of nine-or-so and fourteen. Ditto for Falconer's Lure; I like the neat, unsparing, unemotional portrayal of the internal and external upheavals caused by Jon's death, but like Nicola with The Lamplighter, I'm not making room on my desert island for a book with even the offstage death of a cat in it, and that's that.
The Ready-Made Family and The Thuggery Affair are both 'issue' books and both give too much time, in my opinion, to characters I'm not particularly interested in - I'd be sorry to leave them, but not sorry enough to leave Autumn Term or End Of Term out of the suitcase in their favour.
I can put the historicals back on the shelf without a pang.
Run Away Home, again, I'd be sorry to leave - but I didn't even realise it existed until the 1990s, so it hasn't made quite such a place for itself in my mental reading-room. Ask me again in twenty-five years. :)