Desert island books

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

I just moved to America (okay, it's not quite a desert island) and had to make agonising choices about which books to bring.  Specifically about which AF books to bring.  My final list was: The Cricket Term, The Attic Term, Falconer's Lure, Run Away Home and Players Boy.  The last one made it because it's new and I've only read it a couple of times.  I'm starting to wonder if I'll miss End of Term when it gets nearer Christmas.  But the others are just books I can't live without.

So which would make it onto your list?

Comments

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

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. :)

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

I take your point about Peter's Room being important for later Ginty/Patrick/Nicola issues, but so is Ready Made Family. Actually for years, before I'd read/knew of the holiday books, I kept wondering what I was missing. Eventually I came to the conclusion that AF just had a very well-developed background story between the school books that you could work out bits of if you read closely!!

I'm interested in your point about books that have become part of your life. I can never decide when (probably, if) I ever get on the real Desert Island discs, I'd want a book I know and love - that's become part of my life - or whether I should take the risk and go for something I've wanted to read but not got round to.

In my actual packing, Player's Boy made it in precisely because it's new to me and I thought I'd enjoy being able to re-read it.

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

Don't you think that Run Away Home is an "issue book" too, just as much if not more than Ready-Made Family? I haven't read it in ages, but that's how I remember it. I have a feeling that another good children's writer, possibly Nina Bawden, did a book on the same issue at around the same time.