One of my plans for 2019 is to make time to read more books. My post-NaNoWriMo December book binge* got me off to a great start – I devoured five books, which was bliss 💕📚🌟
January was awesome too, and so far I’m on track to hit my target of reading one book a week…
First up was one of my Christmas presents from my sweet hubby, the wonderful Blood Communion by Anne Rice. It’s the new Lestat book, and it was like visiting old friends, and meeting a few new ones, and I was totally swept away in the mystery and intrigue – and that heart-stopping, OMG! moment… (No spoilers!) Anne has always been one of my favourite authors. I love the way she writes, and the beauty, magic and history she weaves through her books. (She could also be the reason I favour long and lush sentences in my books too, ha ha!)
Then I read To Nowhere and Back by Margaret J Anderson, the author of one of my favourite childhood books, Searching For Shona. It’s full of mystery and magic, and a different kind of time-slip adventure, and I loved it. Hooray for the publishing revolution that has made so many old books available again! (There are a lot of typos, I guess from scanning in the original books, but they didn’t take me out of the story too much.) I also bought Margaret’s In the Keep of Time and In the Circle of Time, time-slip novels set in magical Scotland, and am looking forward to them.
Gretel and the Case of the Missing Frog Prints by PJ Brackston is the first of a very different series by one of my favourite authors, so I was curious to try it. Admittedly her Paula Brackston witchy historical fantasies are more my thing (I love love love The Winter Witch, The Silver Witch, The Witch’s Daughter and others), but this fun cosy/mystery/hilarious adventure is laugh out loud funny, and clever, and intriguing enough that I stayed up til after 3am (oops!) to find out who, how any why. Lots of fun! (And yes, it’s that Gretel…)
My favourite for the month (I know, a big call given Lestat!) was A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, which I devoured without pause. Not much work got done that week – and not much sleep was had either – there were a few staying-up-til-3am nights. I absolutely loved it, and can’t wait for the rest of the books to arrive – although it’s probably a good thing that they’re being posted, so I can get some work done in the meantime 🙂
And for our February discussion at the Australia Fairy Tale Society, an early Australian tale was chosen, The Magic Gun, from the early 1900s book Fairy Tales Told In the Bush, a collection by Sister Agnes. It’s long out of print, and out of copyright, so you can read the book here… Just remember that it was a very different time – the portrayal of Aboriginal leader William Barak in The Magic Gun is awful. Yet in reading the story, we all researched him, and learned about this important ngurungaeta (clan leader), activist, artist, liaison and real-life hero, who we may not have heard of otherwise – you can read about him and his achievements here. I much preferred some of the other stories in the book, and also loved going down the rabbit hole of early Australian fairy tales and finding many more, like The Two Fairies in Tales For Young Australia, the sweet but awfully girls-should-be-obedient Mr Bunyip, or, Mary Somerville’s Ramble, and Fairy Tales, Fables and Legends by Mrs Beatrice Wilcken, amongst many others. Want to venture down the rabbit hole too? The National Library of Australia have collected and preserved so many, which you can read online…
What do the early stories of your country tell you about yourself and the changing world?
* In December I read and absolutely loved:
Return of the Witch by Paula Brackston.
The Sparrow Sisters by Ellen Herrick.
The Night Garden by Lisa Van Allen.
The Other Side of Me by KA Last.
The Little Shop of Found Things by Paula Brackston.
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