Oh joy!

After reading Pundy's list of favourite books he'd read as a child, I went off in search of my own reading roots. I cut the list back to ten because they would have taken up the whole blog!



1. Stig of the Dump - Clive King



2. The Magic Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton



3. Anne of Green Gables - Lucy Maud Montgomery



4. Just so stories - Rudyard Kipling



5. Charlotte's Web (some pig!) - EB White



6. The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster



7. The Wind on the Moon - Eric Linklater



8. The Borrowers - Mary Norton



9. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett



10. The Indian in the Cupboard - Lynne Reid Banks





This was a great exercise and I remembered all sorts of things that had been buried at the back of my reading memories - Flat Stanley, a cat called Charbonnel (?) , the Bears of Berne many of which I couldn't track down.

I still often read children's books. Terry Pratchett is a favourite, David Almond and Philip Pullman, but the best children's book I have read for years and years is Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve. Here's an excerpt -


Chapter 1 : The Hunting Ground

It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.

In happier times, London would never have bothered with such feeble prey. The great Traction City had once spent its days hunting for bigger towns that this, ranging north as far as the edges of the Ice Waste and south to the shores of the Mediterranean. But lately prey of any kind had started to grow scarce, and some of the larger cities had begun to look hungrily at London. For ten years now it had been hiding from them, skulking in a damp, mountainous, western district which the Guild of Historians said once been the island of Britain. For ten years it had eaten nothing but tiny farming towns and static settlements in those wet hills. Now, at last, the Lord Mayor had decided that the time was right to take his city back over the land-bridge into the Great Hunting Ground.

Grab a copy and nick it off your children after they have read it - it's a classic.