Posts by webweaver
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unbelievable. I just spent the last hour wring a HUGE-ass response to this thread and... I lost it. BUGGER!
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@Hilary - that would be Erich Kästner (thanks Wikipedia - I had forgotten!)
Ah visits to the library as a child... Friday evenings after school - we were allowed three books each, the first of which I would be halfway through by the time we got home.
I was such a speedy reader I often ran out before the following Friday came around, so I would move on to my dad's books. He was a sci-fi fan, so I read a whole lot of Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke et al - as well as Flashman whom he absolutely adored.
Some of the odder books on my parents bookshelves that I devoured at around age 10 included Animal Farm which I assumed was a story about farm animals and was completely devastated when Boxer died - and a strange old book called The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne which was first published in 1857 and details the adventures of three boys who are shipwrecked on a Polynesian island - complete with pirates and cannibalistic locals. I always loved the idea of the candle-nut tree and the breadfruit tree - but wasn't so keen on the idea of "long pig".
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Sasha - I think you may have your holes confused.
Eeyore doesn't have a hole - he lives in Eeyore's Gloomy Place (a pile of sticks) by the stream.
Rabbit, however, does have a hole, in which Pooh gets stuck having eaten too much in the way of elevensies. Christopher Robin reads a Sustaining Book to the North end of Pooh, while Rabbit hangs his washing on the South end, and after a week Pooh is thin enough to be pulled free.
And I am quite sure that A A Milne didn't mean it to be read in any double-entendre kind of a way...
Snigger.
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Continuing with the Scandinavian kids' books theme... did anyone else love the Little Old Mrs Pepperpot books by the Norwegian author Alf Prøysen - or am I truly alone in that regard? :)
And back to Moomins - thanks to the Werewolf review (great recommendation, btw!) I now have a long list of Moomin books I need to seek out at Arty Bees. Because (horror!) I only have two!
<backstory>I've spent the last decade or so trying to recreate the book collection I had as a child - which is variously a) at my mum's house in the UK or b) long gone to the charity shop because mum didn't understand how much those books meant to me. omigod was there a fight (and tears) about that little episode...</backstory>
Anyway, so now I have fun fossicking around in second-hand bookshops building up my collection again, but a quick check this afternoon revealed the fact that I have been very lax on the old Moomintrolling - and I really have to get the set because they were just so darned *magical*.
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Aw drat! I need a digital subscription to The New Yorker! The google links to the full review all go to hidden-behind-firewall places and it looks like it might be a very funny read...
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"I have just been thinking, and I have come to a very important decision. These are the wrong sort of bees."
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Crikey - I must have a mental (emotional?) age of between 2 and 5 then, because I still read them sometimes and I still love them to bits and they still make me laugh out loud. :)
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Can't we have both? Pooh versus the Moomins isn't a zero-sum game is it?
<smallvoice>Pooh's not twee... he's, he's FABULOUS</smallvoice>
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Heh. Danielle, I'm right behind you in the queue - handbag at the ready. No-one disses any of the inhabitants of 100 Aker Wood and gets away unscathed - not even Gio!
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Jolisa, and anyone else planning to read The Little Stranger be warned, it's really scary!
Ah yes - scary enough that once we got on to the particular characteristics of the house itself I got far too scared and had to stop reading. End of story for me! And I would count Night Watch as one of my preferred reads of last year, so there you go. Definitely the story not the author.