| Author | Title | Description |
|---|---|---|
| John Grisham | The Testament | A nice easy one-day-after-Christmas read, about a lawyer who has to find a missionary in the depths of Brazil, after she inherits the entire fortune of a wealthy billionaire. The description of the difficult search through the Pantanal region was fascinating, and for some perverse reason I also enjoyed finding out about Dengue fever, which the lawyer contracts. |
| Susan Cooper | The Dark Is Rising sequence | Finally finished this over Christmas! Another book which is really more than one. The Dark is Rising consists
of Over Sea, Under Stone; The Dark Is Rising; Greenwitch; The Grey King;
and Silver on the Tree.
This is ostensibly a fantasy book for children. I remember reading The Dark Is Rising (the book, not the compendium) in 4th grade, the year in which Susan Cooper won the Newbery Medal for children's literature for The Grey King. All I remember from that first reading is that I really enjoyed it and read all the other books. A friend of mine at uni was reading this edition on the bus one day and since then I'd been looking for a copy for myself. I first spotted it in a Waterstone's in Aberdeen, Scotland but decided against lugging it home. I finally found it in a shop in Mosman about 2 years ago and have been slowly reading it since. The books incorporate Celtic mythology with British history. In each book, the focus is on children who find themselves involved in the struggle between good and evil in the world. In Susan Cooper's own words: I was trying to deal with the basic substance of myth; the complicated, ageless conflict between good and evil, the Light and the Dark. My stories were set in my own parts of Britain; in Buckinghamshire, in the Cornish village where we spent holidays after the war, and in the part of North Wales in which my grandmother was born and my parents lived their last twenty-one years. And in ways I don't really understand, the books were haunted; by my childhood self, by a lifelong fascination with myth and legend, and by the whole of Britain's many-layered history. (See here for more info.) |
| Susan Cooper | Seaward | Another of Susan Cooper's books based on Celtic mythology. |
Last modified: Thurs Jan 20 08:33:43
EST 2000