From: Connie Rockman <connie.rock>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 00:10:48 -0400

The Borrowers was an important book for me. It wasn't just the little people, though I loved that, or the inter-species relationship between Arietty and the human boy, which was cool, but I think it was the first book that made me realize the importance of detailed description and how much that brings a story to life in your imagination. And not just the written descriptions, but those wonderfully detailed line drawings by Beth and Joe Krush, especially the one of Arietty sitting on a spool of thread writing in her huge diary with a stub of pencil balanced against her shoulder, and of Pod talking to Great-aunt Sophie who thought he came out of her bottle of Madeira - great stuff. {In college I had a friend who had brought many of her favorite childhood books with her to school - and that was when I discovered there were more books about the Borrowers - O Joy! During a bout with Mono in my junior year, I did nothing for several weeks but drag myself to class and then go back to bed with The Borrowers Afield,. . . Afloat, and . .
. Aloft. It was bliss.}

The books I remember most as an early teen were Elizabeth, Captive Princess and Young Bess. Can't remember how I came to read them - they weren't written for kids - but I was amazed at how richly the early years of Queen Elizabeth came to life before my eyes. Again, it was the wealth of detail that made those books so vibrant, so real to me. I haven't read them since, but plan to look them up - now that these memories are stirred - because they set me on a lifelong course of enjoying historical fiction and a fascination, particularly, for British history.

In college, an English history professor had us read two works of historical fiction each semester of the year-long course. You weren't required to read those books, but the final exam was rigged so you couldn't get an A unless you had read them. Thanks to him I first encountered Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time - an all-time favorite for its revelation that history is written by the conquerors, and that even my beloved Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare himself were not above maligning poor Richard III, who had been on the losing side of the Wars of the Roses. The Devil in Velvet by John Dickson Carr was another treat of that course - a mystery thriller of the Restoration period - again, full of rich period detail, and a real page-turner.

Connie Rockman
Received on Tue 23 May 2006 11:10:48 PM CDT