Top Ten Tuesday: Most Memorable Dogs in Fiction

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week has no assigned theme so I decided to write about memorable dogs in fiction:

Lufra, the Baluchistan Hound in Frederica by Georgette Heyer (1965), is not as exotic as he sounds.  Frederica gets into trouble when she takes the family dog for a walk in London and invokes the name of her aristocratic relative to appease those complaining about his behavior. My reviews.

Six Degrees of Separation – from Ghost Cities to Fortune’s Folly

It’s time for #6degrees, inspired by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. We all start at the same place as other readers, add six books, and see where it ends up. This month’s starting point is Ghost Cities by Siang Lu, a satirical novel that begins with a Chinese-Australian character being fired from his job at the Chinese consulate in Sydney because he misrepresented his language skills and only speaks English.

Six Degrees of Separation – from Theory & Practice to The Shell House Detectives

It’s time for #6degrees, inspired by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. We all start at the same place as other readers, add six books, and see where it ends up. This month’s starting point is Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser (2024).  It won the Stella Prize, which recognizes Australian women's writing but does not get much attention in the US.

WWW Wednesday - 1952 Edition

WWW Wednesday is hosted by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently Reading

Love for Lydia by H.E. Bates caught my eye when I was looking for a book for the forthcoming 1952 Club, hosted by Stuck-in-a-Book and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings.

Six Degrees of Separation – from Tom Lake to Some Writer!

It’s time for #6degrees, inspired by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. We all start at the same place, add six books, and see where we end up. This month’s starting point is Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, which I reviewed in September and liked so much it made my Best of 2023 list.

My April 2023 Reads

April was a busy and varied month that I nearly forgot to share (I guess I did forget my March summary!). One book, in particular, stayed in my mind. I did not have a chance to review Wrong Place, Wrong Time, which I listened to while commuting and found somewhat compelling as the heroine finds herself reliving previous days in her life in a desperate attempt to change something that happened. My sister Clare read it about the same time (unplanned, as sometimes happens) but did not like it much. However, this is one that grew on me and I decided it was well done.

The Naughtiest Girl in the School by Enid Blyton – for the #1940Club

Title: The Naughtiest Girl in the School
Author: Enid Blyton
Publication: Armada, paperback, 20p. Originally published in 1940.
Genre: School story
Setting: 20th century England

This week, Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon of Stuck in a Book are hosting the 1940 Club in which we all read and write about books published in the same year.

The Island of Adventure (Book Review) #1944Club

This is my final entry for the #1944Club:

Title: The Island of Adventure (published in the US as Mystery Island)
Author: Enid Blyton
Illustrator: Stuart Tresilian
Publication: Macmillan, 1944
Genre: Juvenile mystery series

Plot: In this series launch, Blyton sets the scene with the two pairs of siblings who will feature in all eight Adventure books.

Best School Stories

Here is an article from the London Times with a top 25 boarding school stories - most of which I agree with (a few I have not read!):

5) The Autumn Term, Cricket Term and Attic Term by Antonia ForestForest wrote only 13 novels, all but one connected with the Marlow family. Ten of them were about the Marlow children, beginning with the Autumn Term (written in 1948) and were fabulous tales of the six girls and two boys. They deserve to be better-known. I particularly remember Nicola and Lawrie, the two youngest sisters, who didn't quite live up to the standards of their hugely successful older sisters at Kingscote, the family boarding school.Autumn Term, and its sequels, The Cricket Term and the Attic Term and were funny, beautifully written, and seemed far more realistic than many of the other boarding schools books around (especially when it came to the relationship between all the sisters).

Talking parrots

Could Kiki, the Blyton parrot, have done any better? Not that any bad guys were captured...

Fusty musty dusty!

What was your favorite book as a child?

The New York Times asked today what was *your* favorite book when you were a child and it is interesting to see all the comments. Many mentioned favorites of mine such as The Phantom Tollbooth, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series, Narnia, The Lord of the Rings but I was also interested to see an early comment listed the Malory Towers and St. Clare's books of Enid Blyton, which very much influenced my early (and lasting) love of English school stories. Many of the books I loved as a child were books that were already published so I tried to remember books that my sister and I eagerly anticipated coming out in the same way we now await HP VII tomorrow night.