So, Enid Blyton. I don’t even know where to start with talking about Enid Blyton books, and the influence they had on my reading as a child. I know that I was reading chapter books early enough that I don’t recall starting, and that when I was 4-5 my Dad moved away for a year and sent me a book a week – Blyton paperbacks, for the most part. I remember walking to the Post Office to collect my regular parcel!

I know that I read and loved the mystery and adventure books – The Famous Five, the Secret Seven, The Adventure Of and The Mystery Of – and those characters and stories are deeply entangled in my heart. I also loved the random children books, and the various Toy stories, especially Amelia Jane (I think I was always a bit old for Noddy). But thanks to some world travelling in my mid-childhood years, I sold almost all of my collection, and the ones I cared about enough as an adult to re-acquire were not those ones at all.

Instead, the Blyton books I was most desperate to own again, and to reread, were the school stories and the magical classics: Malory Towers, St Clares, Naughtiest Girl, Faraway Tree and the Wishing Chair.

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It’s the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book Week which means that across the country, primary schools are gearing up for a bunch of fun reading activities, culminating in book parades where kids get to dress up as characters from their favourite books.

Heh which in practice means that they figure out who they want to dress up as (princesses and Batman) and then try to find a book that fits it. BUT NEVER MIND THAT.

I decided this year I want to do something fun on the blog to celebrate Book Week, as I usually forget about it until it’s too late. So I’m going to write some posts about my childhood reading, not only favourite books, but how I read them and why I still remember them.

If anyone out there wants to join me in blogging about their childhood in books, please let me know about your posts, either in comments, by Twitter (@tansyrr) or via email to tansyrr (at) gmail dot com. I’d love to be able to do a round up next weekend of various people blogging about their childhood reading and the books that made them happy.

The Truth, by Terry Pratchett

I almost wasn’t going to write a Pratchett’s Women post for The Truth. Like Night Watch, it’s a marvellous book, one of Pratchett’s absolute best, and happens to be almost entirely about male characters and their issues. Considering that gender imbalance is no longer the case for every Discworld novel or even almost every Discworld novel, (as could be argued that it was the case in his earlier days) it feels churlish to criticise it on those grounds. It is a love letter to moveable type, and a fun take on the history of the printing press, with the usual layers of humour and cleverness, and a rich cast of characters, so I am going to forgive it for being a mostly male cast. This was actually the book that brought me back to the Discworld after a period of what felt at the time to be lacklustre releases but may well have been my own loss of interest in the series, and its many repetitions.

But I wasn’t alone in that. The Truth was a huge success for Pratchett, and one of the books which really helped to cement his ‘legend’ status. While he had previously written other novels with a similar formula (standalone male character faces the Discworld’s version of a particular historical industry and chaos ensues) there was something about this book, and its maturity, and perhaps the solid link to the history it was replicating that made it popular among non-fantasy readers. In fact, apart from the vampire, Death and the other side effects of a Discworld setting, this is largely not a story about magic gone wrong and trying to kill you, which sets it apart from almost every previous Discworld novel. This is instead a story of PEOPLE gone wrong and trying to kill you, and how a new industry can be every bit as terrifying and confrontational and dangerous as anything from the Dungeon Dimensions.

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I haven’t done one of these reading memes in forever! Looking over it, I was intrigued to see not only how many I had read (more than I thought at first), but how many I had read long enough ago that I barely remember their contents and thus had to double check my memory as to whether I really *had* read them. Is this what we call getting old?

Also I’ve read a lot of these authors, but not necessarily their specific books on the list. Some of the books I haven’t even heard of, which is very exciting! It seems to be leaning towards older than newer works (no Susanna Clarke, for instance, no Australian authors, no modern YA or urban fantasy, quite an old-fashioned definition of “fantasy” fiction, very few of the last decade at all) but I am glad to see so many authors represented who should not be forgotten. The list contains many of the books and authors that often get left out when epic or high fantasy is discussed, so of course they should be here, talked about, discussed.

Of course there are a whole bunch of fantasy novels by women that spring to mind that could or should be on a list like this. That’s the best thing about this sort of meme – it reminds you of how much great, important fantasy literature by women writers is out there. Where the definition of ‘important’ is – people feel strongly that it matters.

Fantasy Mistressworks Meme
As is usual, take the list, bold all those you have read and italicise those you own.

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Many spoilers abound for the plots & endings of Soul Music, Hogfather, Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett

Rereading all three of the Susan Sto Helit (or Susan Death) books was something I had been greatly looking forward to. I’ve always enjoyed Susan as a character even when I didn’t especially love the books she featured in – Soul Music, for instance, was never a favourite of mine, though the animated version of it is dear to my heart (funnily enough it DOES work better with a soundtrack of relevant examples of the music that the story is about), Hogfather is one I’ve often found bewildering with moments of occasional joy, and I never remember anything about Thief of Time at all.

This time around, I enjoyed all three rather better than I had in the past, but in reading them specifically for this blogging series, I couldn’t help noticing that, well. Considering what a popular and beloved character Susan is, it’s interesting what a small space she takes up in each of the books.

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The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson (one of the pantheon of female authors who took a male name to publish during that period of literary enlightenment known as the olden days) is one of those novels that I have heard mentioned here and there, but given my general allergy to Australian classics, I have not pursued it before now. But more recently, as I’ve been looking with greater interest at the history of women writers (or as I say on Pinterest, Lady Novelists) I became intrigued by Richardson.

I then realised that the movie I thought I had watched as a kid based on this book was actually My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin. Whoops! I am WAY better on the history of feminist science fiction novelists, I promise.

Anyway, in my research I saw reference to the fact that The Getting of Wisdom, as well as having that dreadful Australian Classic label, was a boarding school story. And I LOVE boarding school stories with a fiery passion. Apparently there were queer themes too, and there I was, ordering the book from the library like a boss.

Possibly it’s time to start reassessing what the ‘Australian Classic’ title means to me, or maybe it’s the benefit of reading as an adult rather than a child, but where has this book been all my life? Why was it not given to me with a ‘you’ve read Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, What Katy Did and the Little House on the Prairie books, plus all the Enid Blyton boarding school stories, and this is basically a cranky bitch version of all those books, set in Melbourne.’

Why do people not point twelve year olds towards the cranky bitch at boarding school books?

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Is it me, or are these weeks coming around REALLY FAST? 2012 is prancing by, and what do I have to show for it? Well OK, one published novel, four completed short stories, a novel in progress that seems to be working and a handful of awards nominations, but apart from that??

The soccer season has started, and for once I’m not talking about Arsenal, which has been elating and frustrating me in equal measure since last September, but about young Raeli, kicking off for another season, this time in the Under 7′s. The good news is, her spikes still fit, which was something of a relief because I don’t have the cash to buy her new ones.

In the mean time, I have LINKS for you.

My honey sent me an email this week saying ‘you are a superhero’. Which, OBVIOUSLY. But it turned out he was referring to this, an article about how curating the internet is becoming more and more important, and the people who do this work are, well, superheroes. I have to say, I like the term ‘curators’ as it feels a lot less elitist than ‘gatekeepers’. Though of course, ‘doorbitch’ is still my favourite. HEAR ME, INTERNET? I AM YOUR DOORBITCH.

At the Intergalactic Academy, a great post by Phoebe about a current trend to discredit/challenge the genre credentials of teen dystopia novels because they also have romance in them and thus might SNEAKILY be contaminated with girl germs. Only, of course, she says it better or I wouldn’t be linking to her. I know we don’t read the comments but some important discussion did happen in these – in particular, addressing one of Phoebe’s key points about how you probably shouldn’t be refiling these books as ‘romance’ without knowing something about the romance genre, and it’s actually a bit more complicated than “I SUSPECT THIS IS A KISSING BOOK!”

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Since Alisa is making book confessions over at her blog, it’s probably time that I made some of my own.

It’s the National Year of Reading here in Australia, and my one big reading challenge to myself is to buy fewer books. Which is quite a confronting thing to talk about publicly, because, well, I do rather spend a lot of my time online convincing other people to buy books, even if only a minority of them turn out to be my own. I am a book pusher. Listeners of Galactic Suburbia know this to be true!

But my teetering To Read bookcase is currently unsustainable, and my quest this year is to bring my book purchases (which are still flying on my pre-children reading abilities) more closely in line with how many books I am capable of reading. So for the National Year of Reading, I’m trying to read the books I ALREADY HAVE.

So my system is that I am only allowed to buy one book for every three that I read, and two of those three have to be from the physical To Read shelf as opposed to, say, my whopping bag of Agatha Christies, or my books for research shelf, or something from my greater library, or actual library books. I first stated these intentions here.

How am I doing, three months in? Not as well as I’d secretly hoped. Accidentally buying a pack of three Agatha Christies in the post office back in January did rather send the system into a tailspin which took some time to recover from.

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1. The First Man of Rome (and sequels) by Colleen McCullough
A gift from my Aunt and Uncle, a massive hardback that had some very adult scenes considering I was probably in my early teens. Inspired a lifelong obsession with Rome, the women in Roman history, and Julius Caesar. Certainly led to me choosing Ancient Civilisations at college, which led to my eventual PhD in Classics. All your fault, McCullough!

2. Shapechangers, by Jennifer Roberson
The first fantasy series I read because I was actively looking for fantasy fiction, rather than because I needed to read David Eddings so I could join in the conversation with my friends at school. I still remember being so inspired by this series that, after everyone had gone home after my fourteenth birthday party, I lay down on a pile of mattresses and started writing my own first real novel.

3. The Madigal, by Beverley McDonald
A paperback found in the book section of Myer, the first time I realised that Australians could write fantasy and get it published by an Australian publisher (I think Pan Macmillan)? Heady, brain-altering revelations, in a pre-Voyager world. I started thinking that my secret dream might be closer than I thought.

4. The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
Just as I was getting completely overwhelmed by a glut of fantasy reading, and starting to suspect that my favourite genre wasn’t quite as shiny as I thought, here came Mr Pratchett to blow my mind with the idea that you could write fantasy that was funny and subversive and commented on the genre itself. The next fantasy novel I would start writing was one which turned the cliches of my earlier manuscripts on their head, and also the one that would get me published for the first time…

5. Up the Duff, by Kaz Cooke
The older I get, the less likely I am to find books that have an enormous, life-changing effect on me, but this was the one that made me feel sane about being pregnant, and at the time that felt like a pretty major achievement.

Has one book (or many) ever changed your life significantly?

Hate superheroes?
Yeah. They probably hate you, too.

What if there were superpowers in the world, but no superheroes?

Deborah Biancotti has a reputation in Australia for rich, complex prose and bleak stories about the quiet horrors that we all hope will never happen. The Book of Endings, her first collection, made a powerful statement about the kind of fiction she is known for – and Bad Power, her far more slender second collection, makes an entirely different statement about the writer she is going to be.

The stories in Bad Power have a clear, sharp narrative, and a more restrained approach to her prose. As with many of the Twelve Planets collections, the stories are connected and serve to build up a particular world, based on a single premise. In this case, it is the idea that some people have powers, what comics readers or TV/movie fans would immediately designate superpowers, and that there is something deeply sinister about those powers, and those people.

I tore through this book very quickly – it was such a fast-paced read, and so very enjoyable. Once it became clear that the order of the stories was important and that each fed something into the others, the mystery of how to fit all the pieces together added an extra layer of enjoyment. Each story has its own compelling protagonist, and distinct voice. My favourites were Detective Enora Palmer and Detective Max Ponti, just as my favourite stories were “Palming the Lady” and “Crossing the Bridge,” but this is one of those collections where the whole is far more than the sum of its parts.

BAD POWER, by Deborah Biancotti
Twelfth Planet Press
reviewed as part of the Australian Women Writers 2012 National Year of Reading Challenge

Tansy’s Australian Women Writer’s 2012 Reading Challenge.
1. Eona by Alison Goodman (fantasy)
2. Cooking the Books by Kerry Greenwood (contemporary crime)
3. Bad Power by Deborah Biancotti (spec fic, superhero)