I am enjoying re-reading Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising and grateful to @RobGMacfarlane and @juliamarybird for prompting this by their setting up their #thedarkisreading group on Twitter.
It is fifty years since I last enjoyed a seasonal reading as much as I am this. Then, I was thirteen and reading a Frank Richard’s Billy Bunter novel where the “Fat Owl” managed to gate crash a Christmas holiday at Bob Cherry’s country house. Snow, log-fires and warm light impressions linger from that juvenile revery.
My previous The Dark is Rising reading experiences have largely taken place in the classroom and in the company of receptive and appreciative eleven and twelve-year-olds*, so the luxury of self-indulgent immersion into Susan Cooper’s and Will Stanton’s world is proving to be rich indeed; made more so by the generous sharing by @blueaisling of the author’s 2017 Tolkien Lecture A Catch of Breath in which she shares fascinating and inspirational insights into the concept of fantasy writing, her own in particular.
Such joy…
*including one wonderful child who read it under her desk following her mother’s insistence that I offer her daughter alternative reading as the family did not believe in demons and would have nothing to do with them or the book.