A friend and I were just talking about the things that obsessed us as kids. The conversation began because she was rummaging around on eBay and came across a "Black Beauty" album that she owned as a child. She said she'd played it and played it and played it and she can STILL sing one of the songs.

I was similarly in love with a Chip 'n Dale 45 on which they sang "Sailing, Sailing, over the bounding main", and which I must have listened to 7 million times until it mysteriously disappeared (hello, mom?) "Sailing, sailing" sung by cartoon chipmunks. I have no idea why I was so fascinated by this.

Mentioning Streatfeild made me think about some of the other childrens' writers I like. I find it a bit sad that J.K. Rowling seems, in the eyes of many, to be the greatest writer for children of all time. She's okay. However, I'm not the world's biggest Harry Potter fan. I bought the first one, and since then I've borrowed the rest from a friend because I feel somehow obligated to keep up with them, Harry being a cultural phenomenon and all. However, I find myself somewhat baffled by the success of the books, and I don't think that I would have loved them that much even as a kid. There are so many better writers out there who write the same kind of magical fantasy -- Jane Yolen, Diana Wynne Jones, Lucy M. Boston, Susan Cooper, to name a few. Lucy Boston's "Green Knowe" series are some of the best books I've ever read. Rowling's books, on the other hand, seem to borrow heavily from the already well-established fantasy genre and don't add much that's new. Once I put down a Harry Potter book, it leaves my mind immediately, while there are moments and characters from Jones, Boston, Cooper and Yolen that I'll probably never forget.

On the other hand, Rowling is probably the only person I've heard of (other than me) who's read Paul Gallico's MANXMOUSE, so we would probably have stuff to talk about.

The handsomest horse in the world. 

Though I've been reading blogs for years, and actually set this one up a couple of years ago, I've never gotten around to posting anything. Now that I have a job that involves long hours of sitting in an office doing absolutely nothing, I guess I'll use that time to see how long I can actually keep a blog going. The title and everything are probably temporary until I think of better ones.

I like the current meme of vowing to read 50 books and write about them. Since I'm a voracious reader and will probably read 50 books in the next two months, my goal will be to write about the best and the worst of them... And maybe writing about them here will shame me into getting back to some more "literary" reading than I've been doing lately.

I read just about everything. Except romance. And westerns. Well, actually I have read my share of Louis L'Amour, but that was because my grandfather was a huge fan and those books were around. I read everything that was lying around the house in those days, which was why at the age of 8 or so I was reading "Brighty of the Grand Canyon" and the short stories of John Steinbeck at the same time. Those choices still inform my reading habits today, I'm sorry to say... although I guess I have outgrown Marguerite Henry (though I still snake my old Streatfeild books out of the closet to read now and again).

Anyway, no romance, but lots of mysteries, some sf, fantasy, biographies, and fiction (literary and not-so-literary). We'll see where it all goes.