I was sitting here some weeks ago thinking suddenly, I need to read more, and so I pondered for a while what to choose. I decided that it was time, after a great many years, to reread the Narnia books, and though I finished Prince Caspian with a sigh of pleasure and my hand was reaching, metaphorically, for Dawn Treader, it occurred to me that there were six volumes of Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" series on my shelf still utterly unread. I had picked up Swallows and Amazons at our beloved local children's bookstore, and enjoyed it very much, enough that when the owner decided to retire and was selling off her stock at half-price, I went over and bought all of the rest of the series that she had -- and yet, there they sat on the shelf, for years. And so I thought now that they would be just the thing right now, in these difficult times when one wants children's stories with plenty of adventure but the assurance of a safe homecoming at the end. It had been long enough that I thought I should read the first book again, just to get the sail filled, as it were, and I enjoyed it just as much as the first time around. But I have to say that, while the first book is certainly good, Ransome really hit his stride as he went on. He clearly knows his stuff, both boats and the Lake District in which many of the stories are set, and better still, he has that rather rare ability to write from a child's perspective that makes you forget that he isn't one himself -- as I say, I love the Narnia stories, but it is always clear that they are being told to you by an adult, where Ransome reminds me quite a lot in this respect of Elizabeth Enright's Melendy family series, a different sort of story but with that same feeling of immediacy, of being immersed in it yourself, this is what it's like.
I read, in rapid succession, Swallowdale, Winter Holiday, Pigeon Post, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, Secret Water, and Great Northern?, coming suddenly to the end of my collection with a sigh of dismay. They are all, of course, boat-related but the focus is on different things in each, and new characters come in here and there, so that each book is quite different -- especially, I thought, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, as throughout the series there are adventures and risky situations of course, but, perhaps because I'm a parent now and long past being the same age as the Walker children, the very real danger they are in at being literally swept out to sea was more than unsettling. (This one contains the only mention in the whole series of one of the children being seasick, and the physical reality of it comes as quite a shock.) But, as I say, I enjoyed the series immensely, and can see why so many readers still think of them as beloved favorites. I am amazed only at the fact that I had never heard of them before!
(The photograph is a still from the 2016 movie version of the first book. I haven't seen it -- I found out about it not long after I finished the book the second time, but after reading in reviews that the writers felt it necessary to insert a completely new subplot about real spies, I thought, "oh no!" Hearing that Susan has been turned into a whiny bumbler who can't even manage to cook a fish made me shriek -- apparently Peter has also been made "more real". Why, why, why take classics that generations of children have loved passionately, and change them?? Oh, well -- it looks beautiful, at least. Sigh.)
The D.E. Stevenson list is reading Amberwell, and this time around I volunteered to lead a section, offering a summary of each chapter and some discussion questions. Mine turned out to be quite early in the book, chapters 4-6, which I estimate to be taking place around 1930. The Ayrton family live in a fine old estate on the west coast of Scotland -- the story begins a few centuries earlier with the building of the house and the establishment of the Ayrtons, but by chapter 4 the main characters of the "present day" have been introduced, Mr. and Mrs. Ayrton, his two sons from his first marriage, and three daughters from this second, which daughters are all still under ten and in the care of their Nannie. One of the central events of this section, and a recurring motif in the story, is the dedication of Mr. Ayrton's contribution to the estate -- others in the generations before him were a walled garden, a bowling-green, a stone terrace, and so on -- Mr. Ayrton has decided upon a fountain with the statue of a little mermaid. On the day of the ceremonial Turning on the Fountain, the girls are sitting on rugs on the bowling-green in their best dresses and the boys in their kilts, waiting for the festivities, and Nannie is nearby keeping an eye on them, and knitting. This seems too good and opportunity to pass up, to choose something for my "Knitting with DES" virtual knit-along -- so what might Nannie be knitting, I asked myself.
This is a bit later than ca.1930, by about a decade, but how could I possibly resist three little girls in matching boleros? and just the right ages! This is in the Bestway 749 booklet, this pattern available for a small fee from FabForties.co.uk (who seems to have changed her name recently from The Vintage Knitting Lady, perhaps to specialize in the 1940s?).
(The house in the photo above, by the way, is Inchmarlo, not on the west coast as in the story but in Aberdeenshire. My Scottish-immigrant ancestors worked there, according to the 1840 census! The descriptions of Stevenson's Amberwell and a number of the dust-jacket illustrations in the book's long publishing history remind me of Inchmarlo, and so I was delighted to find this photo available for Creative Commons use at Geograph.uk -- this one is by Stanley Howe.)
"Swallows and Amazons" leads quite naturally to a grown-up sea adventure, and I picked up Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander after many years -- too long! I've only just finished the second in the series, Post Captain, enjoying every moment. O'Brian's prose is so complex yet wonderfully fluid that it is a pleasure to read, and his flashes of wit and deft characterizations are sheer genius.
(The photo -- from Wikimedia Commons -- is the stern of the Surprise built for the 2003 movie and now at the Maritime Museum of San Diego.)
It's been too hot lately for snuggling-under-a-blanket reading, so I just made one instead, and gave it away as a house-warming present -- it is the simple-but-effective "Modern Granny Stitch Blanket" by Jess of Make & Do Crew. I used the recommended Lion Brand "Heartland" yarn, in "Glacier Bay", "Hot Springs", "Olympic", "Mount Rainier", and "Kings Canyon" (for a lark, try guessing which is which! I think I got only one right).
I ran out of "Olympic" just a little over two rows short -- there had been only one skein of it in the store, so I bought a sixth color but decided that I'd risk looking for another skein somewhere else. And rather surprisingly, because it's 100% acrylic and therefore produced by recipe that isn't subject to the whims and eccentricities of natural fibers, the dye lots of "Olympic" at least are noticeably, even disappointingly, different. There is much less of the black in the second skein, leaving the color rather dull and flat -- oh, well.
I'm not generally a huge fan of acrylics, but this is quite pleasant to work with, and I must say it makes yummy tassels!
