Books that made me

Any author who visits schools will know that one of the perennial questions you are sure to be asked (after ‘where do you get your ideas from’) is - what’s your favourite book? I’ve given the same answer every time, it’s The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper.

To be fair it’s a trick answer, because it allows me to pick five books in one. It’s impossible for me to say which of the five books in the sequence is my favourite. But at this time of year it’s especially great to reread - or read for the first time -  The Dark is Rising itself. It opens on Midwinter’s Eve (20^th December to you and me) and runs chronologically through the Christmas period. Some love to read it day by day, marking time with their own Christmas preparations. I tend to splurge – like a box of Christmas After Eight mints, once opened I find it very hard to stop.

The Dark is Rising wasn’t the first book in the series I encountered. That was Over Sea and Under Stone. A teacher called Mrs Crow read it to the class one year when I was about 8. Something in the text resonated with me far more than all of the other books that I must have read or had read to me at that time. I found the rest of the books and painstakingly read them to myself over the following years.

I have very few books that I return to again and again, and the five in The Dark is Rising Sequence are the ones that mean the most.  It’s not sentimental either, I genuinely love the stories and find something comforting and surprising every time I return to them. If ever I see one of the books in a charity shop or second hand book shop I have to buy it. I give it to children - usually those who ask that question – when I go to author events, hopeful that it might give them as much joy as it continues to give me.

They are books I have numerous copies of. I have my ‘reading copy’ which I take with me in all its battered glory. Then I have the hard back versions, which are the same editions as the one Mrs Crow read to me all those years ago, and I have the folio versions for ‘best’. It may sound weird, but these books have been with me all my life, and I treasure them.

First I treasure them for their quality. In a time where everything has to be new, fresh and now, it’s a handy reminder for an author that a book of quality will transcend all that. We should be aspiring to that and nothing else. Second, I treasure them because they take me back to a time when my world was young and full of potential.

But lastly, and most importantly I treasure them because they were the first books I ever truly loved. They were the first books that gave me a passion for writing and an appreciation of the power of the written word.  It’s wasn’t my books that bought me to where I am and allowed me to call myself an author – it was these.  Without them I would never be doing what I do now.

So do yourself a favour and read them if you haven’t read them, reread them if you have, and if you don’t have a copy, next time you see me at an author event ask for one, I usually have one on me somewhere!

A Grown-Up's Christmas in Wales by Susie Day

Do you have an obligatory festive read? A book that you read every winter, or that the family share together?

When I was small, my mother would read us the ten daily stories leading to the 25th from Enid Blyton’s  A Christmas Book (since republished, along with other seasonal offerings, as Christmas Stories). I was especially fond of the Yule Log (if disappointed year after year that it was not the chocolate kind), and mistletoe-victim Balder the Beautiful, which gave my small self angsty pangs and a bit of a crush.

More recently, I’ve tried to reread Susan Cooper’s magnificent The Dark Is Rising - a classic I only read after my sister took me to an amazing theatre production when I was a teen - on Christmas Eve, usually leaving it far too late to get past the first few chapters. Then there’s a slight cheat: The Children of Green Knowe is a book I find hard going (despite loving others in the series as a child) but the BBC 1980s adaptation is the annual soundtrack to putting up the tree, wobbly soundtrack and all.

I write for children; it’s not unusual for me to read - and reread - children’s fiction. But my nostalgic urge come December to recreate something - an atmosphere, a feeling - from that time of my small angst-pang self feels like something more akin to homesickness, or its Welsh cousin, hiraeth: a longing for a past place, perhaps one that has never been. I feel it whenever Greg Lake’s I Believe in Father Christmas twiddles along and revives my strange kidlike adoration for ‘eyes full of twinkles and smiles,’ and complete obliviousness to the ENTIRE REST OF THE SONG.

I am reminded of my niece who, on her first Christmas of ‘knowing’ (perhaps a year younger than might have been ideal), declared mournfully, ‘It’s not the same.’ I think I want it to be the same.

And of course it’s not the same. Our families grow and shrink and grow around us; the places we call home shift. New traditions come and moss the gaps. Not the same, but good, and ours, and before long beloved.

So this year - when I feel as human beings we’ve all done quite a lot of ‘knowing,’ maybe a bit more than we’d have liked - I think I’ll read something new.


Susie Day - books for kids about families, feelings, friendship and funny stuff
https://susieday.com/
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Writing and Place: How Santa Barbara Sunshine Led To a Tale of Wolves and Snowy Woods – by Emma Barnes

I’ve just come back from a visit to Santa Barbara.  It was wonderful to revisit old haunts – the Daily Grind coffee shop, Chaucer Books – and to spend time watching the dolphins and pelicans from Arroyo Burro beach, smell the roses near the Mission, and most of all, bask in California sunshine after a long, cold, Yorkshire winter. 

It also made me think about the relationship between writing and place.

It was while I was in Santa Barbara I got a message saying that my book Wolfie had won a Fantastic Book Award (voted for by children across Lancashire).  This seemed fitting, as it was actually while I was staying in Santa Barbara, five years ago, that I wrote Wolfie.  And that made me think how odd it was that a book about wolves and deep winter woods (so atmospherically brought to life in Emma Chichester Clark’s illustrations) should have been created in such a completely different environment.

cover: Emma Chichester Clark

I remember the process well.  I’d walk my daughter to preschool – passing rows of jacaranda trees, an open air swimming pool and banks of creeping rosemary.  Then I’d go home and open my laptop and plunge into a world where a wolf appears in an ordinary British neighbourhood, and takes the heroine into a snow-filled world of adventure.  Maybe it was the contrast itself that got my imagination going?  I was certainly driven: tapping away intently, working against the clock until pick-up time.  

illustration: Emma Chichester Clark

 Of course many writers are inspired by their particular environment and its familiarity.  But I wonder how often writers are inspired to write about a setting precisely because it isn’t there?  Quite often, I suspect.  In some cases, this might be tinged with homesickness, or nostalgia for a place and time lost.

Certainly, one of the most evocative children’s books that I know, in terms of creating a setting, is Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising – part of the famous fantasy series of the same title.  This book is set in rural Berkshire near Windsor, and Will’s house, the village, the manor and the surrounding landscape are brilliantly portrayed: so real, so immediate, but also echoing with the years of history that lie behind.  When Will sets out into the woods he may meet a Smith from centuries past, or a tramp who has travelled through time, or the mythical Herne the Hunter: somehow the place can contain them all.  This capturing of landscape is also a feature of Cooper’s other books – the mountains of Wales in The Grey King, and a Cornish village in Greenwitch.

These books capture perfectly a British place and time (and I say time because I suspect the “present day” Berkshire that Cooper portrays has probably now been lost as totally as her Medieval or Dark Age versions, under the pressures of modern development).  Yet they were written when Cooper was far from her original home, living on the East Coast of the US.  In interviews, she has described how she was cross country skiing (a thoroughly un-British activity) when the idea of The Dark Is Rising came to her.

I’m certainly grateful for my time in California.  Towards the end of my stay I also went to the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference, which was stimulating in a different way.  And I enjoyed happy hours running on the beach.  But mainly those months were a warm, calm, interlude: a bubble in which I managed to write a book.

Maybe one cold, winteryYorkshire morning I will sit down and find myself writing a tale of sunshine, sand and dolphins…

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Emma's new book, Wild Thing,  about the naughtiest little sister ever (and her bottom-biting ways), is out now from Scholastic. It is the first of a series for readers 8+.
"Hilarious and heart-warming" The Scotsman
"Charming modern version of My Naughty Little Sister" Armadillo Mag

 Wolfie is published by Strident.   Sometimes a Girl’s Best Friend is…a Wolf. 
Winner of 2014 Fantastic Book Award
"A real cracker of a book" Armadillo 
"Funny, clever and satisfying...thoroughly recommended" Books for Keeps
"This delightful story is an ideal mix of love and loyalty, stirred together with a little magic and fantasy" Carousel 

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