Authors Electric

Maps in books ... When I gave my godson a book recently which I thought he might enjoy, he was thrilled to find that it had maps at the front. "I love maps!" he declared. Well, he is only 11. Although I love maps too, and I'm (nearly) grown up. I remember the excitement of following our progress in the atlas when out in the car (yes, this was pre-Sat Nav): I spent hours poring over the OS map for our area to look for bridleways and places to ride or walk to (and still do): the only geography lessons that actually captured my attention at school where those on map-reading and what all those squiggly lines and interesting icons meant ... I even had maps hanging on my bedroom wall - a giant poster of Middle Earth, a tea towel showing Kruger National Park (my Dad had visited while on an overseas business trip) and an old 18th century print of Northamptonshire, where I stayed during the holidays. Maps to wondrous places ... I get a kick out of seeing maps in fiction...

So far, 100 Aker Wood looks like being the winner. I wonder if Piglet would take a lodger? It may be true that you can always escape into a good book ... but supposing you really could, quite literally get away from it all and go live in the fantasy land of your choice?  I was thinking about this the other day ... Narnia was the first to spring to mind. I like animals, and the idea of being able to chat to them definitely had appeal. Until I remembered that the Talking Animals tend to come across as an elite minority who refer rather snootily to the 'Dumb Beasts' .... some rather unpleasant echoes there put me off that particular destination.  OK, so how about Middle Earth instead then? More particularly the Shire ... like hobbits I enjoy eating, and the idea of all those meals and of listening to Bilbo telling tall tales definitely added to the attraction. But knowing my luck, I'd probably end up with a hole which was constructed below the water table and so was...

One of many           I’m currently re-reading Julian May’s Galactic Milieu and Pliocene trilogies: as I finished one and scanned the shelves searching for the next volume, I noticed that a lot of my books are serials or series.           My serial addiction probably started with Winnie the Pooh, before moving on to The Dark is Rising sequence and the Earthsea books via the Narnia chronicles, Swallows and Amazons, The Minnipins, Paddington Bear and Mrs Pepperpot ...           As I got older I moved onto Asimov’s Foundation, Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion in his many guises, Don Camillo, the world of Vanyel Askevron, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, Robin Hobb’s trilogy of trilogies featuring Fitz and Liveships (and she’s now three books into a quadrilogy set in the Rain Wilds), Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum,  and I’m heavily addicted to Alexand...