Sunday 18 September 2016

Rediscovery


When I did A Level English (It was a long time ago - I think Moses was in my class) we read Corridors of Power by C P Snow.

In those days we would work our way through a book by taking turns to read a bit of it out loud in class. (I'm not sure how they work through books in class these days - probably by entering some kind of virtual reality portal together) Reading round the classroom was guaranteed to kill any interest a book may have had stone dead as bored, droney voices are not conducive to falling in love with a story. One particular girl, who wasn't paying attention, informed the room that the hero of the book "felt as though he had been missilled" (as in from a torpedo tube rather than misled - which was how the protagonist really felt.) This immediately entered the vocabulary of the whole class and even now sometimes something can "missile" me.

The other legacy was an immediate falling in love with the characters in the Strangers and Brothers series. I didn't just read the curriculum book, I went to the library and worked my way through the whole series. (It would probably have been more helpful to my A Level prospects to pay more attention to the book we had been assigned but there you are) Anyway, the last couple of times I was mooching in charity shops, I came across old copies of two of the books. They are a bit battered and the print is a lot smaller than I remember but reading them feels like meeting old friends and it is actually a very nice thing. 
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3 comments

  1. Now I am cross with myself. I put one of them [sleep of reason] in the CS before I moved, without re-reading it. May have to pedal off to library on my trusty steed and see what I can find there. Perhaps if I started at the beginning of the series I would understand it better...too many books, too little time...

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  2. PS not sure about Moses, but there was a girl in mine who could have been Jael, she was vicious with mallets and tentpegs!

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