Then: This book was gold-dust in Year Five. To a certain bracket of us, the most exciting thing about moving classrooms every year was that there was a new book-case of books. (Actually, the biggest mark of pride was being so good at reading that you got to go to the classroom above to get books, which unfortunately was also simultaneously terrifying.) In Year Five, we all wanted to get our hands on Bug Muldoon. This sounds like the start of one of those nostalgic stories about sharing the smutty pages from horror novels in the playground, but we never really experienced that (apart from everyone trying to take Shaun Hutson out the library at the same time in Year Seven because it mentioned labia); but in Year 5, Bug Muldoon became treasured currency.

God knows why. No slight intended: the genius of Bug Muldoon lies in its clever parody of film noir, which none of us nine-year-olds understood. I guess we just liked detective novels with a twist, and Bug Muldoon was the smartest, cleverest take on a detective any of us had come across. A beetle detective! Investigating ants and spiders! His sidekick is a fly! Clearly it is the greatest novel ever written.

One glorious afternoon, we all sat on the carpet (we liked sitting on the carpet) and our teacher asked us to select books we liked from the bookshelf for her to read a taster of to the assembled group. Seven of us clamoured for her to read Bug Muldoon. She read the first page, and we waited with bated breath for everyone to join us in the excitement. Neither the teacher nor the rest of the class seemed particularly excited. “Shall I carry on?” the teacher asked. “Yes!” seven of us shrieked, but it seemed the rest had not been convinced by a single page.

Clearly they were philistines.

Now: Turns out Bug Muldoon is still brilliant. It’s even more brilliant once you have a clue about film noir tropes, because this has everything: street-talking, dive bars (under a giant leaf, serving nectar), unheeding thugs (ants), gang warfare (wasps vs ants), a sexy femme fatale (grasshopper) and a sidekick who, one realises as an adult, is a drug addict. (Shakey Jake, who fell in sugar when young, shakes and trembles unless he is given a fix of sugar. If we follow this metaphor, it is morally dodgy that at the end he is rewarded for his troubles with a large sugar cube, but let’s ignore that.)

The oddest thing about going back to children’s books is realising they are very short, and so my biggest complaint was that just when I thought the threads of the mystery had been set up nicely, they were being drawn together rather suddenly, and the conclusion being rushed towards. I suppose it’s a bit much to ask nine-year-olds to read a five hundred page detective novel, but fuck ’em, I want to read it.

However, I was overjoyed to realise, upon searching for Garden of Fear that there is a sequel, so there is more Bug Muldoon I have not read. Why this was not a series that carried on and on is beyond be, because it’s brilliant. I blame the philistines on the carpet.

THEN: Hero appears on a lot of lists (generally just next to David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy) as a ground-breaking young adult novel for a simple reason: an openly gay character. That’s most likely why I read it. When I came up with my list of re-reads I assumed Hero was one of my teenage reads, but on closer inspection of my memory, I realised I read it much later than that, during my first year of university, when I was meticulously filling my amazon wish list with things like the After Elton Top 100 Gay Novels.

And I loved it. It became one of my top ten favourite novels (according to the list I have on my computer.) It was funny, it was engaging, and it had a gay character who was neither stereotype nor neutered. I gave it five stars on my goodreads. That much I can tell you, but if you’d asked me a week ago what else happened in the book I’d have been oddly hard-pressed to tell you a single detail. (This isn’t an isolated occurrence – the same thing happened to me with Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, in that I adored it upon reading and promptly forgot everything about it.)

NOW: Turns out I still love it. Traditionally this book should probably be considered important for the rare opportunity to identify with a gay male lead, but I’ve read so much gay fiction since then that that particular novelty has faded. Instead, I found a whole new bunch of people to sympathise with: his father who keeps his back straight in the face of public scorn, loving someone without knowing how to express it; the geek who wants to be part of the superhero team; the girl who uses a front of anger to hide vulnerability; the woman embracing her age and her mistakes. And sure, all those sound pretty cliched when I boil them down to a few sentences, but Moore’s talent is in making the characters really feel alive. And as for the reviews I’ve read since that claim the writing is a bit over the top… those reviewers have clearly never been a teenage gay.

​This was the first re-read that surpassed its original read (I think… I mean, I can’t actually remember that first read, but…). From a writers point of view there’s some pretty impressive things being handled (including a protracted final battle that doesn’t feel anticlimactic which is really hard to do). But more memorable (I think… I mean, ask me in five years, but…) were the characters, their stories and their vulnerabilities. The scenes that I loved anew this time around (I think, I mean… you get the picture…) were Thom’s desperate quest to hide the porn on his computer, his awkward first kiss in the church parking-lot and the scenes with the invisible mother that carried a more subtle edge of magic realism; it’s these moments that make Hero brilliant. (Let’s hope I remember them all…)

Then: It seems a little odd now to think that the bastion of my childhood reading was something as ridiculously macho as the seemingly-endless Hardy Boys series. (At least, that’s what I thought, until Paul Magrs pointed out how absurdly homoerotic the series is, and directed me to the Mabel Maney ‘Hardly Boys‘ parodies; I desperately wanted to read them in time for this post, but failed.) Nevertheless, between the ages of about 7 and 12 I amassed a dizzying collection of Hardy Boys books (in multiple formats, reprints and covers) and read them avidly. For several years, they were the template for my writing: the stories I wrote featuring my friends and I as detectives morphed from the cosier Enid Blyton model with smugglers and caves into something that could be faintly described as grittier, by which I mean there were more cars being driven (UK age restrictions be damned) and occasionally some guns (UK gun restrictions be damned too.)

The basic character dynamics of the Hardy Boys are easy to remember to this day, and if you’d asked me before I re-read for the blog, I could have told you with ease that Frank was eighteen, dark-haired and serious, and Joe was seventeen, blonde, and hot-headed. I could also have named their father, their girlfriends, and their two friends (one was athletic and had girlfriends, the other was chubby, single and had a clapped out car always referred to as a jalopy.) These basic facts are embedded deep in my reading DNA, but aside from one particular stand-out plot point (involving shoplifted paperclips being essential to construction of a terrorist bomb, which I knew was absurd even at ten) I couldn’t recall a single detail of any of their mysteries.

At some point in my early teens I was quite shaken to discover that Franklin W. Dixon, the writer of the Hardy Boys, was a nonexistent person, and that the books had been written by a series of authors. I’m not sure why I found that fact particular disheartening, but I suspect it was the first time I realised writing books was a purely commercial endeavor, and I didn’t see how that could be possible with such high art as the Hardy Boys.

Now: I’d read enough stray opinions of the series from adult readers (and also read about the series’ ghost-writer’s own hatred of the books) to not have high expectations of my re-read. I chose The Mystery of Cabin Island because I dimly remember it as a favourite, one that I re-read often at the time. The cover features a daring encounter involving an ice-yacht collision; I remember really wanting an ice-yacht, proving that on top of ignorance for UK traffic law, I also had willful disregard of my geographical location.

My previous re-reads for this blog series hadn’t fallen too short of what I remembered, so really how bad could the Hardy Boys be?

A sample of the prose:

“I’d like to get my hands on the skunk who did this!” Biff stormed angrily.

(Notes: 1. Biff is a bad guy. You can tell, because he’s called Biff. He’s actually less subtle about it than Biff in Back to the Future. 2. The skunk is not an actual skunk. 3. There were no calm storms to be found anywhere in the book.)

Further samples:

“Anyone who causes trouble – let me at him!” Biff sang out.

(Notes: 4. I guess Paul was write about that homoeroticism.)

My personal favourite:

Biff knotted his fists angrily. “I’d sure like to give those two guys a good stiff wallop.”

(Notes: 5. Maybe I should meet this Biff?)

So, yes, the prose is godawful, but it doesn’t stop there. The plot is utterly illogical, attempting to cram in a fake-ghost a-la-Scooby-Doo, some priceless-medal-thieves, illogically-angry yobs, the least-strategically-minded villain in history and a lot of squinting through bushes while nothing happens. Whilst I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, oddly motivated criminals aside, the Famous Five, the Three Investigators (review to come) and the Five Find-Outers all kinda held up, this story didn’t even try; but on the flip side, it didn’t tip so far into absurdist to be ironically enjoyable instead. No–it was just plain rubbish.

The reason I can remember the main characters’ personalities so vividly turns out to have nothing to do with characterisation and purely because those particular traits are laid out in exposition seven or eight times. Per chapter. (There’s also a third friend of the Hardy’s who turns up for literally no reason whatsoever other than to fix their window. I’m not sure whether there’s anything subtextual to be read into the fact that this character is a person-of-colour, and exists for no purpose other than services, but if you go down that route there’s plenty of uncomfortable sexism on display, and the chubby character is stupid, lazy, concerned only with food, gullible and easily frightened by ghosts. It’s probably wise not to wobble that particular house of cards.)

To make matters worse, the version I read is allegedly the revised edition, which smoothed over some of the roughness of the original plot (!) and added some subplots. I shiver to think of the original.

All this said, I’m not remotely disappointed. Some of my other reads have left me a bit disillusioned by my memories, but despite all of its many shortcomings, the Mystery of Cabin Island was amiable pulp, which was how I’d already come to think of the series by the time I gave up reading them. When I did some googling, I was swiftly appraised by aficionados of the series that I did not choose a strong title to re-read, and suggested alternatives, but nonetheless, I think I’ll be steering clear of a full re-read. Except for maybe that one with the paperclips.

Then: These are how I remember the facts, though I couldn’t say for certain they’re correct: Creepers was Keith Gray’s first book, either written or published (I can’t recall which) when he was twenty-one. When the book came out, there was an interview with him in the Young Telegraph. I was nine years old.
These facts are relevant firstly because they are why I read the book (how precocious, to read an interview with an author in the newspaper and buy their book!) and secondly because the particular fact of the author being twenty-one was very important. Twenty-one seemed distant, but not ridiculously so, and it was the first time I realised you could be young and be an author too. I had assumed all writers were very very old (like, at least thirty-five or forty), and the idea of someone who was only twenty-one having a book was astonishing. It made my own floppy-disc (remember them?) of Chapter Ones seem real, like one day they might be real books on a shelf.

By my early twenties. (Damn.)

Now: I could remember one thing vividly about the book, which was its twist ending. Given that this was still well-remembered, it’s impossible to say if the twist would still be a surprise reading as an adult. It’s probably not, but from a technical point of view, it’s astonishingly well-managed, and irrespective of the element of surprise, it still has an emotional punch to it.

​What stands out most is how cheerfully coarse the book is. Not in a gratuitous or patronising way (YA can do that in an awkward down-with-the-kidz way), but its definitely not sanitized (YA can also do that in a let’s-not-anger-any-parent-groups way) but in a manner that’s actually pretty representative of the way a thirteen year old protagonist might speak, without going overboard. And I’ve written in this genre and trust me: that’s really hard to do. Plus there’s sneaking fags from the corner shop, and older girls in their bras and knickers: its easy to see why the book got tagged with the ‘for reluctant readers’ label (which is educational code for naughty boys). Which makes me laugh: I loved this book, but at nine, that sort of world was a very long way away from mine. Hell, the same could still be said by the time I was thirteen. For all that, I loved Creepers the first time around, and happily, the book still stands up reading as an adult.

​(And still — published in his early twenties? Really. Goddamit.)

THEN: By far the most obscure book on my re-reads list, I happened to remember it thanks to a single moment in it that snagged at me when I was drawing up the list of childhood books. This one came from the local library, in hardback large print. If you’d asked me, I’d say the cover featured an ethereal, translucent blue bottle, but my recent googling can unearth no such cover on record. The story was set during the Victorian era, I recall, though a moment’s inspection of this memory reveals it to be false, as I also recall the characters driving a Land Rover.

The story involves a boy escaping from captivity and ending up digging up old bottles from makeshift mines in a country house. What stuck with me was a moment when Mouse, the main character (though I couldn’t remember his name) is betrayed by a boy called Ralph (whose name I remember perfectly) and returned to his original captives. Realising the error of his ways, Ralph returns to rescue him, and there is a moment when they lock eyes across the street and Ralph raises a hand, and the two understand that all is forgiven without exchanging words.

I remember this being a powerful moment; perhaps it stood out in a sea of Blytons and Hardy Boys that made everything Loud Screaming Text, and it was unique to run across something with a little more subtext and subtlety. Of course, with distance, it has as much subtlety as your garden variety soap opera, but I was eight–what do you expect?

NOW: So, this book is average. Not rubbish, or even badly written. Just average. I had certainly misremembered the setting, but that might have had something to do with the book’s obvious co-opting of Fagin from Oliver Twist into a 21st century setting. Reading it whilst young, I remember the feeling of intrigue and oddity about the bottle-collecting, as if it was a world one step into fantasy that resided in the hinterlands of the real world. Re-reading it now, it is pedestrian and illogical, and utterly lacking in magic.

As for the moment in which Ralph simply raises his hand, and no words are spoken: this time around, it was devoid of power. Twenty years of reading have taught me every plot mechanic meant he was always going to come back. There was no other way for the story to go, and its predictability robs it of emotional depth. Not to mention that the unspoken subtext I remember is actually, sadly, still text; the book spells out everyone’s feelings in big messy sentences.

But thank the lord it wasn’t three kids and a dog solving crimes.

Then: On occasion, when I was a child, my father took it upon himself to be fatherly and confer literature upon me. He had a small collection of much-loved books – primarily Narnia, of which the Magician’s Nephew was his favourite, specifically the scene in which the Witch stands atop the commandeered the London carriage – but his favourite among them was Brendon Chase, by B.B.

Sunday afternoons were a lagoon of calm; book-ended by church, it was understood that no work happened on a Sunday. Sometimes it would be my parents turn to entertain guests from church, but irrespective of whether we were alone or with company, my mother would always produce a full roast dinner. Then everyone would retire to snooze or read the afternoon away until 4 o’clock rolled around and we would be back on our way out to the evening service.

When I was about seven or eight, my father tried an abortive attempt to use Sunday afternoons to teach me the catechism. I treated it much the same way as I treated piano lessons: a rather clumsy enthusiasm for the duration of the lesson, and an extended absence of practice that meant I never grasped the finer points. He abandoned the catechism fairly quickly.

With the benefit of years, I wonder if he was actively trying to invent something that gave him something in common with his son. Apart from occasionally kicking a football around in the garden, it was always my mother with whom I had shared interests and activities. My father often told an anecdote about how, when his own father returned from war, he had been too afraid to ask him to do anything with him. Instead, he would stand outside his father’s window, kicking a ball against the wall, hoping that his father would hear it and come out and join him. At the time this was little more than a story, and it is only years after my father’s death that I see some of the weight of that story, and begin to wonder about how my father felt about me, and my siblings, and fatherhood. If I might be so bold as to suppose, I would guess that he had felt the absence of his father keenly, but as many of us do, had fallen into the patterns learnt as a child. I wonder now if his telling of that story was a father’s equivalent of kicking the ball against a wall, with his son on the other side of the window. 

On occasion, I suspect he would take it upon himself to seek common ground. Certainly, had the religious aspect of the catechism been the point, it would have continued. Instead, it was replaced with Brendon Chase.

The story is simple: three boys, left to live with their clueless aunt while their parents are abroad, run away to the woods, where they survive remarkably effectively by hunting, trapping and foraging. Meanwhile, their absence causes quite a stir, with the clueless Reverend Whiting (who would rather be hunting butterflies) and the oafish PC Bunting in pursuit. It was my father’s favourite book from his own youth. Each sunday afternoon he read a chapter aloud to me, and unlike the ill-fated catechism, we never missed a week.

His favourite chapter occurred mid-way, in which one of the boys is dispensed to the local village for supplies, and is spotted, making off in a stolen dustcart. There’s a remarkable similarity to the witch atop her carriage; perhaps my father had a weakness for transport-related anrachy. But if I continue to make my leaps of supposition, I might suggest that actually my father was once one of the boys in Brendon Chase, stomping off into the woods in search of animals, living a grand adventure. His childhood home was next to a small copse of trees in which he hunted butterflies, and he pointed out what remained of it every time we passed it on a Sunday morning. And then, somewhere over the years, he had become the Whiting – the mild-mannered reverend who collected his butterflies in cases and secretly rather liked that the boys had run away to join the wilds.

Now: I had some trepidation about returning to this story; some books it is fine to be underwhelmed by when returning to them in adulthood, but this was not one I wished to be so sharply disassembled. With the book in my hands, I realised that I did not recall vast quantities of it (though the climbing of the vast tree, the midnight return to rescue the younger brother, the cart-theft and the bear in the snow all stuck in my mind) and so I experienced a thrilling mixture of discovery and familiarity. Most clearly absent from my memory was the frank bloodthirstiness of the book, with its numerous depictions of hunting and skinning (which unfortunately I happened to be reading around the time of Cecil the Lion) although it always errs on the side of survival over pleasure.

​What resonates the most is the sense of magic that slowly unfolds throughout the book; by the end, there is a sense of the mystical about the forest, with the trees singing, and the bear that haunts the white winter. And with some years wisdom on my shoulders, I might wonder at what it tells me that my father’s favourite book is about running away from all the responsibilities of the world and leading a life of primal idyll away from everything. (And perhaps, I might also wonder at the resonance of a book in which the boys run away only because their father is absent, only to return in the final pages to scoop them up and return them to safety. But I’ve long since learned not makes these kinds of guesses and I no longer have the chance to ask. All I can do is sit down on a Sunday afternoon, and read his favourite books, and suppose.)

Then: I was pretty much reared on Enid Blyton books. From as young as I can remember, I used to buy second-hand books and there was one particular bookshop in Beverley that we visited regularly which had a little children’s section down a few steps. It had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I used to leave with twenty or thirty thin paperbacks, usually mystery stories, and more often than not Enid Blyton.

I read all of the Famous Five books, the Adventure books, the Secret Seven and the Find-Outers. As a result of this I was convinced that a) if I had a dog it would help me solve crimes, b) clues were everywhere, c) I could very easily be a master of disguise, d) all school holidays necessarily involve being tied up and put in grave danger, e) lemons make good invisible ink, f) it is entirely logical to have passwords for your secret society even when you are intimately familiar with every member and g) I could write mystery stories. The last one was roughly speaking true. Alongside the piles of second hand books, I was also bought a string of knackered old typewriters, with which I produced masterpieces of mystery fiction.

In addition to kickstarting my career as a writer, Enid Blyton was also responsible for my mild flirtation with cross-dressing. The Five-Find Outers’ Fatty, despite being twelve, portly and male, frequently disguised himself imperceptibly as a whole range of people, including old women, French students, and carnival greasers. I was convinced I could do the same, and requisitioned my whole family to save me ‘disguises’. As the only people who really participated were my mother and sister, I consequently ended up with a large box mainly consisting of petticoats and blouses. Although my mother later blamed my homosexuality on my fondness for scented candles, she never seemed to worry about having spent my childhood providing me with floral skirts to wear.

Now: I didn’t have very high expectations of either the Famous Five or the Five Find-Outers. With perspective, I could clearly identify that Blyton’s books were sexist, racist and highly repetitive. Re-reading didn’t disabuse me of this: they are, they definitely are. It’s quite surprising that I got through two books without the character of any gypsies being maligned (although she does have a pop at the French in both books. Thankfully, the character named Sooty is not an African-American as I initially feared.)

However, they’re nowhere near as bad as I expected. For the Five Find Outers I read The Mystery of the Secret Room, which was my favourite of the series. I can’t remember why–probably something to do with the invisible ink. A few miscellaneous observations are as such:

• The plot actually makes sense for three quarters of the novel, right up until the reveal of the criminals who a) aren’t really doing much illegal but are arrested anyway and b) clearly had a stupid plan.
• The dog is the most developed character in the whole book.
• The female characters might as well not exist. The same can practically be said of the male characters. In fact, having a band of five characters doing detective work is redundant, as only one of them does anything of note.
• Has anyone seen their parents? Should someone call social services?

For the Famous Five, I read Five Go To Smuggler’s Top, which was also my favourite, presumably because of Smuggler’s Top itself which is a creepy old house atop an island surrounded by marshes that is impenetrable when the mist and water covers the causeway. (I’m not sure whether this was directly stolen from The Woman In Black , but it was hard to ignore as an adult reader.)

Prior to reading it, I did some research online to find one of what I assumed would be a multitude of essays about the genderqueer nature of George/Georgina, and was surprising to find none. Upon reading, I realised that Georgina’s desire to be George never reads as repressed lesbianism/gender dysmorphia, but instead just reads as an extreme brand of sexism because, y’know, boys are superior. (It’s slightly confused by the casting of Jemima Rooper in the TV show, who went on to be the arch-teen-lesbian of TV.)
A few miscellaneous observations are as such:

• The plot actually makes sense for three quarters of the novel, right up until the reveal of the criminals who a) aren’t really doing much illegal but are arrested anyway and b) clearly had a stupid plan.
• The dog is the most developed character in the whole book.
• The female characters might as well not exist. The same can practically be said of the male characters. In fact, having a band of five characters doing detective work is redundant, as only one of them does anything of note.
• Has anyone seen their parents? Should someone call social services?

Then: My primary school really got behind World Book Day in my final year there — I think it was one of the first years that it really took off. Everyone was to dress as their favourite book character for the day. Because I hadn’t marked myself out enough as weird, I decided to go for an utterly obscure children’s literature character from five decades before I was born. Certainly nobody within the walls of that school had ever heard of Jennings, including the teachers I think, who were mostly baffled. I went to great lengths for the costume (unlike my best friend, who came in a white t-shirt and jeans as Charlie Bucket, which is the costume equivalent of going out on Halloween dressed as ‘yourself’). Purple ribbon was sewed onto a blazer to create stripes, a colour-coordinated school tie was borrowed and, most authentically, I wore my dad’s actual boarding-school cap (which was normally kept in a glass display cabinet alongside Treacle, his battered teddy bear.) Nobody knew who the hell I was, although the fact that it was a school uniform was enough for my teacher to pair me with a girl dressed as a St. Trinian for the catwalk show (yes, seriously, catwalk show. They really got behind World Book Day.)

I imagine it counts as my first taste of cosplay, and probably my earliest example of specifically engaging with a book above and beyond just reading it, or shamelessly ripping it off in my own fledgling writing. The Jennings books were enjoyed but not necessarily favorites; I’d read seven or eight of them, out of order and without feeling the need to collect them (I was surprised to discover on re-reading there are upwards of twenty of them) but fifteen years later I can still quite vividly remember the specifics of those I did read: the new boys running away, an errant cartwheel, a collapsing hut. Oddly enough, what I don’t particularly remember was them being actually funny. Light, yes, and entertaining, but not actually funny. Quite why I’m not sure, but the best reason I can attribute is that the absurd shenanigans so closely matched the anecdotes my father told of boarding school that I didn’t so much interpret Jennings as comedy, but as social realism.

Now: Turns out they are really funny, actually. As in, reading them in bed with my partner asleep, I had to get up and go to the bathroom because I had wound up in a giggle-loop over a complicated problem involving where to hide a packet of fish, and was shaking the bed with contained laughter. I chose Jennings and Darbishire to re-read, one of the earlier volumes, because I clearly remembered a plot that revolved around a print-your-own-newspaper set, and when I read the book as a child, I immediately requested such a set (though god knows why, given how disastrously it all goes in the book).

But it turns out there are a whole bunch of other set-pieces that are much funnier and more memorable. I did try and summarise a few of the set-ups (eating increasing numbers of donuts at a teashop to hide the fact that they have no money to pay for the donuts, for example) and then had to delete them as, without the benefit of the fractured child logic that moves the plot along, they make absolutely no sense. But Buckeridge has created a sort of nostalgia-topian (a word I am coining right this second) world of curiosity and baffling decision-making skills that builds smoothly when you’re reading it, as all adept situation comedy does.

​The only faintly irritating note is that, it turns out, the copy I bought is from a 70s reboot of the series in which it was deemed that children would be unable to understand the boarding school world of several decades earlier, and thus such confusing phrases as ‘Preparatory School’ were excised, alongside (apparently, though I don’t remember any of them) a whole bunch of Latin-based jokes. And really, you have to admire any children’s book series that has the audacity to make Latin-based jokes, even if they do cut them out later.

THEN: I started reading the Redwall series when I was perhaps eight, or nine. They were recommended to my nice clean-living parents by another nice clean-living church family as a series of nice clean-living books, and so my mother bought two paperbacks at our school book fair – The Bellmaker and Outcast of Redwall (neither of which, in the context of the whole series, are exactly highlights, but no matter). Over the years I completed the back catalogue and continued to collect each one as it came out. Jacques excelled at creating a vivid, varied and ever-developing world–the stater slopes for the complex world-building of the epic fantasy novels I would later drift to. And although the clean-living church family approved of its lack of swearing, sex and general courseness, the Redwall series has a surprisingly vivid streak of violence through them that doesn’t back away from the savagery of the animal kingdom.

For me, the appeal of the Redwall series lay in the idyll of the world: the battles between goodbeasts and verminfolk was all well and good, but it was the tranquil world of Redwall Abbey, with its great hall, and its cellars, and its general goodwill to all that made me love the books. Ironically, this flies in the face of every wisdom I’ve learnt as a writer, as my favourite parts were always though with absolutely no dramatic tension, where everyone just hung about having a nice time. But I’ve always loved books that make me want to run away and become part of them, and the Redwall series epitomised that. Clearly Jacques and the publishers knew that, as they also released an illustrated book about Redwall’s Great Winter Feast that had zero plot whatsoever, but a great deal of singing and the consuming of october ale and deeper’n’ever pie. They also released a build-your-own-paper-Redwall which I received for Christmas one year, although it turned out to be so wicked-complicated that even my mother (who was more than capable of that sort of thing) struggled to piece it together.

NOW: I was saddened to hear of the death of Brian Jacques a few years ago. The Redwall series felt like (pardon the very-specific pun) part of the tapestry of my childhood, and his passing had all sorts of implications about the distance and dwindling of that youth. I also found myself stung with guilt to realise that I had forsaken the collecting of the last novels in the Redwall saga, with several unread on my shelf, and further books unbought, and felt a little like I’d let the author down.

I remembered The Pearls of Lutra vividly as far-and-away my favourite of the series, mainly because the main plot involved the solving of a trail of riddles around Redwall to locate the titular pearls. Jacques was always good at riddles, but they were usually fairly incidental to the plot; Lutra placed them front and centre. Possibly the most shocking moment of punctured nostalgia for me was realising upon re-reading how damn easy the riddles were (though it’s possible that I simply dimly remembering their solutions.)

And dare I say it… I found myself disappointed. Redwall was probably the one series on my re-read list that I hold in the highest regard with the most potential for a shortfall, and unfortunately Pearls of Lutra didn’t hold the power it once did. The idyll of Redwall — especially the ‘cute’ Dibbuns — instead came off jarring and trite, and I realised quickly that the quest against evil that preoccupies the story is precisely the same quest as every other Redwall book I can immediately recall. These things you don’t tend to notice as a young reader when the clothes the archetypes are dressed up in are a little more convincing, but from a distance of years they became readily apparent.

​That said, I suspect Pearls was a victim of my high expectations, and possibly a faulty memory — I loved Pearls as a ten-year-old, but other volumes of the book that I didn’t remember as well might have turned out to be a better choice as an adult reader. And I’ve had a good run so far (eight books that have all lived up to their memories – I’m not reading in the order this blog appears). I couldn’t say I disliked the book; rather, I ‘liked’ it where I had once ‘loved’ it, and upon closing the book I felt a quite odd sense of sadness — fleeting, not overwhelming, and difficult to define in words — that I hadn’t found everything I remembered within the stones of Redwall.

Then: I was late to the party with Harry Potter; Goblet of Fire came out in my final year of primary school and I’d never read any of them. They were disapproved of in my home; there was a considerable backlash from conservative Christians over the book’s ‘temptation of children to black magic’ and therefore, unexamined, my parents had banned it (this despite my mother’s favourite novel being Lord of the Rings, which she had given me to read aged nine.) Sometime during my first year of secondary school I decided I wanted to read them (though it wasn’t quite the juggernaut that it later became so this wasn’t entirely out of peer pressure, and more out of curiosity at a title I had seen around a good deal) and the easiest way to do it without parental notice was from the library. In fact, I didn’t read Philosopher’s Stone but listen to it, in its excellent audiobook form read by Stephen Fry. which I snuck out below parental notice amongst a pile of detective mysteries and epic fantasy hardbacks.

I was a very quick convert to the series. Along with the rest of my generation, I was completely absorbed into the world of Hogwarts, and sped through the rest of the series. My friend and I went to the weekend previews of the first film (a week before general release), queuing up with lines of people in costume. My parents, resigned to the fact that I had already read four of the books and there wasn’t much they could do about it, bought a tract on the subject from the local Christian bookshop. When they had done with it, I snuck it out of their bedroom (for it had, ironically, somehow become as contraband as the Harry Potter books themselves) and skim-read it. It came down on the side of Harry Potter being harmless, and distinguished between magic-in-fiction and real life, which as a fan of Gandalf, my mother should have already known. And so I was left to it.

I loved Harry Potter for two reasons: firstly, the maturing of the characters and books that was pretty well in line with my own aging (give or take a few years or so). When we saw the final film at a midnight screening, the entire audience (all early twenties like us) stood up and applauded at the end–it felt like the final closing of an era. Secondly: the encyclopedic detail with which Rowling created her world. It was a world I dearly wanted to escape to (and I am not the only one still waiting for my Hogwarts letter), and the richness of every little thing stuffed into the seams of the novel were addictive. When I say encyclopedic, I mean literally: at one point I endeavored to create an exhaustive encyclopedia of every single person, thing, place and spell mentioned in the books (this was pre-internet-fandom which did the job for me several years later, and pre-Pottermore, which is sort of a legitimized version.) I even wrote fan-fiction, a short story entitled Harry Potter and the Sword of Light which I sent to J.K. Rowling. Sadly, it’s completely vanished on some long-lost floppy disc somewhere (remember them?), but I dimly recall that it involved a great deal of fussing about on Diagon Alley and portkeys in the Divination tower. And presumably a sword. When the next book came out a year later, and killed off a pupil with my surname, I was convinced it had been taken from my letter to her (having said in interview that she often took names from her fan-mail.)

Now: Philosopher’s Stone is not one of the volumes I have ever returned to–I’ve reread several, primarily Prisoner of Azkaban–and its also my least favourite film. On coming back to read it, I had anticipated finding it childish; several of my contemporaries suggested I would, and were you to place it besides Deathly Hallows the difference would be enormous.

Philosopher’s Stone is not childish, however. It is simple and direct, but never childish. It’s striking to see Rowling’s completely comfortable and streamlined prose, compared to the lengthier approach she takes later, and what stood out to me on re-reading was how many times iconic moments are rendered in a single paragraph. The story is still as dense in detail as I remembered (I have often found that opening books in series seem oddly light when returning to them, as they have yet to accumulate lore as they continue – Harry Potter is an exception, and I really believe the tales of how much of this Rowling had completely planned out.) To deepen this, I read it in concert with the read-a-long on Pottermore that grants access to occasional nuggests of new information; my borderline-autistic need for encyclopedic documentation re-arose in full force.

Likewise, her opening chapters with the Dursleys have taken on a completely different light. Largely forgotten as the preface to the magical world that follows, this time round I had new appreciation from the sharply satirical nature it takes, and the everyday monstrosity of the Dursleys. Perhaps its something about age; despite their clear villainy, it’s somehow easier to understand their need for picket-fence normality in the face of the wildness of whatever else lies outside.

​That said, nothing has changed. I still want to run away to Hogwarts, and I’m still waiting for my letter. When embarking on this re-reads challenge, I was worried about how many of these books might prove to be a massive disappointment to me, and ruin my childhood memories (this happens frequently to me with films; watching Willow and Legend past the age of 20 was thoroughly galling), but Harry Potter at least doesn’t fail the test.