Childhood favourites
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
I’m sure it will come as no surprise to anyone reading this blog that I spent my entire childhood and all my teenage years with my head in a book. I carried books in my bag to school, took out the maximum number from the library every week and dashed home to spend hours sitting curled in a chair, reading.
I had an ever-expanding canon of personal favourites, which I would reread so many times that I can still quote some of them off by heart today. Listing some of these favourites will immediately tag me as a 90s child; most of them were written by Australian authors in the late 80s and early-to-late 90s. They included the disturbing, often dystopian science-fiction novels of Victor Kelleher, the works of Gillian Rubinstein and Jackie French (who thrilled me by writing for her short story collection Rainstones a story, ‘Dancing Dinosaurs’, that was set in my hometown of Canberra, a rarity in Australian fiction), Catherine Jinks’s historical Pagan Chronicles series, set during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and John Marsden’s Tomorrow series.
It was the Tomorrow series – or more specifically, the upcoming film adaptation of Tomorrow, When the War Began, the first book in the series – that got me thinking about my own complex relationship with my favourite childhood books.
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