I keep a regular journal besides LJ/DW. I have since I was 9 years old -- it's a well-worn story I tell kids when we start weekly journaling at the beginning of each school year. I was nine years old, in the winter of 1975/76, and my mom told me I had to go clean up the trash cans that had been knocked over in our alley. In the slush and the snow and the ice of February. I was so pissed, because **I** hadn't knocked over our trash cans, and there were two units in our two flat apartment, and why ME? Anyway, I stomped downstairs and put the heavy, dingy, dirty metal trash cans upright and gingerly picked up trash to put back in them. Somehow thrown clear from the trash, on a dirty bank of snow near the back fence in the alley, there was a brown and maroon book with the word "Journal" embossed in gold letters on the front. It wasn't new, but only one or two of the first pages had been used -- just numbers, no name or anything. It was ruled as some kind of account book, maybe? Anyway, I considered it a perk of the unfair chore, and took it upstairs and began a very banal diary, printed in pencil. We were learning cursive that year, and I complained about that in one of the first entries. I love my semi-cursive normal handwriting now, but I hated my handwriting until I changed it by force of will in ... maybe sophomore year of high school? Anyway, it's not like my entries were fascinating, not even for a nine-year-old. Stuff about the TV my sister and I watched. Stuff about how stupid the Bicentennial was. When our cat Inessa (after Inessa Armand, Lenin's lover and a revolutionary in her own right) died.

That diary lasted through the rest of fifth grade, sixth, and into seventh grade. It was journal Roman Numeral I. I am on journal LXXII now. I have lost one or maybe two over the years, which is horrifying. One I lost in the Northwestern University Library, and one the first year I was a teacher, at my middle school in West Oakland. Luckily, that one I had only just started, and in both cases I had gotten over writing "[Redacted First Name] [Redacted Last Name] 827 Monroe St. Evanston, IL United States, North America, Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Universe."

I did not write in my journal this year once between my total hysterectomy in December of 2021 and the end of radiation treatments in April of 2022.

I don't write when I am depressed. I am starting to write a little, now, in the past couple of months (though I wouldn't say I am NOT depressed, right now). It's also hard, when I am depressed (or perhaps this is just laziness, which I have a strong tendency towards) to keep track of my reading. I read indefatigably, but I don't read very... consciously? With discrimination? Reading for me is comfort of the most basic sort, and maybe because of that, I do a prodigious amount of re-reading. There are books I would not be surprised if I have read more than 50 times, no lie. Anne of Green Gables, for instance. Ha, it just struck me that it's a Canadian classic, and it's a Canadian series that sparked my impulse to write this LJ/DW entry.

In terms of keeping track of my reading, I joined Goodreads several years ago (I was going to write "a few years ago" but time surges on, and I think it's been more than "a few" by now) and signed up eagerly to the book challenge, knowing that if I include re-reads (probably illegal in some way) I would EASILY read 365 books a year. It absolutely astounded or horrified kids when I would show them completed tallies of 365-books-a-year. I think I reached 500 one year? But recording the books... oh, that's a pain in the ass, including re-reads. I have a million tags, and I have to add one for what year I am re-reading the book in and it's a slow process to look it up on Goodreads, and just... annoying. For new books, choosing all the categories, deciding whether to review the book, etc. Just tedious, especially since I would never do it when I finished a book, but only in great gulps, every few months.

I haven't done it -- set a goal or tried to record my reading -- for maybe two years now? Or three? Probably three.

But tonight, as I start the fifth book in a mystery series I never read before (I might have heard of the author, maybe? I'm not sure) I felt an inclination to write about my reading in 2022. Not in great detail. Don't expect any challenging titles (I don't think). But in lieu of the Goodreads challenge, and because several of the people I enjoy reading on LJ/DW write about what they read, I thought I'd list some -- dunno if I could even do ALL by November of this year -- of what I've been reading.

First of all... there are categories/genres I read a lot: historical fiction, mysteries -- and within mysteries, especially historical mystery series (all periods and all places), mysteries of place (that is, they are contemporary but their settings are crucial -- National Parks (Anna Pigeon, by Nevada Barr), Ireland, England, France (including a series I am very conflicted about because the author seems like an asshole Washington journalist who gets wet dreams about spy bullshit but chooses to write about the Dordogne, a little like a mash-up of My Year in Provence (which I hasten to add, I've never read) and that idiot insurance agent (I think) Tom Clancy. These are the Inspector Bruno novels...), India, the American South in various locales, etc., some fantasy, some sci-fi series (Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson, Lois McMaster Bujold, John Varley, Vonda McIntyre, Octavia Butler and so on), Regency Romances, Young Adult Fiction, some contemporary novels (though rarely super recent ones; I seem to require some years, maybe even a decade, for new releases to mellow, or something. Well, except for YA. I read more recent YA, more quickly, probably because as a teacher, I want to be able to make current recommendations. Or I just like a lot of new YA. Not all of it. Some stuff my nieces used to recommend... nope. Nope to Sarah J. Maas, for example. And to Rick Riordan.

Anyway, the series I encountered belatedly (there are 18 books now, apparently) thanks to The Guardian, my comfort read of a daily newspaper -- yes, it's a liberal rag, but it's a marginally better liberal rag than the NYT, though I read both -- is one I also have some conflicts about. I am suspending those hesitations for now. It's a mystery series -- probably close to the "cozy" subgenre -- by Louise Penny, with the main character as a homicide Chief Inspector with the Sûreté de Québec. This is an Anglo writing about a Francophone Québecois character, so from get, it makes me uncomfortable, but fascinated. I think Penny started the series in 2005, and already there was a movie deal by 2013. I even like the actor chosen to play Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. But oh, man, I didn't make it five minutes into the movie before I had to quit. As a student told me this week (it made my heart pitter pat) "All movies are worse than the books". This one, damn. Nathaniel Parker is a Brit, but he went for what seemed like an American accent (though the first book lays down the canon that Gamache's English is Oxford English... weirdly, because as a college student, he learned English there, which seems... kind of ridiculous... not that he wouldn't have learned English earlier -- I've met plenty of Québecois for whom not learning English is a political act -- but that he'd be accepted to a program at Oxford knowing none. ANYWAY... There was no attempt for any of the actors to a) speak any French, b) have a Québecois accent... which is my preferred French accent. I went there when I was fourteen, the summer after graduating 8th grade, to stay with lefty friends of my parents as a graduation gift. It was a transformative experience for me... right after the failure of one of the referendums on separation (1980), and at the same time as le jour de Saint Jean-Baptiste, the 24th of June, Québec's national holiday. I got to help at a working class neighborhood's fête, despite my pretty pathetic two years of middle school French. But man, I learned to say "Tu veux une bière? Labatts ou Molson? Un sandwich au jambon ou au fromage?" flawlessly. I was a hit with the neighborhood kids younger than me, though we could barely communicate... we managed with drawings and chalk art on the sidewalks. Québec flags and "Québecois et fière de l'être" and "Gens du Pays".

So reading this series is weird. Its setting -- in a Brigadoonish cozy village in the Eastern Townships just over the border from Vermont -- is both attractive and unbelievable, a pastiche of Canadian and Québecois comfort food (pouding au chômeur à l'érable, habitant soup, poire Hélène, etc...) and an Anglican church, a proud heritage of United Empire Loyalists (that is, for Americans, Loyalists who fled their defeat in the American Revolution) (I should be grateful that at least, so far, there are no Orange Lodge Protestants from the North of Ireland or Scotland in this mythical village) and Francophone Québecois villagers.

Louise Penny

Still Life
A Fatal Grace
The Cruelest Month
A Rule Against Murder

C. J. Sansom (Tudor mystery series I somehow never read until a few weeks ago, a very odd lacuna in my generally robust collection of early and late medieval mysteries)

Dissolution -- fascinating, taking the backdrop of Cromwell's and Henry VIII's money grab from dissolving the monasteries of England.
Dark Fire
Sovereign
Revelation
Heartstone -- includes the backdrop of the wreck of the Mary Rose, Henry the VIII's gigantic flagship, in a naval battle against the French
Lamentation -- includes a lot about the Religious struggles, and Catherine Parr
Tombland -- I'm still reading this one; it's very good so far, but these mysteries tend to be intense (definitely not cozies) so I sometimes take a break... into which fell the Armand Gamache series.

Sara Sheridan (Brit mystery series centered in Brighton in the 1950s, with a female lead who was with OSS during WWII, and is now a private detective cum debt collector)

Brighton Belle
London Calling
England Expects
British Bulldog

There are five more of these, but ONLY THE FIRST THREE are available on Kindle, and only two more of them have been uploaded to my new (but quite old in internet years) love, Internet Archive. They are available in Amazon.uk, but not .us Bastards. I think Operation Goodwood is on Internet Archive, but I'm almost saving it, because it's depressing that the other books aren't there. I really like this series, which is close to a subgenre of historical fiction I enjoy -- WWII homefront books -- and post WWII historical (and YA historical) novels, such as those by Michelle Magorian. I do wonder whether the racial aspects of the friendship between the main character and a Black Brit woman whose parents are from the Caribbean is all that realistic. I can't decide if it's super woke (or if that is a problem for me).

Okay, this entry got away from me. It's been a while. Next time maybe more books and less autobiography. I miss Québec, though.

Day 1: Have reading and writing changed (in utility, in purpose, in percentage of literacy, in any way) since the advent of video?

There ended up being 75 topics, and maybe I'll come up with more, and I'll leave that post stuck at the top there, in case anyone ELSE wants to come up with more topics, but meanwhile, I thought what I might do is write a couple of these entries a week, not forcing myself to write every day. My mother SAYS she might join me and do one entry a week, to sort of ease her way into blogging. I hope she does. redlibrarian39, I'm talking to YOU. Even my older niece has gotten into the blogging act, but she's using Blogger, with a friend of hers in NYC. They're silly and funny, the pair of them, and also very good at writing.

On today's topic -- honestly, I feel like I shot my bolt on this when I made my class write on the topic basically as a punishment when they couldn't settle down one day last year (and by last year I mean, during the 2011-2012 school year). If I could find the handwritten two pages I did then, I'd scan them and put them in here. I don't want to rewrite the whole thing from memory. What I write below is not what I wrote that day, though it may share some elements.

Anecdotally, as a teacher, I feel that the worth of learning to read complicated or deep material has suffered since the popularization of TV, movies, and videos in general. Even when I was a kid, our culture was still not entirely video-saturated -- our crappy black and white TV got only, what, between six and nine channels, and stopped broadcasting at midnight, going to crackly snow. And movies were an occasional treat, at a movie theater, for $3.25. $2.25, matinee. Probably my generation watched fewer movies, in fact, than children in the fifties, for who (at least according to Stephen King) it seems to have been a weekly thing. In any case, before I digress further -- reading was the imaginative escape I sought, at any rate. I know that there was already (in fact, that there doubtless always was) a large proportion of kids who thought reading was boring, most likely because they weren't great at it. That's the thing. I didn't really understand until I took credentialing classes in teaching reading that it was such a hard skill to acquire. If you understand anything less than 95% of the words in a selection you are reading, the frustration level is so high that you won't understand enough of the text to continue it. Thus, the smaller reading vocabulary you have, the crappier things (generally -- the "lower interest" texts) you'll have available to read at your reading level. But if you challenge yourself too much, the frustration pushes you down.

More than that -- because I think that that problem must have existed since literacy has existed -- with all of the diversions and distractions and substitutions for text offered by audio-visual narratives, I think that people in the past generation or so have not developed the skill of picturing what they either read, or hear, in their head. I ask students what they picture when I am reading aloud, and most of them have a hard time, unless there is a movie version of the text, and they've seen it. For me, I always had such a clear picture in my mind from fiction that I was almost universally disappointed by the look imposed on characters if a film WAS made from whatever the book was. My niece is like that. My students are mostly not like that -- at least the ones in the English/Language Arts Support class are not like that.

It is a little hard to tell whether the students who don't have a Support class have that mental picturing skill to a higher degree... from their weekly reading logs, it is clear that some of them read challenging and complex texts (one kid is seriously working his way through a number of 19th century classics, from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson through Melville's Moby Dick) and that they do imagine scenes... they write specifically about what they can picture in part of the daily log. But for many of them, they read and reread the Wimpy Kid books, or the Junie B. Jones books, both of which are elementary school level texts...

Science fiction has had a lot to say, predictively, about whether reading will cease to be something that the majority of people can do. Maybe I am more affected by reading sci fi than by looking at actual data? The two authors whose predictions I remember most immediately are Neal Stephenson and John Varley. For Stephenson, most non-elite people in his corporatized future (in one book, Snow Crash the only political states are the balkanized corporations and private companies which own and run each aspect of society) only "read" what he calls mediaglyphs, which are some set of symbols you can use to operate various machines -- like the icons on your desktop -- "open", "close", "turn on", "turn off", "go forward" etc. For Varley, he doesn't get as specific about what remnants of literacy there might be, except that in his 8 Worlds novel* that is focused on a journalist and the world of news coverage Steel Beach there are (actually, also in The Golden Globe, another of the 8 Worlds novels) there are carefully "leveled" versions of any text, from fully written, through something with a limited vocabulary, to simply audio and visual, which he assumes is the version the vast majority access. Written -- electronically, on pads much like today's tablets -- newspapers are quaint dinosaurs entirely subsidized by the State. Varley (although he seems himself to be a libertarian) does HAVE a State, unlike Stephenson's mini-entities. Varley's State is, however, run by a Central Computer that is functionally self-aware and smarter than humans are capable of being.

Okay, I digressed again. Nevertheless, I think my point is, overall... that maybe literacy for the majority IS something that is going to be transformed by our culture's increasing use of video for every purpose. You know, unless we reach a capitalist and ecological crisis that has us starkly facing "socialism or barbarism" and ending up with barbarism. In that case, I guess reading words written by hand on some facsimile of paper will again become a crucial skill. OR NOT (that latter option would be the conclusion drawn by one of my mother's favorite post-Apocalyptic novels -- yes, she loves that whole genre -- Earth Abides.

Obviously yes -- since I wasn't addicted a year ago and am not now -- and also yes, if by Tumblr you mean LJ, I am still into LiveJournal, stubbornly clinging on to the small circle of people I feel I know on this platform.

Oh, my god, the relief at being able to fucking post to LJ... I mean, I imported the rest of my recent entries to Dreamwidth, yes, but it is being insanely slow at loading, too, and ... well, here are my issues with it -- I don't really care about what nihilistic_kid critiques as being spammed by them a billion times a week about trolling -- I don't think I actually get those emails in my inbox; they stay at DW, where I ignore them, knowing that of the 72 emails in that inbox, none are from anyone I actually know. HOWEVER, here are ye Issues, and if you know of solutions, or whatever, tell me:

1. There doesn't seem to be a profile page with a place for writing out one's numerous and recherché interests. How, therefore, can I search interests, other than in the clunky way of laboriously thinking up an interest and typing it into the search interests field, which then gives me only a page of icons and titles of various DW journals (most of which, when I just did this, hadn't been updated for 78 weeks).

2. Relatedly, it's hard to see who other people are "reading", e.g. friended to, without such a User Info page. Maybe there is one, and I'm just missing it? With interests listed and a short bio and a list of friended journals? You know, like LiveJournal has?

3. Of people I know here, LITERALLY only five have found me and friended me there -- oursin, springheel_jack, florence_craye; ironed_orchid; and sabotabby.

4. Can't list the music you're listening to -- I mean, I guess I COULD, by hand, at the bottom of any given entry. But I won't always remember. I sort of like that feature.

3. DW, too, is loading pages at a snail's pace.

Okay, now REALLY, the next entry (should LJ remain open for business for a while, today) will be on the topic of all things Hindi related. So, if any of the between 13 and 24 of you who read this journal want to be on THAT filter, please comment on that post.

ETA: Okay, I have seen the profile page and updated my interests, so that helps somewhat

Wow, I'm more than a third of the way done, thank whatever. The patron saint of books, apparently.

Today: One Hit Wonders

More or less. Some of them have written more than one book, but not much more. Some of them apparently only had one book in them, possibly distilling some childhood experience... some of them write primarily for adults, but had one YAF book percolating away in their mind. Some of them died young. One of them.

The authors:

Yuri Suhl

Indi Rana

Vonda McIntyre

Pamela Sargent

Frances Temple

Yuri Suhl's book, Uncle Misha's Partisans, is part of the quite extensive subgenre of YAF-fiction-on-the-Holocaust. His is virtually unique, however, because it is about Jewish partisans in the Ukraine. Apparently it is based on his own childhood, though in some ways it so perfectly fulfills the fantasy that there was a way to resist and survive the Nazis that it's hard to believe it could be true. Other excellent entries in this subgenre include Jane Yolen's Briar Rose, Lois Lowry's Number the Stars, and Jane Yolen's other book -- The Devil's Arithmetic, which mixes a sort of time travel/Holocaust trope, and is very, very good. I guess it's more YAF than Briar Rose, which shares elements of a romance and general fiction.

Anyway, Yuri Suhl's book was the first one I'd ever read about the partisans, and it caught my imagination, deeply. The scenes where partisans execute a collaborating Ukraine policeman, after fooling his wife into letting them wait for him in her village house, which is stuffed with loot from local deported Jews... chilling. And the young male protagonist manages to be a hero in a way that is believable. The tone of the book is not unlike some sort of meld of the 1970s miniseries (the late 70s was a great time for epic miniseries, like Roots and this one) Holocaust and Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers -- I am extremely miffed that that last book is not available as an ebook. Yet, I hope. I don't know how available Uncle Misha's Partisans is -- let me check. Well, you can buy it used. And, in fact, there is now a true-to-life biography of Mottele, the hero of Yuri Suhl's book, a young Jewish violinist/partisan. See, here.

Indi Rana wrote a book I return to again and again (well, I return to a lot of books, but this one is a special favorite). The Roller Birds of Rampur is the story of an Indian-British girl who has come up against the deep racism of her white boyfriend's family, in her final year before college. Or A levels or something like that, anyway. She becomes incredibly depressed, and decides to go stay with her grandparents on a working farm in India. The story deals with how she comes to terms with who she is, having been raised in Britain, and also how she struggles with what India is like -- especially caste and the condition of peasant women. Her grandfather was a Marxist who came to question Stalinism's utility for India... he talks with her a lot about Hindu philosophy, dharma, karma, etc. The book is thoughtful and moving and informative, all three. I love it. I wish she'd written more, but as far as I know, she hasn't. She has a worthy competitor, however, in the more recent books by Kashmira Sheth. I'll do her another time.

Vonda McIntyre and Pamela Sargent. These are both female authors of sci fi which is more often written for adults. But each of them have written at least one book that more properly is YAF. Vonda McIntyre's Barbary is a good piece of sci-fi -- space station, cat, teenage girl... gah, I'm having difficulty remembering more of the plot! That's not a good advertisement for it! But she's a great writer of sci fi in general, just trust me on this! I have a hard time knowing which novels of hers I like the best... I love Dreamsnake which I think I read while I was still in middle school. And I like her immediate future quartet about spaceflight and alien encounters, and her books which deal with intentionally bioengineered aquatic humans, the Divers. Her politics are very good.

Pamela Sargent wrote Earthseed, which is a YAF story about a colony ship with only children aboard, heading for a new planet and trying to teach them how to survive. It's quite bleak, and while it predates Octavia Butler by a long way (I am pretty sure... I guess I should check), there are distinct similarities in some of the plot, and in the tone, with Butler's Dawn. I wish Sargent, too, had written more. Ha! In fact, surprise ending, she has. "Without fanfare..." as Amazon puts it. Indeed. She just recently continued the Earthseed idea -- it was written in 1983 -- and last year put out Farseed, and coming this November, Seed Seeker. They sound great, if not as groundbreaking as Earthseed. Now to check when Dawn was first published. Maybe it came first! No, I don't think so. Dawn seems to have been published in 1997 or so. But at least I was able just now to download Lilith's Brood, which is all of the Xenogenesis trilogy, via Borders' ebooks.

Frances Temple -- yikes! I left her off... she more properly belongs in my historical YAF entry, but she's definitely part of this group, too. She wrote a great medieval period YAF book, The Ramsay Scallop, which covers similar territory to basically all of the Karen Cushman books (that is, England in the Middle Ages), but has less humor and more consideration of what pilgrimage meant to Catholics. The main characters in this book are on their way to Santiago de Compostela, in Spain, and on their way, they encounter an Andalusian Muslim, who strangely hasn't yet been expelled. Well... I can't remember right now the exact time (apart from Queen Isabella of Spain finishing off Granada or wherever, before funding Columbus) most Moors were expelled... so maybe his lone existence isn't strange. But he seems to be alone. Anyway, a useful exploration of religion, race, and otherness. Frances Temple also wrote a book about children during Papa Doc's Haiti. She was pretty amazing. And then she died young, of cancer, which SUCKS.

Damn this is hard!

I again have to pretend like this is still today (which is IS, really) July 20th, and not July 21st (which it ISN'T, not really).

And it's fairly late, so I am less into writing about books and writing now than I might normally be. I saw an enjoyable Netflix instant watch tonight -- a Luc Besson film that involved a lot of parcour (parkour? I don't remember how they spell that pastime), District B13. The banlieues of Paris looked like themselves. The violence was comic book and/or balletic. The nuclear bomb was less annoying than I usually find them.

Zilpha Keatley Snyder

I think her writing is excellent. She's been writing since the 1960s, at least. She reminds me of E. L. Konigsburg (and vice versa; they remind me of each other), in that they are both intelligent women who write intelligent, thoughtful books for young adults. Probably one of Snyder's best known books is her The Egypt Game, which is about some kids who have excellent imaginations and who construct an imaginary game based on ancient pharoahs and temples and play their stories in the back yards and alleys of an unnamed city. There is something deeply mesmerizing about the game itself, and there is also some unclear sense of menace surrounding the kids. It's a great book, and won an award, I think. A Newbery Honor Award -- not the medal.

I love her mid-seventies trilogy, about the land (or planet, I guess) of Green Sky -- it's this three book long treatment of pacifism and how democracy could work. I make it sound dry, but it's not, not at all. There's also some meditation on drugs as a way for people to escape, and corruption. It's a real world-building exercise. Good sci fi. Titles:

Below the Root

And All Between

Until the Celebration

She has of late done more sort of contemporary YAF novels, often about misfit intelligent kids. I've missed the last several, I see, looking at her website. But a late 90s one, Libby on Wednesday, was excellent in its treatment of precocious intelligence, cerebral palsy, and abuse.

She's good. I would like to own the Green Sky trilogy electronically, one way or another.

ETA: Plus, she just has the coolest damn NAME:

Zilpha Keatley Snyder


Zilpha

Yikes... I feel like I am slowing down on this meme. But I'd like to try to complete the whole thing, sort of out of grim persistence. Also, I am not going to note the fact that it is after midnight and therefore not the 17th anymore. It is functionally the seventeenth of July, okay?

To keep with the writery/readery theme, then... Michelle Magorian. Michelle Magorian is a writer who found her happy place, in terms of setting and theme, and she's sticking with it. I am not complaining about this -- her setting is England just during and after World War II, and she does a brilliant job of showing what England was like at different class levels, in different areas -- urban, rural -- and for both genders. Her most well-known book is Good Night, Mister Tom, which became a made-for-tv movie starring John Thaw, the guy who played Inspector Morse, as a reclusive, cranky old man in a small village at the outset of the Second World War who is forced by circumstance to take in a child evacuated from a working class district in London. The child has been abused, and the story explores this as well as the chosen family that Mister Tom and Will Beech form. It's also a coming of age story, a story of the social changes wrought by the war, and a good (okay, something of a starry-eyed, brimming-with-nostalgia) portrait of both English village life in the 1940s and of the London Blitz.

Her other stories are all in that same world, or in the early 1950s, after the war, and they're equally good -- some even better, and longer. Only a few of them have been published in the US, but I ended up getting some of them from England, because I like them so much.

Titles:

Good Night, Mister Tom

Back Home -- about a girl who was evacuated to a bohemian American family in upstate New York, who returns to Britain after the war to find that she no longer fits into her stuffy middle class context -- and, throughout the story, it slowly becomes clear that her mother does not, either. Excellent. It works for me both as an entry in the girls-fantasize-about-going-to-boarding-school genre, though it is trying to explode that, AND as an entrant in a particular subgenre *I* like, about counterculture in the late 1940s and 1950s... the underside of McCarthyism, if you will. There is an interesting and odd bit of connection to C. S. Lewis, in that the experimental modern schools he EXCORIATES in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (I think... the book which introduces Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole, at any rate), Magorian extolls, and to the same degree. I appreciated this.

Not a Swan (this is called something else in its American version, I can't remember what) -- a teenage girl and her two older sisters go to stay for the summer in a rural area while their mother tours with the British version of the USO. They learn how to be more independent (again shedding a class background that will no longer work so well after the war) and the protagonist experiences a sexual and eventually romantic awakening. She also succeeds at writing for publication, and solves a sort of mystery. This story is great about blinkered experiences of gender in the past, and about the vexing question of premarital sex, and when experimentation around that became more commonplace.

Cuckoo in the Nest Working class boy in post-war England yearns to be an actor

A Spoonful of Jam His younger sister goes to a posh school and also gets drawn into acting

Just Henry A boy wants to work in movies -- actually a cameraman -- and his family has issues because of a mysterious war death.

I haven't give the last three such long treatments just because my entries are tending to get a bit long. But be assured they're just as good -- Magorian is, after all, on her home stomping grounds here as well.

In fact, they're all great. I don't care if she ploughs the same literary ground forever; I just wish she'd write some more.