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osprey_archerLo these many years ago, back in… 2012… I signed up for a 100 posts challenge, on the topic “100 Books that Influenced Me,” and then petered out in the early forties.
But it’s occurred to me that if I wrote a post a week, I could finish the challenge in a little over a year, and after all I love writing about my favorite books, so why not? Mostly I write about books that I’m reading now; it will be nice to give myself the opportunity to talk about old favorites.
This week: Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, which was my very favorite thing when I was small. The book (actually a sequence of five books) is about a family of tiny people, less than a foot high, who live in the walls of human houses and support themselves by borrowing (well, stealing) from their human hosts.
The heroine is Arrietty Clock, who at fourteen (which seemed to me a most impressive age) has never left her family’s home under the clock in the kitchen of a quiet Victorian country home. But that’s about to change: in the absence of a son, Arrietty’s mother insists that Arrietty needs to learn to borrow, just in case something happens to her father. Because, after all, something has happened to her father: he’s been Seen, seen by a full-size human being, a boy (recuperating from an illness he contracted in India - the most classic Victorian backstory) whom the Clocks didn’t know was in the house until too late.
I loved the adventurous aspect (leaving her home for the first time to experience the wide world!), the setting (this book might be the genesis of my love of Victorian England), the details about tiny people living in a big world: Arrietty rolling an onion down the corridor from the storeroom so her mother can cut a single ring off of it to put in their soup. And of course Arrietty herself: she’s a thoroughly satisfactory heroine.
The US edition is beautifully illustrated by Joe and Beth Krush, who also illustrated Elizabeth Enright’s Gone-Away Lake. I poured over the pictures of Arrietty’s overstuffed Victorian parlor, all built up of bits and pieces repurposed for the use of tiny people: spools of thread used as stools, postage stamp pictures of Queen Victoria hung on the wall as portraits.
I was so taken with the idea of tiny people that I beguiled many hours in kindergarten envisioning the adventures of tiny people living in the school walls. I spent some time worrying what they ate during summer vacation, when we weren’t around to provide half-eaten rice krispie treats for their delectation, before deciding that they probably migrated to the park up the hill behind the school and lived in bucolic bliss till we all trundled back to school.
But it’s occurred to me that if I wrote a post a week, I could finish the challenge in a little over a year, and after all I love writing about my favorite books, so why not? Mostly I write about books that I’m reading now; it will be nice to give myself the opportunity to talk about old favorites.
This week: Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, which was my very favorite thing when I was small. The book (actually a sequence of five books) is about a family of tiny people, less than a foot high, who live in the walls of human houses and support themselves by borrowing (well, stealing) from their human hosts.
The heroine is Arrietty Clock, who at fourteen (which seemed to me a most impressive age) has never left her family’s home under the clock in the kitchen of a quiet Victorian country home. But that’s about to change: in the absence of a son, Arrietty’s mother insists that Arrietty needs to learn to borrow, just in case something happens to her father. Because, after all, something has happened to her father: he’s been Seen, seen by a full-size human being, a boy (recuperating from an illness he contracted in India - the most classic Victorian backstory) whom the Clocks didn’t know was in the house until too late.
I loved the adventurous aspect (leaving her home for the first time to experience the wide world!), the setting (this book might be the genesis of my love of Victorian England), the details about tiny people living in a big world: Arrietty rolling an onion down the corridor from the storeroom so her mother can cut a single ring off of it to put in their soup. And of course Arrietty herself: she’s a thoroughly satisfactory heroine.
The US edition is beautifully illustrated by Joe and Beth Krush, who also illustrated Elizabeth Enright’s Gone-Away Lake. I poured over the pictures of Arrietty’s overstuffed Victorian parlor, all built up of bits and pieces repurposed for the use of tiny people: spools of thread used as stools, postage stamp pictures of Queen Victoria hung on the wall as portraits.
I was so taken with the idea of tiny people that I beguiled many hours in kindergarten envisioning the adventures of tiny people living in the school walls. I spent some time worrying what they ate during summer vacation, when we weren’t around to provide half-eaten rice krispie treats for their delectation, before deciding that they probably migrated to the park up the hill behind the school and lived in bucolic bliss till we all trundled back to school.
