Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild (1936)

Born in 1895, Noel Streatfeild was the author of a great many books, the most famous of which is Ballet Shoes.

Ballet Shoes tells the story of three adopted sisters - Pauline, Petrova and Posy - and their training at The Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training.

  

The sometimes sickly-pink modern covers of more recent editions of Ballet Shoes might put off potential readers, but the Fossil girls are presented as rounded characters and the details and worries of their everyday lives are beautifully evoked by Streatfeild.

Group members enjoyed the period detail of the story, and those who had not read it before were pleased to discover that there was more to Ballet Shoes than dance lessons and stage school antics.

Crown of Acorns by Catherine Fisher (2010)

Following our group's enjoyment of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, we decided to try another fantasy writer - this time Catherine Fisher.

Fisher, like Cooper, draws on myth and folklore. Several books are based on Welsh myth and landscape (Fisher was born in Newport), while the Oracle Trilogy blends Ancient Egyptian and Greek mythology to great effect.

Crown of Acorns was chosen by our reading group as it is set here in Bath, and centres around John Wood's beautiful eighteenth century streetscape, The Circus. Fisher splits her narrative between a troubled teenager, who has moved to Bath to start a new life, and a fictionalised account of John Wood (the elder) and the building of The Circus in the mid 1700s.



Fisher's writing is vivid and elegant and her other existence as a poet shows through in her prose.

Our group enjoyed this book, with some favouring one storyline and some another but we all agreed that it made us look at the streets and buildings of Bath anew.

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper (1973)

The Dark is Rising is the second and best known book in Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising sequence which draws on Arthurian Legend and British folklore.

Cooper studied English at the University of Oxford, one of a group of authors (including Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones and Penelope Lively) who were to make a powerful impact on children's literature in the 1960s and 1970s.

This book led to one of the most enthusiatic discussions our group has had, with die-hard Cooper fans and first-time readers all enjoying the story and Cooper's powerful, engaging writing. As with Alan Garner's writing, Cooper conjured up moments of genuine terror in her story and wove a dark, magical tale which is grounded in the English landscape as well as its folklore.

Susan Cooper is still  writing today, with her recent book Ghost Hawk being nominated for the Carnegie Award.

 

Arthur Ransome: BBC Radio 4, Great Lives

Labi Siffre on Arthur Ransome

Matthew Parris invites his guests to nominate the person who they feel is a great life. This week singer-songwriter Labi Siffre discusses the life and work of Arthur Ransome. Siffre says that the Swallows and Amazons books taught him responsibility for his own actions and also a morality that has influenced and shaped him throughout his life.

Noel Streatfeild on "Desert Island Discs", 1976.
Click here to listen to BBC Radio 4 archive recording

Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875)

Our tour of Scandinavian authors finished its current round in Denmark with the Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875).

The library staff put special effort into finding full translations of his stories for children, rather than heavily edited versions.

Most of us chose a lightly edited version because it had illustrations by Edward Ardizzone, though the general consensus was that the Penguin/ Puffin Classics editions contained the best translation.

Reading these stories prompted a lot of childhood memories of reading the Ladybird versions of his stories, with their short text and bright illustrations (proving that the narrative pull of his tales was as strong as his elegant turn of phrase). While some readers were defeated by his longer stories, other counted The Snow Queen and the Wild Swans as childhood favourites.

Some of the books were illustrated with Andersen's own beautiful paper-cut art - a talent with which he would entertain people at cosmopolitan literary gatherings, as he never fully mastered the English language.

Andersen's retelling of traditional tales and his own original stories have captivated and inspired people for many generations. It's worth getting your hands on a good translation to read his original descriptive, evocative texts.

Mary Poppins by P L Travers (1934)

Most people probably know about Mary Poppins from the 1964 Disney film starring Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke. A more recent film, Saving Mr Banks starring Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson highlighted the gulf between the "Disney version" and author PL Travers' vision of the story.

Poet, actress, journalist and author, PL Travers (born Helen Lyndon Goff: 9th August 1899 - 23rd April 1996) had an eventful, often complicated, life.  Born in Australia she emigrated to England in 1924, leaving behind a far-from-idyllic childhood.

Members of the book group all noted the difference between the saccharin Mary Poppins of the Disney movie and the sterner, much vainer Mary Poppins in Travers' books (Mary is for ever admiring her reflection in shop windows), where the children are often reprimanded for mentioning their nanny's magical abilities, and are constantly found wanting in their appearance and behaviour.

Still, there are compensations for her sharp tongue. The children have magical (and sometimes mystical experiences) not normally encountered while walking in the park or visiting friends for afternoon tea.

The episodic nature of the book also appealed to members of the group. Each chapter is almost a self-contained short story ( a structure which influenced Neil Gaiman in writing the Graveyard Book).

If you've only ever seen the film and felt it could do without that extra "spoonful of sugar", it's time to give the original stories a try.