8 July 2024

I spend a short while this morning searching through old blog posts. You can do this too by clicking on the links to the right (if you’re on a computer) or they appear below if you’re on a phone. What I was looking for was posts I’d made about Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five a few years ago. I had bought a box set of the complete Famous Five and I had had the idea that I might do a long term project on the books. Unfortunately, I have so many ideas for what to do with this website that a few inevitably do not come to fruition. Which is the case with the Famous Five project. I found four blog posts relating to my intention to do this project. I thought I’d display them here with links to them (although the real point that inspired this blog posts comes at the end):

• 28 March 2019
• 3 April 2019
• 9 September 2019
• 11 January 2021

I read a number of the books from the series when I was a kid, and as it so often happens, we cling to what we grew up with, even when we can see that it may not be as good as we remember. Lately, both Victoria and I have been rereading the series from the beginning without reviewing the books. I’m interested to get an overall feel for them. I even bought a biography about Blyton by Nadia Cohen back in May – The Real Enid Blyton – which I will review at some distant time in the future (most probably). Blyton sounds like an interesting woman. She reportedly played tennis in the nude!

I could say a few things here about the books and their characters for those who haven’t been introduced to them, but the purpose of this blog post was to share a link Victoria sent me for a Guardian article published years ago now which says it all so much better than I could. I laughed out loud when I read the end. The article I’m referring to is ‘The Famous Five in their own Words’ by Lucy Mangan, published in The Guardian 22 December 2005.

Enjoy!

- bikerbuddy

1 July 2024

It’s halfway through the year and it’s at this point that it’s easy to begin to wonder what happened to some of those plans you had at the beginning. Specifically, I’d intended to put a lot more content onto this website this year, and I had plans to read a lot more short stories, which I rarely read, even though I enjoy them. The unravelling of my plans started in February when a question asked about the website at a dinner led me to introducing an email subscription to this site. That, in turn, led me to updating the menus across the website, which in turn had me updating the website to make it compatible with phone screens. As a result, I’ve read and reviewed fewer books than I anticipated I would so far this year. Add in a trip to Norfolk Island and an unforeseen event in our family and here we are!

The good news is that this entire website is now compatible with phone screens. There may be some slight issues here and there, and I may be rethinking a small number of aesthetic choices in the near future, but it’s done!

So, I’m trying to treat the beginning of the new financial year like a new calendar year right now. Today I’m putting up a review for George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, the longest we’ve ever published, which seems appropriate since due to unforeseen circumstances it’s had the longest gestation period from the beginning of me reading the book until today when I’ve posted the review. Click here if you want to take a look at it.

I’m hoping to get back to something like my original plan for this year from here on in.

- bikerbuddy