The Unconvincing Elf King

Let’s look at another poem today, again by a well-respected poet – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Der Erlkönig is his most famous ballads and translates as The Elf King, but don’t be fooled into thinking it’s for children. It was written in 1782 as part of a piece called Die Fischerin (The Fisherwoman), which was

All children, except one, grow up

You recognise the quote, right? It’s the first line of Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie. It’s a dashing good yarn about Peter Pan (who never grows up) and the adventures he has, both in our world and in Neverland. There are mermaids! And pirates! And he can fly! I loved the story as a

Misused Words

I’m just going to talk about the English language in this post but I’m sure other languages have plenty of similar examples where a word is commonly mixed up with other words, for example, in English people often mix up their/there/they’re, are/our, affect/effect. There are also times when you hear/read a word that is absolutely

Sucking Eggs

Okay, this week let’s talk about a novel that I’m not entirely sure that I like – The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding. It was written in the mid eighteen century and I have heard arguments that Fielding was just reflecting and satirising the attitudes of the time; I’m not going

A Weasel in the Clouds

Hamlet is probably one of Shakespeare’s best known plays and also his longest. It is fairly typical of his tragedies, in that the plot sounds ridiculous if you say it out loud (Hamlet see’s the ghost of his dead dad, pretends to go crazy while he procrastinates about getting revenge, then kills a bunch of

The Size Of It

I thought we’d talk about a non-fiction book this week for a change, although bear with me as I inevitably get a side-tracked. I’m currently reading Crow Country by Mark Cocker and it’s lovely. He’s a British author and naturalist, and loves crows. Passionate and slightly obsessed, he writes about his thoughts and experiences in

Vampires with a difference

It’s October! It’s spooky month! Let’s talk about vampires. You’ve heard of Dracula by Bram Stoker, right? It wasn’t the first piece of literature about vampires and certainly isn’t the best, but it’s probably the best known and the most influential. It’s not even a novel as we usually think of them, the story being

Pratchett Soup

Do you ever hear a story about a book or an author you love and just do a mental double take? What? Really? Did I just dream that? I have no doubt that you’ve heard of Terry Pratchett but have you heard about the weird things his German publishers did in the 1990s? He had

Finding Pokémon in Sumerian Mythology

I like reading myths from around the world and from different historical periods, but it’s taken me a while to get into the Sumerian stuff. It might be because they seem so removed from me – they were one of the earliest civilisations that we know much about, living in the late Neolithic/early Bronze age

The Curses of an Angry Aunt

I like the novels of P.G. Woodhouse, especially the ones about Jeeves and Wooster. They are light, slightly ridiculous, and genuinely funny stories, poking gentle fun at the rather stupid ‘idle rich’ variety of English gentlefolk. They were written in the early twentieth century but you could be forgiven for thinking they might be set