Ever have one of those moments where you realize that you’ve heard about something for a really long time, and yet you have no notion of what that thing really is? And that the thing you had heard of is something that, given your background, age, or proclivities (or all of the above) is probably something you should have known more about?
For me, recently at least, this thing is The Dark is Rising Sequence. I had never read it. I would hear occasionally about it – mentioned in the same canonical category as the Narnia books, or Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. I was a kid who, for some considerable period of time in the fourth and fifth grades, never left the house without at least two of the Narnia books with me (it wouldn’t do to be caught out in case I re-finished one and had to start another – I have no idea how many times I re-read all of them). I engaged in some very earnest conversations with a friend, another girl with similar interests, about the proper way to keep them on the shelf (in order of their writing or chronologically). I also loved the Lloyd Alexander series and re-read it many times, though I didn’t own it until adulthood.
Other authors did, of course, pass my way. I read the T.H. White Camelot books once, but those books didn’t engage me for the multiple re-reads of the others (had his wonderful Mistress Masham’s Repose not been out of print when my family read it, we probably would have owned it instead of borrowing, and I probably would have torn through it a few times more, but it wasn’t, so we didn’t, and I couldn’t).
I had lots and lots of well-meaning adults recommend books to me, based on my love of fantasy and escape. But I don’t think anyone ever recommended The Dark is Rising to me. Which is really odd. I was the right age (the books were published in the 60’s and 70’s), had the right sort of tastes (see above), and I had seemingly endless afternoons of New Hampshire summers to curl up on the sofa and read.
I wonder how this oversight happened. At any rate, it’s being rectified now.
