Personal Note: Field Observation #3

The gentleman on the bike next to mine is reading John D. Sinclair's translation of Dante's Purgatorio. Maybe this is the gym for me after all.

On an unrelated note, I have another story brewing at last, for fma_fic_contest's prompt "seamless." Go, muse, go!

Writer's Block: Timeless tales

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Let's see -- I went through a Nancy Drew phase and a Black Stallion phase in series books, but the stories that stuck with me tended to be Newbery medalists, with their lovely characterization and he-do-the-police-in-different-voices-quality dialogue. I loved Elizabeth Enright's Melendy Family series. I read Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles to death. I was a huge fan of Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising sequence. I got my introduction to Latin from Graham Dunstan Martin's Giftwish and Catchfire. After I encountered Power of Three by Diana Wynne Jones, she was snatch-on-sight reading. Then, of course, there's The Lord of the Rings, to which I was introduced by my sixth-grade reading teacher, God bless her. That was a life-changing experience: a great book that introduced me to the joys of literary criticism and philology. Whee!