Books

Thankfully I negotiated 50p weekly pocket money following this episode for which I could save up for books that I wanted and allowed me to snap up the 1980 novelization of “Flash Gordon” by Arthur Byron Cover (Publisher: New English Library) which I hungrily consumed. The book became such an important touchstone of my youth that I purchased another copy from Amazon when I moved to the U.S., realizing I had left my original copy sitting on a bookshelf at my family home. I subsequently loved that movie (seeing it while freezing in the depths of winter at a theater where the heating had broken) and have owned it on DVD, Blu-ray and now on streaming video, I am sure that some part of the nostalgia that allows me to overlook the film’s baked in cheesiness is fond memories of reading the novelization.

My reading tastes were certainly eclectic. I read all the Famous Five novels by Enid Blyton and that must have been the late 1970s/early 1980s because many featured stills from the TV series that ran on British television for two seasons from 1978 to 1979 until the production company lost out in that curious British tradition that sees a bidding cointest for the rights to broadcast the ITV signal to a particular section of the country. Whatever the cause, Southern Television was defeated and with it its flagship childrens program.

Those weren’t the only children’s books that I read in my pre-teen years (I would have been 6-years old when the “Famous Five” TV series debuted). My mother had received gifts of Enid Blyton books when she was a child and it was a strange sensation to read an inscription to my mother receiving the book as a gift when she was my age. There were also the “Secret Seven” and the “Adventure” series and I still have the hardback edition to “The Valley of Adventure” with me here in the U.S. today. Of course my reading habits changed over time as I suppose they do for us all. Today we have so many distractions, from popular culture to current affairs. But sometimes it feels good to wrap up on a rainy afternoon and curl up with a book. Though today that would mean curling up with a Kindle or iPad.