I’ve seen a few people call Tolkien dry, and I just cannot understand it. His writing is, as far as I’m concerned, the complete opposite of dry: it’s lush and vivid and rich.

Jumping you ahead to some of his best writing is perhaps the wrong thing to do, but I shall anyway: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2010/09/28/tf-reaching-for-the-cookie-sack/

Maybe you should learn that proselytism is irritating and unwelcome. The more so if you are doing it in such a scattergun way.

I think I like you and your family. I can really see that! You told the story well.

What the actual …? Were your family just not readers?

Have you read Fred Clark’s blog “Slactivist”? He takes apart Left Behind with wit and verve and deep insight, since he grew up in the same culture. It’s truly brilliant stuff.

Terry Pratchett wrote a cat book. That might be good.

I enjoy linguistics and debunking, so I can strongly recommend The Myth of Mars and Venus by Deborah Cameron. (Not a gift, though. I bought it for myself while killing time in a bookshop before a job interview in a nearby pharmaceutical lab. I also bought It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science.)

Holy fucking shit. How did that get published?

David Mitchell has a rant on WILTY about receiving a gift and putting it away somewhere for someone else to deal with after you’re dead.

You know that thing you’ve clearly spent the last five years agonising over before eventually, tentatively, coming to a conclusion after much pondering, reading, research, and deliberation? Here’s an introductory pamphlet on the topic!

The only reasonable response is “fuck off!”

Anne herself has a fair few “teenage goth” vibes at times. I think you might like it.

It sounds insulting to me.

Both of those are appropriate responses to Wuthering Heights.

I often find that when I’m tired or stressed I cannot read a new book, but can return to old friends. Often this is Tolkien if I’m at home. Or, if I’m at my parents’ house, more likely Dick Francis or Agatha Christie; perhaps Rosemary Sutcliff or Arthur Ransom. Weirdly, Pratchett isn’t usually on that list, much as I love him.

Charlotte Brontë is an interesting critic. Her introduction to Wuthering Heights is fascinating.

I believe that the play is actually the original, and it became a novel later. The backstory of Peter Pan is used as some of the detail in AS Byatt’s amazing novel The Children’s Book.

I read Peter Pan a long time ago, and I forget the details. The theory I formed at the time was that Peter was a normal boy living a normal life, but this was his dream. That’s why he suddenly disappears for a while every now and then: he’s woken up, and the dream continues without him. I’d need to re-read to see whether that reading actually has any real support in the text: my memories are pretty vague at this point. I do distinctly remember the book as strange, definitely not a normal children’s story.

I read a lot of British and American authors, so sometimes I seek out something local — Irish. And I do other times look further afield. Partly, I think it’s “good” (and also good for me), but partly it’s just interesting and fun to look for stuff I wouldn’t normally come across, set in real cultures far away from mine.

The Carpet People was written by 17-year-old Terry Pratchett in 1971 and then re-written by the same author in 1992.