Posted by Neil on August 16, 2024 at 15:04:53 user nancy_forever.
Greetings. I'm a 49 year old Canadian, a computer scientist working in Toronto, that found a set of my father's cloth hardbound Swallows and Amazons books on the bookshelf when I was about 10 years old, and I read them until they fell apart (the loss of which I regret to this day) and then bought my own set, which are themselves now starting to fall apart as I begin their umpteenth reading.
This time around I'm a bit older, it's been at least 10 years since the last reading, and I've developed more of an interest in the history and world around the books, including the history of Ransome himself, and have started thinking about more than simply what is written on the pages of these novels. So I began to research what is out there already in terms of analysis and discussion, and here was TarBoard, a perfect harbour for me - and I see I have a lot of catch-up reading to do.
So far I've re-read SA, SD, and PD (I'm going slowly, and taking notes) and I am thrilled to consider the insight into the main cast we can glean from PD if we treat it as a meta-novel, written by the 'real' versions of those characters about each other, i.e. how they behave (I'm looking at you, Nancy) is less how they 'really behave' in their world, and more of a collective agreement by all the S&A (and Captain Flint) of how they behave since they 'wrote' the story together, which is perhaps not so hard to imagine since Uncle Jim is a full-on author at this point. I don't know if that makes sense... I'll expound on it more later more clearly, I hope.
Anyway, I'm about to depart for a trip back to Nova Scotia for a week, to visit -my- old sailing lake and woods, and I'm not sure how much I'll be online, but Woll put in some precious time to get me registered so I wanted to at least poke my head in the door and say 'Hello'.
I do understand these boards are not as lively as they used to be, facebooks and whatnot being perhaps more popular with a younger crowd, but I for one love old-school bulletin boards, and there is clearly a plethora of historical discussion to read here already. I'll donate to the upkeep when the donate link works!
Thanks for having me,
Neil
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