Life is good

[selenay]

So, the review database is pretty much done and guinea pigs beta testers are now attempting to break it having a play with it. Got one minor bug to work out, which I'll be looking at after the weekend and won't take much work to fix, but otherwise it's looking good.

Yay!

And today is the beginning of my lovely holiday from work. Have DVDs and books to read and have no intention of touching the review database again until next week. Instead I'm being completely lazy today, I'll be going up to Manchester for an FDAS meet tomorrow and will be recovering from the FDAS meet on Sunday, possibly by the application of more books and DVDs. I may even indulge in actually, gasp, reading some fanfiction seeing as I haven't had time for weeks to do so.

I've got half a dozen fics bookmarked to read, copperbadge has got lots of chapters of Cartographer's Craft up that I haven't had time to read and it's been months since I had time to just trawl around the archives and see what I can find. Ah, the joy of indulgence :-)

Plus, there is this stack of Chalet School books calling my name. Oh, the choices of what to read :-)

Comments

[paranoidangel]

Plus, there is this stack of Chalet School books calling my name

I came across those when I was investigating childrens books the other week, but I don't think I ever read these. What are they like?

[selenay]

Well, I think they're very cool and readable :-)

There's a ton of Chalet School books and the author set them when she wrote them - so the earliest are set in the 1920s and the most recent in the late 50s (or possibly early 60s). They're about a girls boarding school initially set in the Austrian Tyrol, moving to England after the Anschluss and then in Switzerland after the war. I've always loved the international aspect to the school and the amount you end up absorbing about Europe and people at that time. Plus, as befits a boarding school series, there are adventures and exploits that either leave me in stiches or unable to put the book down until I know that everyone is safe.

I guess that they're probably similar, in some ways, to other books of that kind written at that time, but the setting does make them stand out a bit. You get to follow the mistresses as well as the girls and, because they were written over such a long period, you'll often find Old Girls going back to the school to teach or the children of early characters turning up at the school.

I always heartily recommend them. Most of the other kids that I went to school with read the other boarding school series, which never really interested me. It was probably because the Chalet School books were a bit more innocent and set a bit earlier than things like the Trebizon books - my reasons for reading them as well as the other kids' reasons for avoiding them!

If you do spot some, it's worth giving them a chance.

And I'll be happy to take any copies off your hands if you decide that you don't like them after all. Got a long list of titles that I still want *g*

[paranoidangel]

Well, I read this before I went out at lunchtime, so I stopped in the charity shop with the most books and found two 2 books in 1. So now I have:

The School at the Chalet
Jo of the Chalet School
The Chalet School and Jo
The Chalet School in Camp

They're now added to my list of books to read - they sound quite interesting from your description - I assumed they were just common-garden boarding school books.

[selenay]

*g* You're starting in the right place, then - a lot of the later books are easier to understand if you know something about where the school began!

Yeah, they're not quite your common-garden boarding school books. Obviously they have some of the common elements, but the setting adds a dimension that other boarding school books just don't have it.

After all, how many boarding school series have escapes from Nazi occupied Austria and Guernsey?

[paranoidangel]

a lot of the later books are easier to understand if you know something about where the school began!

Excellent, that's good to know!

After all, how many boarding school series have escapes from Nazi occupied Austria and Guernsey?

Certainly not the ones I read as a child!