Summer Reading: Swallows and Amazons
If you like sailing or want to, if you like camping or want to, or harbor the same feelings for secret missions, maps, building fires, roughing it, making codes, talking parrots, and the like, then these books are great summer reading. Written by Arthur Ransome, there are twelve in the series, dealing with the sometimes highly implausible exploits of some English children on summer holiday. They take place c. WWII. The prose can be rather clunky, but the adventures are wonderful. The Picts and the Martyrs I read first and then Swallows and Amazons, then Swallowdale. They needn't be read in any particular order, though reading them in the order written introduces the characters. Highly formative of the imagination.Here are the books:
- Swallows and Amazons (published 1930)
- Swallowdale (1931)
- Peter Duck (1932)
- Winter Holiday (1933)
- Coot Club (1934)
- Pigeon Post (1936)
- We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea (1937)
- Secret Water (1939)
- The Big Six (1940)
- Missee Lee (1941)
- The Picts and the Martyrs: Or Not Welcome At All (1943)
- Great Northern? (1947)
- Coots in the North (unfinished at the time of Ransome's 1967 death, published in an unfinished form in 1988 with some other short works)