Lassie and Beautiful Thing

Here's a very popular book series in our library -- the Alex Rider books by Anthony Horowitz. They're about a teenage spy and we seldom have so many of them in, so when that happened recently I had to take a photo to get the cool effect of the spine designs. (The picture is still missing volumes 11 and 12, so who knows what they might have added!) I've never read any of them but as I said, they're popular with the kids.

Here's another book that caught my eye the other day:
 

Yes, we keep "Lassie Come-Home" on the shelf, even though it is a rather petrified copy. The copyright page is missing so I can't even tell when it was printed, but the catalog gives the publication date as 1971. (The original copyright is 1940.)

It was definitely printed before "decimalisation," the streamlining of British currency that occurred in the early '70s. The price on the spine is given as 12 shillings and sixpence. I was prepared to see that "Lassie Come-Home" had fallen out of favor but in fact it has been checked out several times in recent years, most recently in 2020. I guess good old Lassie still has some appeal. I'm tempted to read it!

As I've written before, I used to watch the "Lassie" TV show when I was little, but I never read a real "Lassie" novel -- just children's adaptations and comic books. In middle school I did read my grandfather's old copy of "Lad, a Dog," by Albert Payson Terhune, a 1919 book -- also about a heroic collie -- that was a precursor to the whole Lassie phenomenon. I haven't seen a copy of that book in years. It's probably full of culturally problematic language.

You'll notice that "Lassie Come-Home" contains a hyphen, while the famous movie version didn't. Apparently Lassie is referred to in the book as "Lassie Come-Home," once she does, in fact, come home. I can see some cigar-chomping producer in Hollywood barking, "GET RID OF THAT HYPHEN!"

Not much of note happened yesterday. We had an all-school assembly in the morning to kick off the school year -- even though we're already more than a week into it -- and the library was once again very busy. Which I like! It makes the time fly.

In the evening Dave and I watched "Beautiful Thing," a 1996 movie about two teenage boys who fall in love on a London housing estate. It's one of my favorite films, set in Thamesmead, where I recently walked on the Thames Path. I hadn't seen it in years, and Dave insists he'd never seen it, though I can't believe I didn't show it to him before now. He probably fell asleep. He managed to stay awake last night, but we both had trouble hearing many of the lines -- the sound on our rented version from BFI wasn't great, and there were no subtitles that I could find. The East London accents can be quite impenetrable, at least to our American ears, especially when the lines are spoken quickly. But we got the gist!