Blowzabella - me too! Every December, the Dark is Rising sequence gets a re-read.

I'm in the middle of re-reading the Peter Wimsey ones now, and am deeply frustrated because I suspect I left 'Gaudy Night' at Bratlings's school last night(Parents' evening - the child they teach is not the one downstairs here) and as it's now a training day and half term, I won't see it for a week or more - unless I left it on the bus in which case it's gone forever. The address in it is 20 years out of date!

I read almost everything I have, over and over again. It's like meeting with an old friend again. The exceptions are tech books and one or two I was given as presents that didn't really gel. There's only one of my books I haven't read - Umberto Eco's 'Island of the Day before', a present, which one day, I will try.....

Trumpet Major - used to be a really good pub just a stone's throw from Hardy's house Max Gate in Dorchester, although he was so mean, it's highly unlikely he'd set foot in it under it's former name, now forgotten.

Published in 1880, set on the Dorset coast, it's about a soldier in the Napoleonic wars, and deals with the threat of invasion and the usual things that soldiers and maidens get up to. It has Admiral Thomas Hardy (no relation but lived in Portesham, a village in Dorset, where my ancestors lived - my dad went to the same village school) and Farmer George III in it, and it's the most cheerful of his miserable books. He only wrote one book that was almost entirely happy, his first, 'Under the Greenwood tree', about 8 years previous to the Trumpet Major.   

LTS