Writing & Blogging
I like horses. I like books. Given that these are both massive understatements, you would think that I grew up obsessed with horse books. Oh sure, I read more than the average city kid, but not as many as you might think.
I read Misty & Justin Morgan but not Stormy, Brighty or the rest of the herd.
I read Black Beauty, but not The Black Stallion.
I read Dick Francis, but who didn’t? At least until the violence grew overly gratuitous.
My strongest memories of childhood reading are not from books at all, but from comic books: Casper, Little Dot, and the rest. I can recall the visuals and plots of some of them to this day.
After that it was science fiction. Aside from Elizabeth Moon, no one really does horses in space. In fantasy, horses are most often tools of transportation, when they are not people in horse suits. Robin McKinley is one of the few who has real horsehair in her novels. But I digress.
My point, and I do have one, here, somewhere, is that I have had way more trouble than I would have expected coming up with 227 words on horse books for kids. Horse stories avoid the vortex of my To Be Read pile.
Live horses, yes. Literary horses, not so much. You?
Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott
Virtual Brush Box 
Live and literary; horses and dogs. Mostly horse books growing up, now not so much as there aren’t many in adult fiction – but there are some tear jerker movies. There are some mystery writers in particular that one way or another use dogs. Just found a fun new (to me) one. Still love fantasy the best but I do enjoy good/real literary stories with animals (that are treated as loved animals and not humans in an animal coat).
Hi, in both college and grad school I took courses on kiddy lit – don’t know why, I don’t even like kids – and both term papers were on horses. Happy to send you copies, if you’d like.
Do agree with you about Dick Francis, don’t even have the books anymore. At one time I used to have 1700 books, for various reasons now down to a couple of hundred. Need to make a list to make sure.
Isn’t it nice that there are books for every taste?
@debandtoby. Papers as posts for your blog? Maybe with a second post of commentary after rereading them years later? I’m so good at thinking up work for other people.
Good idea. Some issues with my health and Eowyn’s, rereading the papers would be a good distraction.