Puck of Pook's Hill, by Rudyard Kipling

This is not the most obvious book to start a new resolution - to blog about what I've been reading - but I came across it on the shelf when I was doing the dusting and couldn't remember whether I had read it so long ago as to have forgotten it, or whether I had never read it at all. It is a yellowing Papermac edition that cost me 45p when I bought it, which from the date inside was in September 1972. So that's more than 40 years ago.

I'm not even sure whether it is meant to be for children or for adults, though it isn't an overtly children's edition. Someone who saw me reading it commented that Kipling has a dark side, but I never found it in this book.

Not being much of a historian, I can't comment on the book's veracity but suspect it is a carefully airbrushed version of events. Perhaps if I had been more of a historian I would have been more annoyed by it, but although I recognise its sentimentality I didn't find it so cloying as to be bothered by it.

Its charm, as far as I am concerned, came from its setting in Sussex. Having been brought up on the Kent-Sussex border, and having had many family holidays on the Sussex coast not so far from Pevensey, the depiction of the sun-dappled past was like getting into a warm bath. Of course I don't remember as far back as 1906, when the book was first published, but even allowing for false and selective memory there was something immediately familiar and comforting about it.

It also had the great advantage for a commuter of being broken into separate, albeit related, stories, each one just about the right length for a journey.  Which is no way to judge literature, I know, but is a factor when it comes to choice of reading.

So - a pleasant read but not a life-enhancing one and I think it is likely to go back on the shelf for another 40 years.