{"id":13306,"date":"2010-09-26T09:28:09","date_gmt":"2010-09-26T13:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2010\/09\/26\/13306.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:58:03","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:58:03","slug":"book-report-the-railway-childr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2010\/09\/26\/book-report-the-railway-childr\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Railway Children"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Your Humble Blogger was a huge E. Nesbit fan, back in my misspent youth. Or spent youth, anyway. I can&#8217;t really claim that reading E. Nesbit books was misspending my youth.\n<P>I have not been able to persuade my Perfect Non-Reader that these books are charming, though. It seems as though she is not fated to become a pathetic Anglophile like her father. Or maybe she will, only it doesn&#8217;t come out until later. Or maybe it will skip a generation.\n<p>There isn&#8217;t any reason for a kid to like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.randomhouse.com\/catalog\/display.pperl?isbn=9780679425342\">The Railway Children<\/a>, actually, unless that kid is already prepared to be charmed by Britishness generally. Unlike the fantasy stories, which have, you know, dragons and wishes and so on, <I>The Railway Children<\/i> has little in it to appeal to, well, anybody except a pathetic Anglophile. It was never among my favorites of her books, even when I was a lad. And yet, I found it both charming and moving, oddly enough.\n<P>And somehow the background plot, which I never remembered because it really has nothing to do with the book, is about a innocent man jailed for selling state secrets (and a foreign agitator abandoned by his political compatriots), all of which is made much less interesting than a broken leg or a birthday present. Which is how it should be in a book like this, I suppose.\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which Your Humble Blogger&#8217;s auto-complete feature assumed that when YHB began to type <I>broken leg<\/i> he intended to go on with <I>islature<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13306"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19182,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13306\/revisions\/19182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}