Weekend Reading List

When I was in Primary five, a very long time ago, my aunt G (father's younger sister, a teacher at Fairfield's) gave me Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, with the original illustrations, and I still have it. It has followed me through all my different addresses, and sat on all my different (dusty)shelves, outlasted my different phases and tastes. I'm whiling away the rainy days by reading this classic Dickens story all over again, laughing at all the memories that resurfaced of the time when we were all involved in our school musical of this book, staged with pomp, at the Victoria Concert Hall. And no, they didn't allow me to sing. I was made one of those orphans that had no lines to speak of. To cheer up from the gloom, I'm also looking at my collection of Eloise books, the irrepressible six year-old terror invented by Kay Thompson and illustrated by Hilary Knight. The little princess lords over the "room on the tippy-top floor" of the Plaza Hotel in New York with her English Nanny, her pug Weenie, and her turtle Skipperdee. Did you know a portrait of Eloise hung in the lobby of the Plaza until it closed for renovations in 2005? I read that a movie based on Eloise in Paris (my fave of the lot!), starring Uma Thurman as Nanny, is being made. Uma Thurman would make such a good Nanny!