On in-flight reading and exploring Prydain
There’s an art to choosing the right book for a plane ride. There’s a separate but related art to choosing the right book for a plane ride shared with a voracious teen reader who can’t pack as many books as she’ll read over the trip. The chosen book must be engaging, and preferably one of a set that I can read over the course of the trip, handing each completed book along to my companion so that neither of us runs out of reading material. So, I packed with care when travelling with my thirteen-year-old last summer, finally deciding that now, at last, was the time for both of us to read the Chronicles of Prydain.
But when I pulled the first book out of my carry-on bag, she glanced casually at the cover. “Oh yeah,” she said. “Prydain. Those books are weird—but cool.”
“You’ve read them?” I said, somewhat deflated.
She had. Ages ago, it turned out. But once I fell into the story, I was so absorbed I hardly minded that she wouldn’t be reading them with me. (In fact, some of our best conversations on the trip would be about books she’d read but I hadn’t—go figure!)
Written in the sixties and set in a fictional land that resembles Wales more than a little, Lloyd Alexander’s five-book Chronicles of Prydain sounds the full orchestra for readers: humor, high stakes, adventure, romance (but at about a middle-grade level, so more sweetness and teasing than smooching), magic, swordplay, sorrow, a complex search for purpose—these books have just about everything in them but space travel. And they’re excellently written. The tragic scenes will make one’s eyes well up, while the comedic ones may cause one to snort one’s in-flight ginger ale into one’s sinus cavity. (Be warned.)
The stories center around Taran, an Assistant Pig-Keeper who knows nothing about his parentage and who longs for his life to amount to something more than assistant pig-keeping. But as stories do, his swiftly wheels away from a simple quest to prove himself heroic and into a quest to know himself, to be known by those he loves, and to also save Prydain.
With its nooks and crannies and startling magic, Prydain is an excellent place to escape to during an interminable day of air travel and one worth visiting again and again—no ticket required.
This article first appeared on https://thearosenburg.substack.com/
- Something Better Coming - April 21, 2025
- The Mythmakers - April 9, 2025
- Joni Eareckson Tada - March 19, 2025
Leave a Reply