Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novel The Eagle of the Ninth was re-read in 2008 by the long deceased Roman emperor Antoninus Pius. Somewhat reincarnated, he is a vigorous blogger despite being 1924 years old.

… Above all, I was struck by Miss Sutcliff’s debt to Rudyard Kipling (which I had not noticed thirty years ago). Of course, in today’s world of web and wiki, it is easy to discover that she had a life-long interest in Kipling, culminating in the writing of a biography (long out of print). The most striking parallel for me is the little turf altar that Marcus builds in Chapter Eleven, because it is surely an echo of a scene sketched by Kipling in Puck of Pook’s Hill.

“Wait awhile,” said Pertinax, and he made a little altar of cut turf, and strewed heather-bloom atop, and laid upon it a letter from a girl in Gaul.
“What do you do, O my friend?” I said.
“I sacrifice to my dead youth,” he answered, and, when the flames had consumed the letter, he ground them out with his heel. Then we rode back to that Wall of which we were to be Captains. Read More »

Carlo Rotella writes in the Boston Globe about buying for her children for Christmas “generations-tested” books, including Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic historical novel The Eagle of the Ninth:

… my daughters, being kids, are into Christmas, and I have some other gift-giving obligations, so every year on the Saturday morning before Christmas I come down off the mountain and make a trip downtown to buy presents. My main destination is a bookstore, and as soon as I get there I start feeling better about things. The place is always packed during the days before Christmas with a crowd that radiates excitement and contentment, and that itself is encouraging. People still read, and still regard the giving and receiving of books as something special.

And the old long-haul reliables I remember from childhood, generations-tested books you can read to your kids when they’re little and they can then read for themselves and go on rereading into adolescence and beyond, are still for sale, often in fine new editions: books like Scott O’Dell’s “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, John Dennis Fitzgerald’s Great Brain books, Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman adventure “The Eagle of the Ninth,” Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Charles Portis’s great comic Western “True Grit.”

via The gift of good stories – The Boston Globe.