The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron (1954) - This is the first of the Mushroom Planet series, about a small, secret planet orbiting around the Earth. I read it when I was in grade school, and again May 2016. It's interesting how much science there is in the book, for 1954, considering where we were with manned space flights at that time. The strangest thing about the story is the question of how much of this is real and how much imagined, which is never really answered, for sure. Or maybe I'm confused. I know I was confused when I read these books in grade school (there are five in the series) - they kind of freaked me out! Eleanor Cameron wrote a lot of books, including a series about a young woman named Julia Redfern, which I might read later.

Laura

Laura by Vera Caspary (1943) - The novel that the movie, Laura, was based on. I read it a few years ago and reread it in May 2016. In some ways it's exactly the same as the movie, but also, of course, very different. The book is five sections, each told from a different point of view of the various characters. Waldo Lydecker is first and by far the best. My interest in Laura is that I'm basing one of the ten sections of my new novel, K2 (working title) on the movie, and what always seemed to me a secret, underlying narrative, or alternative reality. A mystery that is never solved.