The Magic Faraway Tree

Let's talk about The Social Reckoning.

16 years after The Social Network explored the underbelly of Facebook's-

Wow

... early years, Aaron Sorkin returns to his love of underbellies by doing some navel-gazing at Facebook's more recent tummy aches.

Not saying that Jeremy Strong did a bad job, it's just different.

Mm-hmm.

And this entire movie feels different than The Social Network does because this is not really- about Mark Zuckerberg.

This is about Facebook.

Published in 1943, The Magic Faraway Tree offers a childhood apprenticeship in the picaresque fantastic.

As wandering adventurers stumble from one predicament to the next, collecting strange acquaintances, getting into trouble, and usually learning enough to get home safely.

But the next adventure's always waiting up that ladder through the clouds at the top of a fantastical tree deep in the enchanted wood.

For those of us reading these books as nippers, and subsequently finding ourselves wandering through Michael Moorcock's multiverse a few years later, there's something quite familiar about all this.

That odd little company of fellow travelers, the passages between worlds, the discovery that somewhere delightful can become somewhere perilous with very little warning, and above all, a sense that reality is just temporary, and you better keep an eye on the exit door.

Yeah.

We hate bullies, but, uh, yeah.

Well, it's, it's a funny thing, this, because as it happens, getting hold of a copy of these three books, because the first was The Enchanted Wood, the second is The Magic Faraway Tree, and the third is The Folk of the Faraway Tree.