I was a little surprised that four books on my influential book list are books with a horse focus. The Horse and His Boy by C. S Lewin, Melka by Joan Penney, Dick och Dalli, which i now realize has been translated to English, it’s called The Snow Ponies by Ursula Bruns, and Flambards by K. M. Peyton. And they weren’t the only horse books I loved as a child, I was also an avid fan of Walter Farley’s Black Stallion-books, and My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara. I’m surprised because I never was horse-mad as a girl. In fact I am afraid of them, and though I find them beautiful to look at, being near one makes my heart beat very fast, and my mouth runs dry.

The Horse and His Boy is of course part of the Narnia Chronicles, though it’s quite different from the others as it’s completely set in the world of Narnia, though actually not in that particular country. I really loved Bree teaching Shasta to ride, and I also like Aravis a lot, and her journey. Their adventures in Tashban and the ride through the desert was something I read with the same excitement, every time I reread it- and I’ve probably reread this Narnia-book the most. Also, Bree is a great flawed character and drama queen.

Melka and The Snow Ponies were books my father had as a child, and I first came to them because he read them for me. Melka was written in the 1930s, and is about a horse, Melka, born in a Sudanese village, where she has some foalhood adventures before she is sold to an English family and is brought to a city. She gets a close friend in a donkey called telephone, and grows close to the boy who rides her. As she is found to be very good at jumping, she is stolen and dyed brown (she’s a white horse), but is eventually reunited with her huma. In the end the family goes back to England, and Melka ends up living in a manor stable in the countryside. I haven’t read this book since I was a child, and I’m not sure I dare to read it again. I’m not sure how well the depiction of Sudanese natives has stood the test of time…

It's been a very long time since I read The Snow Ponies as well, but I remember it as a very funny book. It's about two teenage girls who live with their grandmother and aunt on a stud farm where they raise Icelandic horses and Shetland ponies. They are mad about Vikings and get very excited when their cousin Ethelbert is coming for an extended stay, as they think having a Viking name must make him like one. But Ethelbert is a spoiled hypochondriac and his presence a nuisance more than anything else. I guess it comes as no surprise that Ethelbert, who is pretty much a soulmate to Eustace in the Narnia books, will be forced to do a hard look at his own actions, and change. But with horses, instead of dragons.

Flambards is really the first part of what I read as a trilogy as a child, because those were the only ones translated to Swedish but it’s actually a series of four books. I read the last one as an adult, and didn’t care for it much. Anyway, it’s set before, during and after WWI, and is about rich orphan Christina who is sent to her uncle in the British countryside. He is very posh, and also impoverished, and Christina eventually realizes the hope is that she will marry her cousin Mark, to get the manor house Flambards back to its glory days. Everyone there is horsemad, except her cousin Will, and Christina soon grows to love horses and Flambards as much as Mark does. Pity Mark is such a bastard. I regularly return to the three first books in this series, and there was also a television series I remember liking.