Yesterday I found this book on a free shelf.
I remembered liking Joan Aiken‘s writing, though it had been a long time since I’d read anything of hers. I was also desperate for reading material.
I was not disappointed. The Whispering Mountain turns out to be a prequel to the Wolves Chronicles, of which the best-known title is probably The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.  I’ve decided I need to reread them, since I seem to have missed several volumes. (Warning: the summaries given for the books on the site I linked above are spoilery. Which I suppose is only reasonable for books several decades old. But still.)
One of the many delightful words in The Whispering Mountain is dod-gasted, which I thought I remembered T.H. White’s King Pellinore using about his Questing Beast. A cursory search failed to confirm that particular connection, but did turn up an excellent article about obscenicons, aka grawlixes, aka the strings of characters used in place of swears in comics.
Another word from Whispering Mountain, bach, a Welsh term of friendly endearment, connected me to another book. The term is used liberally by passionate theater director Geraint Powell, a significant character in The Lyre of Orpheus, the concluding novel in the Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies. That link is to an interview with Davies which contains this quote: “I write novels that I hope will be interesting just as stories, but they also have implications and byways which I think would interest people who have more information.” Which perhaps is why I’m so fond of his books; not that I necessarily always have the “more information” he refers to, but that I am the kind of person who likes to ferret it out.
But any book set in Wales, which Whispering Mountain is, will connect me most strongly with a series that I, like many other readers, imprinted on at an early age: Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence. Not all the books in the sequence take place in Wales, but Wales is an important setting, and Cooper herself has strong ties to Wales.
Last connection: there’s a quote from The Dark Is Rising that keeps running through my head:
For all times coexist, and the future can sometimes affect the past, though the past is a road that leads to the future.
In Cooper’s context, times coexisting has to do with the work of the Old Ones and the struggle between the Light and the Dark. In mine, it evokes the fractured world that people with memory loss experience. Visiting, and hopefully comforting, someone with memory loss is the reason I am where I currently am; where I discovered that copy of The Whispering Mountain.