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December 26: formative stories you read as a kid (for Vicky) [Tumblr crosspost]
Um. If I talk about why, we'll be here all day, so I guess I'll just list a bunch of titles and series. My cutoff age is twelve, since one has to define childhood somehow and becoming a teenager seems a reasonable break point.
C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series, most particularly The Tombs of Atuan. Also The Dispossessed. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, most specifically The Silmarillion. Also Smith of Wooton Major. Grimm's fairy tales. Andersen's fairy tales. Children's books of Greek myths, Norse myths, and Christian myths (aka, a child's illustrated book of Bible stories). Every single one of Andrew Lang's colored Fairy Books. Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. The Burgess Animal Book for Children, by Thornton Burgess; less critically, his various Old Mother West Wind books. The picture books of Holling Clancy Holling, especially Paddle-to-the-Sea and Seabird. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy, Moon-flash duology, and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. Robin McKinley's Damar duology and Deerskin. Oz, all of it, by all official authors, plus Baum's Sky Island and The Sea Fairies. A child's collection of Arthurian stories, based on Mallory. Meredith Ann Pierce's The Darkangel and The Firebringer (not their sequels, which I didn't find until later). Tamora Pierce's The Woman Who Rides Like a Man (I read the quartet out of order). Piers Anthony's Xanth, annoyingly enough. Seaward and the Dark Is Rising series by Susan Cooper. Every juvenile adventure Heinlein ever wrote. Asimov's Foundation trilogy (not so much the later sequels). Clan of the Cave Bear and its first three sequels, by Jean Auel. Whatever encyclopedia edition my parents owned. Anna Sewell's Black Beauty. Every horse book Marguerite Henry ever wrote. Walter Farley's The Black Stallion and all its sequels, even the weird one with the aliens. (You may think I am kidding about the aliens; I am really not.) Caribou Traveler, by Harold McCracken. Shy the Platypus, by Leslie Rees, which came with an accompanying stuffed toy platypus that I lost at my daycare center.
I am probably forgetting a dozen more.
...
I was not remotely a balanced reader. If it didn't have animals and/or fantastical elements, I wasn't much interested. I mean, I read tons of Sweet Valley books (because Vicky had them in the house), and stupid amounts of R. L. Stine "horror" books (again, because Vicky had them in the house), and a fair amount of "realistic" fiction (because I was deathly bored and needed to read something, anything, even a cereal box...), but most of that just went in and out without sticking. I am still a highly unbalanced reader, though I've read a few pieces of the standard Western literary canon since my late teens, and I have taken to reading nonfiction more often than fiction.
I am not sure what influences I carried away beyond that pre-existing bent toward the fantastic rather than the realistic. Probably a love for logistical accuracy and an interest in ethics, but again, I don't know how much of that was learned versus how much was innate. It is also obvious that I overdosed on fairy-tales and myths, to the point that those storytelling patterns are deeply ingrained in my subconscious.
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December Talking Meme: All Days
Um. If I talk about why, we'll be here all day, so I guess I'll just list a bunch of titles and series. My cutoff age is twelve, since one has to define childhood somehow and becoming a teenager seems a reasonable break point.
C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series, most particularly The Tombs of Atuan. Also The Dispossessed. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, most specifically The Silmarillion. Also Smith of Wooton Major. Grimm's fairy tales. Andersen's fairy tales. Children's books of Greek myths, Norse myths, and Christian myths (aka, a child's illustrated book of Bible stories). Every single one of Andrew Lang's colored Fairy Books. Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. The Burgess Animal Book for Children, by Thornton Burgess; less critically, his various Old Mother West Wind books. The picture books of Holling Clancy Holling, especially Paddle-to-the-Sea and Seabird. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy, Moon-flash duology, and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. Robin McKinley's Damar duology and Deerskin. Oz, all of it, by all official authors, plus Baum's Sky Island and The Sea Fairies. A child's collection of Arthurian stories, based on Mallory. Meredith Ann Pierce's The Darkangel and The Firebringer (not their sequels, which I didn't find until later). Tamora Pierce's The Woman Who Rides Like a Man (I read the quartet out of order). Piers Anthony's Xanth, annoyingly enough. Seaward and the Dark Is Rising series by Susan Cooper. Every juvenile adventure Heinlein ever wrote. Asimov's Foundation trilogy (not so much the later sequels). Clan of the Cave Bear and its first three sequels, by Jean Auel. Whatever encyclopedia edition my parents owned. Anna Sewell's Black Beauty. Every horse book Marguerite Henry ever wrote. Walter Farley's The Black Stallion and all its sequels, even the weird one with the aliens. (You may think I am kidding about the aliens; I am really not.) Caribou Traveler, by Harold McCracken. Shy the Platypus, by Leslie Rees, which came with an accompanying stuffed toy platypus that I lost at my daycare center.
I am probably forgetting a dozen more.
...
I was not remotely a balanced reader. If it didn't have animals and/or fantastical elements, I wasn't much interested. I mean, I read tons of Sweet Valley books (because Vicky had them in the house), and stupid amounts of R. L. Stine "horror" books (again, because Vicky had them in the house), and a fair amount of "realistic" fiction (because I was deathly bored and needed to read something, anything, even a cereal box...), but most of that just went in and out without sticking. I am still a highly unbalanced reader, though I've read a few pieces of the standard Western literary canon since my late teens, and I have taken to reading nonfiction more often than fiction.
I am not sure what influences I carried away beyond that pre-existing bent toward the fantastic rather than the realistic. Probably a love for logistical accuracy and an interest in ethics, but again, I don't know how much of that was learned versus how much was innate. It is also obvious that I overdosed on fairy-tales and myths, to the point that those storytelling patterns are deeply ingrained in my subconscious.
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December Talking Meme: All Days
