Formative Matter

[blackbear88]

So I've been having an interesting conversation on robinmckinley's LJ about books that shape us in our early reading years--not just books you enjoyed when you were a pre-teen, but books that genuinely changed or helped form how you write (if you're a writer) or how you think or view the world at large. Her own talking about the books that shaped her writing--

Comments

[bushi7]

_The King Must Die_ by Mary Renault. It's a novelization of the myth of Theseus and the concepts of honor and sacrifice it portrays profoundly affected me as a teenager.

Reading _A Wrinkle in Time_ further cemented in my 10-year-old head that science fiction could be really cool. (Watching "City on the Edge of Forever" as a 7-year-old started that whole love of SF.)

As an 11-year-old I enjoyed _The Grey King_ by Susan Cooper so much that I lovingly memorized the long rhyme in it (and I can still recite it even today--though not the two last lines that are in Welsh :-)). It was this book that led me to expand my fascination with SF to include fantasy, and it was after reading this book that I started dabbling in writing my own fantasy stories. (As a side note, _The Grey King_ is book #4 in the Dark Is Rising series and the reason our school library had it but not the others was because it had won a Newbery. It was many years later before I had the opportunity to read the other books in the series.)

Fascinating to think about these books and how they affected my life... I wonder what books my kids will look back on as having affected them? Harry Potter will likely be in there somewhere.

[hhw]

It was those 2 welsh lines (and the other Welsh words) in that series that eventually led to my first fateful meeting with blackbear88!

[bushi7]

Heh. Sounds like there's a story there. You're not going to continue?

[hhw]

On my part, The Dark Is Rising series lit the spark to want to learn the language, and I met blackbear88 in a Welsh class at IU.

[blackbear88]

For my part, I loved the first book in the series (Over Sea, Under Stone) but--like the Narnia books--I liked the others less, for reasons I won't rail about here! I think my own interest in Welsh was sparked by Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, and so my bachelor's thesis was on medieval welsh lit, and after college I thought I should expand my understanding of the language... and there was hhw!

[sirvalence]

I had no idea you'd studied Welsh. Fascinating.

[knightos]

What if we want you to rail? I'm just curious...

I read the Dark is Rising first, so it had the most impact on me. I waited very impatiently for my 13th birthday, as I had really hoped that I was an old one. *laughs* I liked the others, but that one had the most impact on me. I used to have all the poems in the serious memorized, as I had done a report on them when I was but a wee bairn.

[blackbear88]

The short version of the rant is, "Will's a prat." :)

The longer version has to do with what I like in a book--I favor heroes who are ordinary people who do amazing things, rather than books where the hero discovers that they were predestined for greatness. Simon, Jane, and Barney are three more or less ordinary kids (despite their association with Great Uncle Merry) who get swept up in this amazing scary-ass plot to find the grail before the bad guys do, and they triumph by being smart and resourceful. Will, on the other hand, is like the Chosen One, and while I didn't mind him in the first book, by book 5 I was fed up with him--and what happens to Barney Simon and Jane? Nothing! They show up in Greenwich and do some stuff, and Jane gets all weird (my memory here is vague) and Will bosses them around. Suckity suck.

The Dark Is Rising

[danceswithpahis]

When I was younger I read and loved the Dark Is Rising series. Upon rereading it as an adult (or rather rereading parts of it; I couldn't make it through the whole thing), much of the fairy gold had turned to withered leaves. The detail that annoyed me the most was actually fairly small in the grand scheme of things, but it bothered me enough that I couldn't keep reading. A handful of times, the people in Will's life (his family, close friends, etc.) find out that he is an Old One (or whatever the term was; it's been awhile). Will gives them a little bit of information about what that means, they act surprised and shocked, and he regretfully decides that they can't handle this information and wipes it out of their memory. Okay, give me a BREAK!! Of course it's going to take them more than 40 seconds to process this information. That does not necessarily mean that they can't handle it at ALL. How about giving them a day or two (or five minutes or so) to process it before wiping their memories?

I will say that for me too this series got me interested in Welsh. I still haven't managed to take a class (although one of my lifelong dreams is to live in Wales for awhile and study Welsh), but I remain hopeful.