two hundred public words 15/30
Damn it. Well, whatever, I'll post twice today. At least I am not subject to perfectionism, huh? 'Cuz otherwise, I wouldn't continue.
In my last entry, I left a few authors out in the cold in terms of YAF fantasy writers, just because there are so many. I guess it's not so surprising that I know a lot of YAF fantasy, old and new; it was the sort of thing I read semi-obsessively around age eight, nine, ten, eleven. I have a visceral, all-five-senses memory of going down the line of shelves in the myths and fairytales section -- Dewey Decimal System, 398, Folklore -- Beyond the Grimms' Bros. and Hans Christian Anderson, there were the Lang Fairytale books, in their spectrum of colors, the Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Pink, Grey, Violet, Crimson, Brown, Orange, Olive, and Lilac (thanks, Wikipedia) -- all published between 1889 and 1910, and collections of myths and folklore of other cultures, from Greece through Scandinavia, Japan, and the Americas and Africa. I think I very likely read them all. I know I was au courant with Anansi, the West African spider trickster character, long before he was de rigueur in mid-seventies classrooms and textbooks.
Anyway, it was natural to move from those tales to original fantasy stories, from ... well, from whenever. Here are the remaining (male) authors I intended to talk about:
J. R. R. Tolkien
C. S. Lewis
Edward Eager
The order here is one of chronology of writing, with overlaps. Women are in the next entry.
I read Tolkien -- at least, The Hobbit -- when I was about thirteen. Part of me was geekily drawn by the invented language, and I appreciated the quest format... but something about the tangled gnarl of his writing put me off continuing on with The Lord of the Rings literally until the movie came out. Then, however many years ago -- deep into adulthood -- I finally read all three of those novels, and enjoyed them very much. I think, not long after I read The Hobbit, I saw a cartoon movie based on it, which I wasn't that into... that may have influenced me against further Tolkien, too. I think that I recognized a lot of his source elements (I'd read various versions of Beowulf, and he calls on the Lang fairytales, too, to create his Middle Earth. But I don't know. There was just something... maybe too insular or too Heroically Male about it to interest me. Actually, that may have been it. There aren't any female characters to identify with, and that was often very important for me, though apparently not in Mark Twain... hm.
C. S. Lewis, I struggled much more with. I read and sobbed over The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, along about age ten, which was when I had my own spiritual crisis and considered converting from my inborn atheism to Catholicism or Judaism. I figured it should be one of the two heavy hitters, which is how I conceived those two religions... the ORIGINS, if you will, of Judeo-Christian culture... plus, I had a great aunt who was a Franciscan nun, and lots of fellow students who were Jews... it is a matter of some pride to me that the girl I asked to help me with my exploration of Judaism -- basically, she taught me the Hebrew alphabet and told me a fair amount about holidays and basic precepts... though not more about either of those than I had gotten from Sydney Taylor's All of a Kind Family series -- later became a Reform Rabbi.
Anyway, that was a good moment at which to start the Narnian chronicles, but my religious frenzy didn't last more than a few months in fifth grade, and when I decided more firmly on atheism I had a reaction -- Aslan is SO CHRISTIAN. That whole series, from its Jesus sacrifice in the first book to the veiled anti-Muslim xenophobia in The Horse and his Boy with its sneering derision of Tash (Allah), to the nasty anti-atheist diatribes in the apocalyptic Last Battle, where the materialist dwarves (apparently, the industrial working class) reject heaven and god and therefore are condemned to survive or die in a filthy stable with muck and dung covered straw... it offended me. And then, a couple of years later, I read the Cold War Christian trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength... oy. I was entranced by the imagery of Mars and the idea of philology -- the study of language, something I had a yen for, myself, but dimly suspected might be mostly accomplished already -- but I was furious at the endless religious intent and at how Lewis painted modern science as twisted and totalitarian, of necessity. The heavy doses of class snobbery didn't make it an easier pill to swallow, either.
Edward Eager, though immediately after Lewis in chronology, is miles away in lack of seriousness. He wrote his series on everyday middle class American children encountering magic, in early 1950s, because he wanted something to read to his own kids. They're enjoyable light fluff, with time capsulized white bread culture and a heavy debt to E. Nesbit and P. L. Travers. The series, from Half Magic, through Knight's Castle, Magic by the Lake, The Time Garden, Magic or Not?, The Well-Wishers, and finally, Seven-Day Magic all employ humor, siblings, a conceit -- whether it's a magical coin, a lake, a period of time -- which limits the extent and potential of the magic encountered, and often, a question about how real anything actually is. They're enjoyable books, and were republished fairly recently. They're written for somewhat younger kids -- pre-teens, let's say -- and the language is a lot easier than many other fantasy books.
In my last entry, I left a few authors out in the cold in terms of YAF fantasy writers, just because there are so many. I guess it's not so surprising that I know a lot of YAF fantasy, old and new; it was the sort of thing I read semi-obsessively around age eight, nine, ten, eleven. I have a visceral, all-five-senses memory of going down the line of shelves in the myths and fairytales section -- Dewey Decimal System, 398, Folklore -- Beyond the Grimms' Bros. and Hans Christian Anderson, there were the Lang Fairytale books, in their spectrum of colors, the Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Pink, Grey, Violet, Crimson, Brown, Orange, Olive, and Lilac (thanks, Wikipedia) -- all published between 1889 and 1910, and collections of myths and folklore of other cultures, from Greece through Scandinavia, Japan, and the Americas and Africa. I think I very likely read them all. I know I was au courant with Anansi, the West African spider trickster character, long before he was de rigueur in mid-seventies classrooms and textbooks.
Anyway, it was natural to move from those tales to original fantasy stories, from ... well, from whenever. Here are the remaining (male) authors I intended to talk about:
J. R. R. Tolkien
C. S. Lewis
Edward Eager
The order here is one of chronology of writing, with overlaps. Women are in the next entry.
I read Tolkien -- at least, The Hobbit -- when I was about thirteen. Part of me was geekily drawn by the invented language, and I appreciated the quest format... but something about the tangled gnarl of his writing put me off continuing on with The Lord of the Rings literally until the movie came out. Then, however many years ago -- deep into adulthood -- I finally read all three of those novels, and enjoyed them very much. I think, not long after I read The Hobbit, I saw a cartoon movie based on it, which I wasn't that into... that may have influenced me against further Tolkien, too. I think that I recognized a lot of his source elements (I'd read various versions of Beowulf, and he calls on the Lang fairytales, too, to create his Middle Earth. But I don't know. There was just something... maybe too insular or too Heroically Male about it to interest me. Actually, that may have been it. There aren't any female characters to identify with, and that was often very important for me, though apparently not in Mark Twain... hm.
C. S. Lewis, I struggled much more with. I read and sobbed over The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, along about age ten, which was when I had my own spiritual crisis and considered converting from my inborn atheism to Catholicism or Judaism. I figured it should be one of the two heavy hitters, which is how I conceived those two religions... the ORIGINS, if you will, of Judeo-Christian culture... plus, I had a great aunt who was a Franciscan nun, and lots of fellow students who were Jews... it is a matter of some pride to me that the girl I asked to help me with my exploration of Judaism -- basically, she taught me the Hebrew alphabet and told me a fair amount about holidays and basic precepts... though not more about either of those than I had gotten from Sydney Taylor's All of a Kind Family series -- later became a Reform Rabbi.
Anyway, that was a good moment at which to start the Narnian chronicles, but my religious frenzy didn't last more than a few months in fifth grade, and when I decided more firmly on atheism I had a reaction -- Aslan is SO CHRISTIAN. That whole series, from its Jesus sacrifice in the first book to the veiled anti-Muslim xenophobia in The Horse and his Boy with its sneering derision of Tash (Allah), to the nasty anti-atheist diatribes in the apocalyptic Last Battle, where the materialist dwarves (apparently, the industrial working class) reject heaven and god and therefore are condemned to survive or die in a filthy stable with muck and dung covered straw... it offended me. And then, a couple of years later, I read the Cold War Christian trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength... oy. I was entranced by the imagery of Mars and the idea of philology -- the study of language, something I had a yen for, myself, but dimly suspected might be mostly accomplished already -- but I was furious at the endless religious intent and at how Lewis painted modern science as twisted and totalitarian, of necessity. The heavy doses of class snobbery didn't make it an easier pill to swallow, either.
Edward Eager, though immediately after Lewis in chronology, is miles away in lack of seriousness. He wrote his series on everyday middle class American children encountering magic, in early 1950s, because he wanted something to read to his own kids. They're enjoyable light fluff, with time capsulized white bread culture and a heavy debt to E. Nesbit and P. L. Travers. The series, from Half Magic, through Knight's Castle, Magic by the Lake, The Time Garden, Magic or Not?, The Well-Wishers, and finally, Seven-Day Magic all employ humor, siblings, a conceit -- whether it's a magical coin, a lake, a period of time -- which limits the extent and potential of the magic encountered, and often, a question about how real anything actually is. They're enjoyable books, and were republished fairly recently. They're written for somewhat younger kids -- pre-teens, let's say -- and the language is a lot easier than many other fantasy books.