Four Books
I've decided to take this much the way my favorite ones to follow on my flist have. Not so much just a recitation of things you've heard me say before, but like an atlas to who I am and where I've been. Things you would have to have touched and tasted to have 'traveled to me.'
I. Elfquest.
I was five or six when I started reading this comic book, with kyllo at seshen's house, and at the elementary when she would sneak the books there. Oh my, but I'm aware most people would say we were too young. But we loved it. So much. So so so much. And we made clothes on notebook paper to dress our Barbie’s up like these characters.
Oh, so deep and long and true and forever is my love of Richard and Wendy Pini.
II. The Giver.
The very first, favorite dystopia novel, with its own amusing first time story. I didn't find this novel because I knew it or heard of it. I was standing in the library boasting about my reading speed, when I was ten or eleven, and they wanted proof. So I told them to pick any book and give me fifteen seconds, and question me on anything on the page. I won. The boys were impressed and the morning went on.
But at the end, I still really wanted to know why children were gifted books at a certain age, on that certain page, so I went back and took the book out that evening.
III. Piers Anthony.
This is twofold. I began reading The Xanth Series because my mother loved them, and they were everywhere in her library. And I so very much wanted to be a big girl and read my mother's books. And she was letting me, so I tried as hard as I could. Which amusingly, the only way I could start was by pulling out this huge first three book, hard cover, edition at the beginning. Tiny me, carrying this huge volume.
Also. Importantly. Was how impacting the Mode Series was on my teenage years. Looking back, and even then, I understand why my mother was leery about my sudden fascination with it. Given the topics which ran throughout it.
IV. The Mists of Avalon.
Nowhere near the first Arthurian Legend book I read, or even the first ten, but this was my favorite. Though it was published the year I was born, I read it when I was about twelve or thirteen, very much for the same reason as the Xanth books. This one sat on my father computer shelf for half my life, and so I stole it down and sat and read it across an entire weekend at his house, doing nothing else but it.
And it's never left a very special place in my heart, or soul, since.