(Untitled)

[oursin]

intertext has a lovely post about childhood reading of fantasy and sf, which reminded me of a post I meant to make and got distracted.

While on one of the panels at Wiscon I averred that reading The Left Hand of Darkness in my early 20s was what got me into reading sff. I had read sf before then, but very little of it in book form, as far as I can remember

Comments

[serrana]

The girl is finally old enough to sit still for chapter books, which is a v. recent development. So far we've done The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which confirmed my juvenile suspicion that Lucy is completely smarmy (like an adult's idea of an ideal little girl, rather than an actual child) and Susan is the sensible one. TLTW&TW was never my favorite of the Narnia books as a kid, and I don't think it is as an adult either, but it's a very good read-aloud book -- Lewis, probably intentionally, has made the chapters of relatively equal length, about what can be read aloud in twenty minutes, which is a great convenience.

The second is Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, which has some wonderful writing (which I know I didn't really appreciate as a kid), but much more uneven chapter lengths. And I find myself completely slashing Ratty and Mole. Which is thoroughly inappropriate but oh, my, they are such an old married couple.

[oursin]

How could I forget The Wind in the Willows??? (I still tear up at 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn'. And of course the Alice books.

[serrana]

I've been thinking I should follow it up with...oh, what is it -- Three Men, A Boat, and a Dog?? Except I think that would be over the girl's head. But the tone is v. similar.

[oursin]

E Nesbit might work? (Same period.)

[liadnan]

I've just been reading Francis Spufford's memoir, The Child That Books Built, about childhood reading (and SF&F in particular). Well worth a look if you haven't read it.

The first book he read was The Hobbit (when he was 6) and, with one notable exception (I've never read the Little House on the Prairie books) everything he referred to chimed with my own experience. (Though I was reading long before 6, indeed before 4, but that's what comes of having English teachers as parents. Not sure what the first novel I read was: unlike him I didn't jump in at the deep end skipping Peter & Jane.)

So far as Le Guin is concerned, he too writes about that revelatory feeling of first reading The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Or indeed, so far as my own experience is concerned, the Earthsea books.

[oursin]

That's an amazing book.
And I was taught history by his father. So I recognise some of the places he describes.

[liadnan]

They aren't as enjoyable for me at 34 as they were at 16 either. The second sequence aged better. But I'm not sure I would really have put them down as defining, or lifechanging for me anyway.

Slightly related, in my head at least, is the observation in Diane Purkiss' At The Bottom Of The Garden: A dark history of fairies, hobgoblins and other troublesome things (which I picked up for a re-read after the Spufford and which in my mind is now connecting with it in unexpected ways): "[M]y mother's generation watched the film Casablanca. So did mine. But we watched for such different reasons and saw such different things in it that we might more accurately have been said to be watching different movies." Though you -Frankie I mean- and I are of the same age, the ages at which you read books first clearly can result in an analogous difference in reaction (though I'm surprised that Oursin had that reaction to the Needhams -unless I misunderstood-, I'd have expected them to be something that worked at all ages). But Oursin's point in the

[intertext]

I can't help thinking I would have adored Harry Potter if I'd read him as a child (I mean, I enjoy the HP's, but am not overwhelmingly delighted by them). I think children are less critical of the obvious flaws in writing (see also Enid Blyton et al) than we are.

Lloyd Alexander is one writer I have difficulty with as an adult, though I loved him when I was young, especially the Prydain books.

[rivka]

Lloyd Alexander is one writer I have difficulty with as an adult, though I loved him when I was young, especially the Prydain books.

Oh dear. Perhaps I shouldn't re-read those, then.

[adrian_turtle]

I loved the Prydain books when I was young, but rereading them as an adult was difficult and uncomfortable. In my twenties, it was uncomfortable, but I could sort of remember enjoying them. In my thirties, the scenes with Gurgi were just too uncomfortable for me to enjoy the rest of the book at all. I it was a lot easier for me to reread the Westmark books as an adult. I think I got even more out of them than I did the first time around.

[oursin]

Some years ago I picked up a Blyton Famous 5 at my sister's (it must have been when her offspring were still at the Blyton age), and although it clearly had all the expected defects, it did have vigorous onward narrative propulsion.

[forthwritten]

I read On the Road when I was about 16 and it was perfect. I read it again as a first year undergraduate and it just didn't have the same appeal - instead of being exciting and freewheeling, the 'characters' seemed tediously immature. I haven't read any Kerouac since; I'm too worried that the people he writes about will just remind me of people who think they're so very rebellious and dangerous when they're merely tedious and adolescent.

On the other hand, fresher's week was the perfect time to read Brideshead Revisited.