Fantasy with Friends is a weekly meme hosted by the good people over at Pages Unbound. Fantasy with Friends poses questions each Monday about fantasy, either as a genre as a whole or individual works.
This week’s prompt is:
Is there a particular fantasy that got you interested in the genre? Do you remember any of the earliest fantasy books you read?
I think one of the earliest–maybe the earliest–fantasy novels I read was Jane Yolen’s The Wizard of Washington Square. I’m not positive it’s the right one, I spend a good amount of time looking for it this weekend, and it feels right. And I have a strong memory for where it was on the library shelves–and Yolen fits for alphabetical by author placement.
Several others followed–those that stand out the most are Julie Edwards’ The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles (an all-time favorite), Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH was something I read a dozen or more times. A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet were in heavy rotation (the fourth book in the series wasn’t released until I’d moved on from “Juvenile” fiction). The Phantom Tollbooth…what can be said about it that hasn’t been several times before? I’m not going to say anything about Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, because the emotional scars are still raw. I have strong memories of reading Below the Root by Zilpha Keatley Snyder (not just because it didn’t help me at all with the Commodore 64 game), although I couldn’t find the rest of the trilogy in bookstores or the library.
Also, how cool is the name Zilpha?
There are two big series in my mind, though. John Christopher’s The Sword of the Spirits. I sadly remember very little of it–but I remember reading it often, and that it was one of the earlier books I remember that had a lot of morally gray moments and protagonists who weren’t to be admired all that much.
I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again (and again, and again, knowing me)–the big one for me is The Chronicles of Prydain. The Chronicles of Narnia and/or The Voyage of the Dawn Treader turned me into a C.S. Lewis reader, but the saga of Taran, the Assistant Pig-Keeper, Princess Eilonwy, the ex-king/would-be bard, Fflewddur Fflam, and the oracular pig, Hen Wen…that’s what turned me into a Fantasy reader. The stories based on Welsh-mythology, tapped into my imagination–shaped it, too, actually. Life, love, laughter, and loss–it’s all there. I’ve read the series twice in the last decade, and it still works. It’s my favorite from my childhood, and it’s one of my favorites still.
A few years after that, I came across the DragonLance Chronicles, DragonLance: Chronicles, the original Shannara trilogy and Magic Kingdom for Sale/Sold, and…well, we’ve left “earliest.”
I’m really looking forward to some of the other posts in response to this prompt, iT’s fun looking back on what early books shaped the readers we become.
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