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

[theneonpenguin]

the chronicle of narnia: 7 years old.

[blackbear88]

All of them, or particular ones? :) (I ask because TLTW&TW was an Important Book for me.... but the others were not.)

[theneonpenguin]

all of them soon followed by wrinkle in time.

[dougmander]

The Wonder Clock -- a collection of 24 fairy tales written and illustrated by Howard Pyle, the golden age American illustrator, and published around 1890, I think.
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.
Tolkien, of course.

[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

[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.

[hhw]

The Wump World by Bill Peet. Read it in school in first or second grade, finally bought myself a copy about 15 years ago. I don't think it had any impact on my writing, but it definitely planted some pro-natural environment, anti-excessive consumption ideas early on.

[blackbear88]

Oh man, I love Bill Peet! I'd never seen this one before, I should check it out...

[sirvalence]

LotR profoundly affected my ideas of what people should aspire to be. It makes me squirm when people accuse it of showing black-and-white thinking, because they aren't reading deep enough. Boromir succumbs to temptation, but redeems himself. Gollum is thoroughly corrupted, but Frodo is merciful to him and he _almost_ breaks free; he might even have been successful if Sam had been kinder to him. The elves and dwarves oppose Sauron but bicker amongst themselves. The woses condemn the Rohirrim for hunting them.

I know I read a lot. I typically finished two paperback novels a week, reading them on the bus (one-hour ride, each direction). But nothing else affected me the way LotR did, and still does.