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

[arenson9]

There's a scene in "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel", a juvenile novel by Heinlien, where the alien, intelligent cat people point out that humans do a really poor job of noticing all the details of what's around them. The epiphany caused by that text of realizing how much I don't see or remember has stayed with me and been reinforced many, many times

[knightos]

Let's see... Tolkien when I was about 8, Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, and L.M. Boston when I was 9. At 10, I read a lot of the Three Investigators (a step down, but very formative). Somewhere in the mix Madeleine L'engle, Alexander Key, Asimov, and Heinlein. And in 3rd grade I had my mother read Dante's Inferno to me, along with Homer's Illiad and Odyssey. I wasn't capable of reading them on my own, but really wanted to go through the material, so she read and explained when I had questions.

[reynaud]

Remembering what I read when I was a pre-teen...

I don't really remember what I read when. I know I read the Hobbit as a kid, but waited a while to read tLotR. Then friend introduced me to Lloyd Alexander and the Chronicles of Prydain, which I think influenced my ideas of hero being average joe-schmoes. Sometime in there, I also read Madeline l'Engle and John Christopher's Tripod series. I also read alot of the Three Investigators and Enid Blyton's Famous Five and Secret Seven series; what I loved about those especially were the secret tunnels (especially in the Five series) and the Three Investigator's secret base. I must have read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe in there somewhere and some of the others (like Prince Caspian and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader), but some of the Narnia series I never really got into (I still have not completed "A Horse and his Boy").

I'm not what, if anything, has effected my writing style. I suppose if someone else read my writing they could tell, but I can't.