Guilty Pleasures

[hfnuala]

When I was 10 to 15 years old I devoured everything by Andre Norton I could find. The first one of her books was bought for me from one of the english bookshops in Brussels - it was Tales of the Witch World and was a Daw paperback with a good and pulpy cover. I still have it, though it may be in storage. I've got rid of many bad teenage books[1

Comments

[davidfrazer]

Harry Turtledove.

A friend recommended his novel Agent of Byzantium, which is a spy thriller set in an alternative world where Muhammed converted the Arabs to Orthodox Christianity and was sanctified as Saint Mahomet. Since there is no Islamic or Ottoman empire, Constantinople's main enemy is the Persians, and the fringes of the empire are filled with Nestorians and other esoteric heretics.

I enjoyed that, so I galloped through the Misplaced Legion series and realised that Turtledove was taking advantage of the obscurity of Byzantine history to use it as the basis of an entire fantasy world. And that is about all I can remember of it.

(Hi. We met during glitzfrau's meet-the-lj-friends evening in London. Hope you don't mind me dropping in.)

[fjm]

Guilt? Jews don't do guilt....

I read anything I could get my hands on: M&B, fantasy, fairy tales, Streatfield (Gemma and Sisters were my favourite but I also had a crush on Petrova which transferred seamlessly to Sabrina in Charlie's Angels). I never stopped reading Diana Wynne Jones, discovered sf at te age of 12 and moved almost completely over to that, and continued to collect girls school books from the 1920s and 1930s. I have the complete Chalet School collection (only in pb) and took it to University with me.

But then, I'm the person who sat sewing sequings on a fairy frock (for Iolanthe) in a Women's Group meeting because I wanted to piss them off.

[thereyougothen]

i think i read every single regency romance in bowie library.

every single one. even the really crap ones. i used to work in a deparmtent store from 11-9, so i would come home, read a book, fall asleep and do it all again tomorrow.

i think i would read the georgette heyers again, and there were books by patricia veryan that used to make me laugh out loud. but everything else was crap.

but not as crap as the crap my mum read.

[kulfuldi]

I was thinking about this, and the books I was most guilty about reading, even as a child, were 'Biggles' books - mostly because my relatives tended to mutter 'militarist, imperialist rubbish' if they saw me with one. Which was, of course, true, but not the point when you're 8 or 9. I used to lie on the ground behind the sofa to read them, so nobody could see me.

[once_was_eric]

Enid Blyton!

It was a while ago...