I’m reading David Profumo’s Bringing the House Down: A Memoir, about his parents’ marriage and The Scandal (I had started it months ago and immediately lent it out before finishing it), and it is like a PARODY of Englishness, it’s so English, but I adore it utterly. I would shelve it with other examples of Male Children Writing About Their Parents’ Sex Lives With Understanding and Humor and Perspective (Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage, mainly.)
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While Ford was a student at Ball State University she began writing about her assault, her relationship with her father, and started her first blog.
She graduated with a degree in English studies in 2011 and moved to Indianapolis. Within four months of arriving, she went from having three part-time jobs to being unemployed. It was then that she realized her dream was to become a full-time writer.
“When you’re at the bottom, it’s also the best time to think about what you want. And once you realize it, there’s no going back — it’s like they say, once you’re awake, there’s no going back to sleep.”
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During the course of the same book-sorting that unearthed my Profumo memoir, I came across my complete Monty Python scripts, my most prized and well-thumbed possession from ages 10 to 18, utterly held together by duct tape, and was SWAMPED by a wave of nostalgia and great love. What was your most important book during that time?
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FASCINATING (also really sad, fyi):
He was singular in life: one of the greatest accordion players ever to come out of south Louisiana. A Creole prodigy who traveled the countryside playing his bluesy two-steps and waltzes, he changed Cajun music and laid down the roots for zydeco.
At his death at the age of 44 in 1942, he was Case No. 13387 in the state psychiatric hospital, destined for an anonymous burial.
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Jamil Smith on the Cavaliers and police reform in Cleveland:
Clevelanders are good at worrying. The city’s citizens are big on loyalty and short on hope. This is bred into us. We have to constantly reject the undeserved labels of laughingstock and “Mistake on the Lake” given to us by our municipal neighbors, all while experiencing the very real fragility that comes with, among many things, the collapse of industry and the incompetence of our local government. In recent years, a narrative of local renaissance of sorts has sprung up. When the Republican Party chose the traditionally liberal Cleveland for its 2016 party convention, the Plain Dealer editorial board went so far as to declare that the GOP had “validated the city’s relevance.” We can be a very insecure bunch. And this extends everywhere.
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I don’t know if Nikki linked to the Addy Walker piece on Friday, but if she did, you can always read it again:
Dolls have never simply been toys, especially not throughout America’s racial history. In Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny, Michele Mitchell writes about black reformers in the early twentieth century who argued that if beautiful white dolls reinforced white superiority and minstrel dolls reinforced black inferiority, then perhaps owning beautiful black dolls could teach children racial pride. Booker T. Washington wrote, in 1910, that black dolls “will have the effect of instilling in Negro girls and in Negro women a feeling of respect for their own race.” Marcus Garvey urged mothers to “give your children dolls that look like them to play with and cuddle so that they will learn as they grow older to love and care for their own children and not neglect them.”
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I have not seen Montage of Heck, the Cobain documentary, but I assume Robin Wasserman is right about it, she usually is:
What you won’t find in Montage of Heck:
Any major challenge to the familiar narrative of Kurt Cobain as an angsty, reluctant rocker with an unfortunate heroin habit. Despite breathless claims to the contrary and with a few interesting exceptions, this story hits all the expected beats.
Any version of Cobain not already available to avid fans. The playful, funny side that many viewers seem shocked to discover — as well as signature episodes like Cobain’s botched efforts to lose his virginity and subsequent sort-of suicide attempt — is known to readers of Cobain’s journals (published in a collected volume back in 2002), from which much of Morgen’s footage is drawn.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
Strange & Norrell last night. My god, Strange & Norrell. Hngh.
Somebody hold me. Or at least talk me through this. I cannot wait until Sunday for more.
Wans’t it amazing! Strange! Merlin! Swoon!
Shit got real in that episode. Shit got so real. Was not expecting that much blood. Or nudity.
It occurs to me that they’ve still never said anything about the Raven King being king of the North. The idea of the Kingdom of Northern England is such a basic part of the book’s DNA that I’d never considered that the show might do without it. I guess there’s still time to introduce it, but they’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
I liked Strange’s use of euphemism when reading the soldiers’ letters.
I bet it’ll be introduced when Strange goes to Windsor and the show get its Madness of King George crossover on. Because that has to happen. They can’t not give me my George III.
The actor they’ve found for Stephen is UNREAL. He is playing it so well. My heart breaks every time he or Lady Pole are on screen D:
And the dead Italian soldiers and Strange freaking out after reviving them and oh mannnnnn and the gentleman’s long creepy fingernails!!!! This adaptation is so good.
Calm yourself, woman. Emotions are for the Italians, and to a lesser extent, Italian zombies.
I was previously unsure about the casting for Strange. Last night sold me. I can’t wait to see George III and Mrs. Brandy
No books were more important to me at that age than Thea Beckman’s Thule-trilogy, which was hugely important to my burgeoning feminism and which unfortunately has still not been translated into English!. Come on people: it’s a post-apocalyptic YA trilogy that would make a mint. Some publisher should totally get on that.
I mean, a recap of the story: it takes place after World War III, which involved so many nuclear bombs that the earth’s magnetic axis shifted. The books take place an undetermined amount of time later, in Greenland, which now has a lovely climate and is a matriarchal, nature-loving, pacifist society because it was all those evil industrialist men who fucked everything up. In the first book, a boat full of aforementioned evil industrialist men arrived in Greenland, and they then get (spoiler) completely destroyed by the kick-ass Thule ladies. The second book takes place a few years later, when 3 boats full of evil industrialist men arrive. And in the third book, which jumps forward again, Greenland’s been partially colonized (though there’s still guerilla resistance) and they have to learn to cohabitate.
It is AWESOME. Seriously. And full of interesting female characters, and it actually questions its feminist utopia and makes a lot of really interesting thematic points. Admittedly, Beckman was a 2nd generation feminist (the books were published 1985-1989), and she’s a lot more gender essentialist than I am, but still.
I WANT TO READ THIS.
Damn my monolinguality.
Ok, who do we appeal to to get this translated asap? Maybe a petition? I would 100% read this.
If you pay me a quadrillion bucks, I’ll translate it 😉
Kickstarter to hire a translator GO
Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…..Sowieso alle Lemniscaat boeken. Jan Terlouw’s koning van Katoren is een fantastisch voorbeeld van een maatschappijkritisch boek voor kinderen
Yessssss…All books by Lemniscaat Publishers anyway. Jan Terlouw’s “King of Katoren” is a fantastic example of a children’s book dealing with the socio-political issues of the day.
Did you know that was actually based on the D66 party program? Did NOT catch on to that as a teenager. But I did vote for them repeatedly, so maybe it worked as insidious political propaganda.
Which language is it? Danish?
Sorry, should have mentioned! It was written in Dutch.
How difficult Dutch? I’ve lived here for a while and am taking lessons, but I’m still not “good” at the language. I can sort of get through Voetbal International every week.
Difficult to say, but it’s meant for kids 12 years and older, and I think the language is fairly simple. You could give it a try?
I found a page with some quotes! Like this description of how the women of Thule view men: “”Mannen waren aardige, sterke, dikwijls vriendelijke wezens die het zware werk konden doen, maar zoiets gevoeligs als het landbestuur kon je hen niet toevertrouwen. Daarvoor waren ze te ruw, te eigengereid, te zelfzuchtig.”
That should hopefully give you an idea
(and for the curious, that says “Men were nice, strong, often friendly creatures who could do heavy labor, but you couldn’t trust them with something as sensitive as national governance. For that they were too rough, too stubborn, too selfish.”)
Most important book of my teenage years: Tam Lin.
HOW COULD I FORGET TAM LIN I MUST BE DEAD
Were you also mildly disappointed to get to college and realize it did not actually consist of a bunch of 20-year-olds sitting around quoting early modern literature at each other?
…just me?
Not just you
I didn’t encounter this book until grad school, and while I enjoyed it, I was like, “Please, those are *not* real undergrads, whatever.”
True story: I interviewed once for a position in the classics department at the real-world college the one in Tam Lin is based on. I asked the chair if zie was really the Queen of Elfland. I did not get the job for unrelated reasons, but I would have regretted it forever if I’d missed the opportunity to ask that question.
HERO
I included Carleton in my top 5 colleges as a high school student 100% because of Tam Lin.
I applied to transfer to Carleton for largely that reason. (Ended up not transferring at all. Possibly should have gone to Carleton to begin with. Everything worked out fine.)
I loved the heck out of that book.
I re-read it every fall and it always makes me wish I could go back and leave for college all over again.
The books by Joan Aiken that start with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and really get rolling when Dido Twite takes the reins of the story and also my heart in Nightbirds on Nantucket. Dido Twite for Prime Minister! The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander (my mom read them to me and I read them to my sisters). Douglas Adams–more the two Dirk Gently books, which I encountered on my own, than the Hitchhikers’ series which I experienced mainly through joking about them with my adored group of dudefriends. I was about to say “don’t judge me” (about the friends, not the books) but really, judge away.
The great thing about the Wolves books is how they ran the gamut of Stuff To Be Obsessed With (or at least, stuff I was obsessed with as a child): melodramatic Victorian children’s gothic? Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Courtly intrigue? Black Hearts in Battersea and the Cuckoo Tree. 19th century New England stories? Nightbirds on Nantucket. King Arthur, cannibalism, and pet leopards? The Stolen Lake. Classical music? Dido and Pa. Industrialization dystopias populated by plucky children? Is Underground. Psychic powers and cults? Cold Shoulder Road. That series had everything, is what I’m saying. But it was also so so unlike anything else that did any of those things.
And also it COMMITTED to those things. I think by the time Is Underground and Cold Shoulder Road came out I had aged out a bit (though I reread The Stolen Lake and the Cuckoo Tree periodically) but yeah, it had a lot, and the narrative is so confident about all of it, like, OF COURSE she’s going to ride an elephant to London to keep witches from causing a panic at the coronation.
I still re-read the Wolves Chronicles periodically. They are part of the small collection of Book I Will Always Own In Print Despite My Love Of Easily Transportable Ebooks Because What If Civilization Collapses? Though I also have them in ebook format because that way they are always accessible wherever I am.
Probably my most well-read book then (and now, really) is The Princess Bride. My first copy completely fell to pieces, so now I pretty much just collect copies of it- I currently have five. I’m most desperate to get my hands on that weird pulp sci-fi cover that has absolutely nothing to do with the plot, but I’ve never seen a copy in any used bookstore (I could get it from eBay probably, but it’s not quite the same thing).
Other critical books from that time period: Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce, Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones and In A Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson.
Mine too! I have a history of letting people borrow it and never getting it back (which is why I’m super stingy about letting people borrow books now), so I’ve probably bought the book 5 or 6 times by now.
The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order was one of my most thumbed books from middle school through high school. It helped form my views on feminism and sexuality for sure. I’d love to find a copy to skim again, and see how it holds up now that I’m 30.
yes!! I found an old copy at a library a few years ago and it was equal parts super-’90s (there was a piece on the sex appeal of the mini backpack) and super feminist.
I don’t know if I have an absolute favorite book from teenaged years, but I was/am sentimental about The Scarlet Pimpernel and collected various editions and tons of lesser-known sequels.
YES! I loved them too! I successfully campaigned to write a major English class project on The Scarlet Pimpernel and was very angry when I had to change my title from “Demmed Elusive” to “Darned Elusive.” Stupid Catholic school.
my Catholic school called my mom when I wore my Les Miserables t-shirt because the dress code didn’t allow shirts with words on them
WHY WOULDN’T THEY LET US BE GREAT
Brace yourselves: it’s (apparently??) Negroni Week: http://negroniweek.com/
Ah, thanks for reminding me! Cheers.
NO NO WE CALL IT NEGRONI SEASON!!
NEGRONI! SEASON!
Also, they were supposed to have a follow up chat with Evelyn but I never saw it. Do you know what happened?
Yes, that is the reference I was making, although apparently clumsily.
I had no idea what a Negroni was. And then I looked it up and it has vermouth. I’m out.
GUYS I know I’m late to the party but I saw Mad Max this weekend and am HERE TO DISCUSS. Since much has already been covered (reading Mallory and Shrill’s post post-screening was absolutely cathartic), here are a few additional topics:
– What happened to the old harem caretaker lady? Do we actually see her die and I just missed it?
– If the Warboys are the sons of the Citadel groundlings (?), then where are the girl-children? I probably don’t want to know, do I?
– WHO exactly is Joe perpetually at war with, if Bullet and Gas Town are allies?
– If Furiosa was going to gas town with a tanker full of water to trade for gas, then why did she tell the canyon gang that she had gas to trade them? Was she just lying?
– Thank god someone finally found the proper way to showcase Nicholas Hault’s face being that of a hot skeleton
– Do they just, not eat in that world, besides the occasional two-headed gecko and a bunch of well-watered lettuce? What is everyone on the road living on exactly?
I can answer some of these!!
1) Old harem caretaker lady (I think she may have been an original wife?) came with on the road in Immortan Joe’s car, and helped “deliver” the baby. Since that car remained intact, I think she lives.
2) Not sure.
3) He’s kind of got things on lock, but there are other clans– the porcupine guys who first attacked the War Machine, the canyon biker people, etc. They briefly mention that Furiosa is going into “hostile territory” when she first diverges.
4) The little round trailer had gas in it, the big square trailer had water.
5) Yes, my reaction to him was exactly the same as Capables.
6) Not sure.
Such a good movie, I am going to see it again in theatres as many times as possible.
6) if Road Warrior is anything to go by, there are probably still stocks of dog food around somewhere that people eat. Joe’s got a lot of raiding parties, presumably he’s made a stockpile somewhere. And they raise pigs in Barter Town, Joe’s aquacola probably buys him a lot of pigs.
I just saw it this weekend too!!! I had my doubts, going into it, that it was actually going to be the two-hour car chase it was described as. I was wrong. It was glorious.
I have no answers to any of these questions. I too wondered about the lack of girl-children (then figured I didn’t want to know) and wondered what on earth everyone was eating (which I do want to know).
There’s a guy called The People Eater…so……
I saw it yesterday and I am Changed.
I’ve been going around intoning “Do not, my friends, become addicted to water.”
Saw it this weekend too with my husband and sister-in-law and we all loved it. May be seeing it again this weekend. FURIOSA FURIOSA FURIOSA
Of course, the counterpoint is Mallory’s classic: http://thehairpin.com/2011/08/so-youve-decided-to…
I demand people (i.e. my cat) WITNESS ME every five seconds
My favorite intonation is “Ride eternal, shiny and chrome” (apparently Stephen Colbert just quoted the same in a commencement speech, in which he referenced the “documentary” he’d just seen this weekend, oh my God).
lolling. BEAUTIFUL
Also, what was up with the guys who spoke Russian (I think it was Russian?). Like… why Russian in particular?
Immediately I began wondering what it would take to turn my little red car into a Battle Fiat
We were all such a hazard driving home from the theater, omg. I was thrumming to charge forward and run something down, and my friend suggested she climb onto the roof and start growling at people.
I downloaded the soundtrack last and listened to it on my busride to work this morning while I crocheted. It was…an odd matchup.
I can only imagine you were crocheting aggressively, fit to take down the patriarchy.
It’s also available on Spotify! My favorite tracks are “Brother in Arms” and “Chapter Doof – Extended Version.”
I am very very interested to know why almost all the vehicles are set up with the steering wheel on the left — i.e., for driving on the right side of the road. Please someone explain. My spouse’s idea was that maybe water is SO scarce that Max has wandered into southern Africa and is not even in Australia anymore, which would also explain some of the topology.
In the future, you can just “wander” from Australia to southern Africa? Hey, I guess if the oceans dried up…
Yeah that was his idea.
I think what Furiosa calls “the Great Salt”, that they plan to drive through for a hundred and sixty days, is supposed to be the dried up remains of the oceans.
I read somewhere that they filmed in Namibia, so it’s possible.
Did Max actually see Splendid “go under the wheels” or did he think there was a chance she was alive, but knew they would all die if they tried to rescue her?
(This movie was everything I did not know I wanted! I agree with so many of your questions! Furiosa did have a fuel tank to trade with the Canyon Gang–after it’s separated from the war rig you see it get blown up. I have no idea how she justified taking the fuel tank on a gas run–maybe it was supposed to be empty to carry the gas back, but she secretly filled it up?)
I saw it a second time yesterday and I was watching that scene pretty closely – you can see her get a bit flung about. I’m not sure he would have gone back for her even if she’d survived, but I’m pretty sure he honestly thought she was dead.
I was under the impression that, at least in part, he didn’t want to go back because it would have been too psychologically painful. They show a split second flashback to a woman on the road, which I assume was a reference to his wife being run over in The Road Warrior.
I just saw it over the weekend too and I totally had my doubts going in. The only thing that swayed me was the positive reaction from Toasties because I had assumed it would just be dude-centric. HOW WRONG WAS I. I cannot tell you how EXHILARATED I was to see a film have a heroine as badass as Furiosa. Her awesomeness just was. And got-damn I never thought I would be so turned on by a guy unquestioningly handing over a gun to a woman because she’s a better shot and it’s nbd. FUCK I LOVE THIS MOVIE.
Right?? But for me what sets this movie apart is that you don’t just get the token badass heroine. A lot of movies have that. This one has Furiosa and is just getting started. Then you get – rape survivors who are scarred but not letting their past or their looks define them, building their own destiny – a gang of super awesome old lady sharpshooter bikers who want to regrow the world – Max yielding power to Furiosa without a second thought – BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE – recognizing that an enemy is a fellow victim, and letting compassion change that enemy into a friend and hero. I mean George Miller is saying, not at all subtly, that women and men working together with compassion can un-kill our fucked up world. It’s a car chase action flick that makes you into a better person. FUCK I love this movie.
Yessss absolutely! The fact that she’s not the token female fighter who has risen through the ranks despite her being a woman or AN AMPUTEE was so refreshing. The wives and the desert seniors who were also part of this world were fierce, but also kind, and flawed, and like you say, their looks and pasts didn’t define them.
I really want to marry Furiosa though. Tom Hardy is a total man-babe, but like, I dunno. This is one of the few films where I felt melancholy because I wanted to continue to be in a fantasy world where I might have a shot with Furiosa. I will forever have googly eyes for her.
I just love that every day there’s a new toastie who’s finally seen it, and so every day we all get to geek out all over again 😀
I am going Thursday and I CANNOT WAIT
Can I ask another question — how long after the apocalypse was the movie supposed to take place? Because Max isn’t all that old, and I think he was a cop in the before times, so that implied not too many years after. But Furiosa was apparently kidnapped as a child and was telling the biker chick ladies about her “clan,” which implied — at least twenty years? Any thoughts?
Anyway, I found the movie to be very satisfying and will probably watch it again sometime. Charlize was awesome.
I kind of figured that we’re stretching the limits of time here, as somehow, as Mallory mentioned in her convo with Shrill, they have this entirely new cosmology and religion. I guess, though, things disintegrate pretty rapidly when the world ends. So who knows?
I’ve seen 45 years referenced, but also maybe there was a lot of apocolypse and it lasted a long time. I’m not sure I’m convinced by Max’s claim to have been a cop.
I saw a theory that Tom Hardy’s guy has actually forgotten his name and “Mad Max” is a bit of a legend, so he takes the name “Max” to show he’s like him. The way you might call yourself after a legendary wanderer if you became a wanderer yourself.
Dread pirate Robert
Much useful info in the MeFi Fanfare thread here:
http://fanfare.metafilter.com/3315/Mad-Max-Fury-R…
Three of us had a mini-Toast meetup north of Boston and saw the 3D version! Apparently you can more than get away with seeing the 2D version since the 3D was essentially a “retrofit.”
I’m so glad I went. I think Miller easily surpassed the three original movies. The effects are unbelievable, especially considering that where you think you’re seeing CGI you probably aren’t. (The vehicles are FOR REALZ, as are the guys on the poles.)
Have you seen the b-roll? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH9KISH7nIo
The stunts are CRAZY
Oh also! I kind of want to know what kind of badass shenanigans the Milk Mothers get up to between being hooked up to pumping stations 24/7 and releasing all the water to the people at the end. There must have been some, right? I’d love to know their story!
Also I want to get a tattoo of bolt cutters now.
The first book to come to mind isn’t one from 10-18, it’s one from something like 7-9. I have such specific memories of Journey to the River Sea (a lesser known Eva Ibbotson book, but my first and favourite); I remember buying it knowing nothing except that it was about the Amazon and I loved the Amazon. I am hesitant to go back, as the book includes a white people vs. the natives plot and I am unsure if the treatment was good or not, but I did love it and reread it constantly as a child.
Oh my God I absolutely LOVED that book. I was more in the 10-18 range when it came out, but I still adored it, especially since the protagonist and I have the same name. I’d say the treatment of the native vs. whites issue holds up better than it does in some of her older romances (I’m thinking A Company of Swans specifically, and some really unfortunate lines in the others), but I also have a huuuge blind spot for her books. They’re some of my absolute favorites.
Eva Ibbotson was so much fun! I loved Journey to the River Sea, probably because it had this awesome gothic feel to it while still being a departure from her ghost books. I agree that it might not hold up well, though I haven’t gone back to it. I think at the very least the British family is portrayed as gross and evil, and we root for the natives, though there might be a bit of “noble savage” going on.
Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.
Eva Ibbotson forever! I loved Journey to the River Sea, but my favorite as a kid was Island of the Aunts.
i devoured everything eva ibbotson wrote. i just remember feeling that her novels were deliciously melancholy but not in a way that felt self-indulgent, even as a kid?
My most read and reread high/middle school book? Probably The Lord of the Rings. Though I went through books so quickly. There was also all the Pratchett and The Hitchhiker’s Guide and somewhere in my mother’s house is an incredibly battered copy of Watership Down.
But earlier than most of those (Tolkien will always be earliest) is the library copy of The Perilous Gard that I read in third grade. It taught me that heroines could be angry. Exquisitely angry. And that anger and stubbornness could help you and that you could apparently win men by insulting them.
And that all elves are probably just subterranean druids waiting to sacrifice you. Very important life lesson.
Yep yep me too me too. My copy of Watership Down looks like SHIT. As does my copy of The Once and Future King, which I also read to pieces and understood maybe 1/3 of once we got past the turning-into-animals part.
Oh man. The Once and Future King is probably one that I would get so much more out of now that I’m an adult. I should probably reread that one.
Watership Down, I love Fiver forever. And all of them. Did you read the follow up, Tales From Watership Down? More stories and stuff.
That one came out while I was working as a library page and you’d better bet that I was the first one to check it out.
Lord of the Rings defined my 11-14 year-old years. The movies were coming out during that period and I read the books before they came out to impress my older siblings, but then I fell in love and spent those years completely obsessed with all things Tolkien.
I’m also a LotR re-reading fiend. I used to try and read it once a year, but it takes so long and my “I want to read this” list got so big that I’d rather spend that time reading new things, at this point. Now I pop back into LotR when I start missing it, which does happen occasionally.
My copies of Little Women and Prince Caspian were also pretty beat-up from rereads.
The Perilous Gard! I was just thinking about that as one of my high school influences. Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock was the start of a lifelong love of the Tam Lin myth and as an angry stubborn teenager, the idea you could win men by insulting them….spoke to me.
I read it when I was nine and it was such a huge influence on my character. I can still pinpoint bits of my personality that are Kate Sutton.
Watership Down is one of the few books I have carried with me in every single move from college to now.
Hitchhiker’s Guide!! By the end of high school, my copy was barely held together by several generations of packing and masking tape. Some pages had to be taped back in, too. My brother has it now, and I somehow haven’t felt the need to read it in like 10 years.
I love love love “The Perilous Gard”! Though I know I would stand no chance against the Weight.
What I want to know, what my teenage self was desperate to know: how does a girl grow up to be a Courtney Love?
In my college speech class, I gave a speech about whether or not Courtney killed Kurt and as a result I spent hours poring over Kurt’s journals. I have never been a great Nirvana fan – I only recently started appreciating them, honestly. But after reading his words, I can’t understand anyone thinking that she did. There’s a lot going on there.
tl;dr #teamcourtney
My most important book was probably The Mists of Avalon by MZB (who I learned later was a child molester and an enabler of such things, ugh) and Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett. The latter launched me into a feverish curiosity into all Arthuriana, wiccan/neo-wiccan stuff, Celtic mythology, and the notion that the stories and narratives I had learned up to that point could be more nuanced and not nearly so patriarchal; the former introduced me to Discworld (which I still loved) and poked at all of the things I just mentioned except for the last bit.
Mists of Avalon was really important to me and yeah, the news about MZB (which I heard in Toast comments) is so, so disappointing. It was a book my mom handed down to me, and until I heard that, I would have handed down to any young people I thought needed some good reading, but now… I don’t know? She’s dead, so buying the book wouldn’t be lining the pockets of a predator any longer, but I’d hate to support the idea of her.
Tricky issue! What do you think about recommending that book given what is known about the author?
In this case, I’d say it’s fine. Buying the book wouldn’t support her, as you said, and in fact, it might support her children – the abuse survivors. It would be one thing if you were to notice themes in her work that, in retrospect, took on a new light that you thought might do more harm than good to anyone you might recommend them to, but all I’ve heard are people saying the same thing you are: they’re shocked, they never would have guessed, they feel conflicted because in spite of everything her work was a huge positive influence on them right when they needed it most. I’d just tell anyone I gave or recommended it to about that stuff straight away, so they wouldn’t find out on their own and experience the same emotional rollercoaster that everyone else did.
I think Mists of Avalon was the first book I read mostly for the sexy parts…
Meeee tooooo….
I bought The Mists of Avalon after reading a glowing review of it in Dragon Magazine back in the day. It was hugely influential for me as well! My wife and I bonded over it when we met in college. It is the book that made us feminists, in that it made us aware of power structures and dynamics we just hadn’t seen before.
For about a year in high school I carried The Mists of Avalon and Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance in my bag wherever I went. There was probably also a gauzy shawl and some crystals in there, too.
Also, the book I thumbed through the most as a teenager was probably Reviving Ophelia. I found it in the hallway being thrown out after my freshman year of high school and snagged it and really just kept coming back to it.
I also re-read a lot of early YA lit because I had piles and piles of it in my house and could read one of them in like, an hour. My favorite was Doris Orgel’s Nobodies and Somebodies, which is very sadly SUPER OUT OF PRINT.
Oh man, I read Reviving Ophelia many, many times too. My mom had it, but I don’t think she ever read it. The main thing I remember is that there was one girl who was very smart and started “acting out” because of her despair at the world–the author said that smart kids can’t see all the bad things that happen in the world objectively, so they can end up depressed. And I thought (and still think), well, maybe that’s why the world sucks so much–adults treat anyone who lets the world’s problems affect them too deeply as weird or crazy.
Oh man Daniel Deronda (mostly the Gwendolen Harleth part if I’m honest) was CLUTCH for me when I was a teenager. And also considerably increased my vocabulary! I still think of it fondly whenever I encounter the words “bedizened” or “friable,” so you know, all the time really.
Hmm also Fire and Hemlock by the genius Diana Wynne Jones, the Hitcherhiker’s Guide series, the original Sherlock Holmes stories, and Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books. And Harry Potter, although I only reread the last couple a few times each.
Not at all ashamed to admit that my copy of “Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging” is covered in food and falling to pieces. I’ve read that book (and all subsequent followings) too many times to count.
LOVED THOSE. Though I think the last one I ended up reading was Away Laughing on a Fast Camel because that came out my senior year of high school. I couldn’t relate but I could at the same time?
Oh hi friend! Dave the Laugh will forever remain my one true love.
YES. My sister and I read every single one of those and would quote them at each other CONSTANTLY. I need to dig those up and do a re-read.
MEM’RRIIIEEESS oh my god I loved those books! I was so fascinated by the British way of life haha. Why did they have all the weird words for everything??
I loved all those books and gave a copy of Angus to my niece years ago for Christmas. I was quite proud when she called me to let me know that she immediately went out and bought the next few books in the series.
That’s funny because I was staying at my aunt’s house and reading “Away Laughing on a Fast Camel” and she came to investigate what I was laughing so much at. When she found out it was a book she went out and bought the series for herself!
#coolaunt
Wish they’d existed when I was Georgia’s age, but she’s like the female Jack Reacher in a way–customers from every walk of life bought those books so regularly I finally had to see what the big deal was. Turns out you’re never too old to squee.
There is no need whatsoever to be ashamed, because it is wonderful. I spent so much time in tears of laughter over those books.
(Also, they were set in Brighton which was super near me, so it all felt very recognisable. I went to a talk by Louise Rennison at (I think) the Brighton Festival, which was great.)
Anne of Green Gables and all eight books thereafter were read to absolute pieces by me. I learned more about WWI from Rilla of Ingleside than from all my history classes together.
Same here. I have a lot of influential books from that time, but I STILL pull those out and reread them at least once a year at the age of 31.
And except for the daydreaming part I didn’t really turn out like Anne at all. I used to identify with her so much…now I read between the lines and catch all the darkness that I never realized was there.
I thought for ages about which of the many important books was the MOST important, and then I realized…in my mind, I have always placed Harry Potter as a category unto itself completely separate from other books. So whenever I consider my favorite books or most influential books, it never occurs to me to say “Harry Potter,” because it’s just so obvious that the whole Harry Potter craze defined my book-reading experience from late elementary school through the end of high school. Does anyone else from my generation do this with Harry Potter? It seems kind of unfair to place other books in competition against it. I mean, my friends and family and I endlessly speculated about book theories, discussed favorite characters, read fanfiction, found fanart, sang the Mysterious Ticking Noise, held parties to celebrate movie releases, attended midnight book releases…
Definitely! So many midnight release parties, so many nights staying up reading the latest book, so many Halloween costumes and make-believe and preteen crushes and fanfiction. I was 6 when the first book came out, 11 when the first movie came out, 16 when the last book came out and 20 when the last movie came out so Harry Potter = childhood + adolescence for me.
Yep, it’s gotta be Harry Potter for me. I started reading them in fifth grade and the last one came out the summer after I graduated high school and they were my obsession the whole time.
I don’t know if there was any single possession (book or otherwise) that I treasured for such a long time period. Eight years is a lot of years, and especially those years. Starting with age 14, though, I read Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Perilous Gard about twenty times. I still have my original paperback, with the little MAGICQUEST dude tooting his horn on the upper left corner of the cover.
YES. That book was a major influence on my life. From age nine until now I have operated under WWKD in times of crisis. I got it from the library though, in a school I was only in for a few months, so I wasn’t able to remember what it was called for almost two decades. I have a copy of the edition that was in the library now though (the big seventies hardback) and The Sherwood Ring too.
If I could only write two books, I should be extremely lucky if they could be as utterly perfect as both of Elizabeth Marie Pope’s.
I have to say, the cover of your copy is extremely misleading.
Ha! I too found it through a library, fell in love with it, moved across the country, and forgot what it was called for the longest time. This was pre-Internet, too, so I couldn’t even do random Google searches for it.
(sorry for the comment-stalking)
Bonus points since that link goes to Adventures Underground, which is near where I used to live.
Haaaaa, Nicole, I had the same edition of the Python scripts, vols. 1 & 2, and ADORED them. But that was also the age at which I discovered Ngaio Marsh, and from that point on became obsessed with tracking down all 32 Alleyn novels (in a pre-internet world).
For childhood books, Mary Renault was also a big one. I don’t know why my grandparents had so many books about gay Greeks, but I am eternally grateful for it. Tiny me devoured those books like candy. Over and over and over.
I read and re-read High Fidelity many times, each time wishing there were more lists in it.
Yes, I reread High Fidelity probably thrice a year from age 13 up. Sometimes I feel ashamed of that, because High Fidelity is in many ways the kind of melancholic middle-class white dude nonsense I have no patience for now, but mostly I accept that at least it’s at the top of its genre and I will never be able to shake my fondness for Nick Hornby.
I actually feel kinda sad for Nick Hornby (or more like, for all of us readers feel vaguely icky for loving him) being dragged down by the swamp of medicore sad-white-guy narrative-but-it’s-the-GREAT-AMERICAN-NOVEL!!!s out there. Give me my ability to love Hornby with no reservations back, guys.
I’m trying to find the interview I came across recently that may make you love him again! Basically he said that he’s bored with self-pitying white man stories and has consciously pivoted toward telling stories about girls and women. (His most recent book, Funny Girl, is about a young woman working in television in Britain in the 60s, and he adapted the screenplays for An Education and Wild.)
OH please find that interview, I have been wanting to pick up Funny Girl and needed some justification! Juliet, Naked was also really good, a nice bridge between self-pitying white dude and women.
I’m looking forward to reading Funny Girl! I always got the impression from his sadwhiteguy books that he was aware of how ridiculous those characters’ predicaments were, but it is cool to hear that he’s taking that + his fame and using it to tell other stories.
I really liked Funny Girl! (I broke my women-and-POC-authors-only streak to read it, and it was worth it).
Found it! https://soundcloud.com/bullseye-with-jesse-thorn/…
Lol, omg I would like to say something really fascinating & intellectual for the book thing. But then I remember wandering aimlessly around the middle school library and the librarian (the first truly excellent librarian I’d ever met) asked me a few questions and then suggested I read “Companions of the Night” by Vivian Vande Velde. She had some kind of magic touch for recommending books and this was the first time we really talked. I ended up reading that book twice in a row right off the bat, including getting in trouble in math class for hiding it in my lap & trying to read it on the sly instead of listening to boring math which was SO boring and had, like, NO vampires. I guess I should have realized that books like “Prisoner of Vampires,” “Jane-Emily,” or even the Bunnicula series would eventually lead to me being a vampire-loving tween. I was the kind of dweeb who learned the word “occult” at a young age because I needed an efficient way to search for books with “vampires, ghosts, witches, monsters, whatever” in the new-fangled library search computer.
I wish I’d found Vivian Vande Velde as a kid! I’ve really enjoyed her collections of riffs on Rumplestiltskin and Red Riding Hood. (Basically, poking fun at holes in the fairy tale logic–like, why doesn’t it occur to the prince that if the miller’s daughter could spin straw into gold they probably wouldn’t be living in a hovel?)
There were a couple of authors like Vivian Vande Velde & Zilpha Keatley Snyder that I ADORED but was only able to read a couple of their books because my tiny library in my tiny town had a limited collection. I would look at the “Also By” lists in the inside cover and wonder what names like “The Rumpelstiltskin Problem” meant. This being pre-internet, I couldn’t even read summaries online so it was like an ongoing mystery. I recently found out that one of my all-time fav books, “The Egypt Game,” has a sequel and it blew my mind because as a kid I had no way of knowing that Zilpha was even still writing since the two books of hers I had read were dated to the 60s & 70s.
YES!!!! I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. That book led to an excellent spiral into velvet skirts, tarot cards, and a deep desire to change my name to something vaguely Dutch.
My most read book was Damia by Anne McCaffery because I thought the main relationship was so romantic. I re-read it as an adult and am completely squicked out by this guy that meets a baby and just waits around for her to grow up into his love. Biggest 180 I’ve ever done on a book over time.
Aged better and still beloved would be Watership Down and The Positronic Man.
So, so many books by Anne McCaffrey that I don’t know that I’ll ever re-read–I’d like them to live fondly in my hazy memories, thank you!
I also read a shitton of Redwall. And this one time, I met Brian Jacques at a book signing. I have never agonized about an outfit quite so much as twelve year old me agonized about what I would wear on that day. And then he complimented me on my bracelet. I almost died.
He was the closest I could come to meeting a minor deity. Seriously. I worshipped authors. The worst day of my childhood was the one I which I found out that JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis AND Roald Dahl were all dead. I cried for days.
ohhhh Redwall, yes, that was the fantasy world in which I totally lived at ages 10-11. I don’t know if I could have survived meeting Brian Jacques, as that would have shattered my hope that Redwall was real and not made up by an author and maybe one day I would wake up there (I think I wanted to be a squirrel, maybe an otter).
Around the same age, the Enchanted Forest series too! I was annoyed at the absence of girl heroes in kid books and I think I’d tried the Alanna books but they were just a little too older-teen for me? And then Cimorene showed up and she was perfect and she showed me that being “not like other girls” didn’t mean sports and gross jokes, it could just as easily mean cooking and reading, and definitely don’t underestimate those other girls.
Oh yes the Enchanted Forest series! I loved that series so much (except for the last one, I didn’t like how Cimorene’s life ended up so much).
I barely consider the last one canon! I think it was written, or at least published, years before the others? I can live with it as a standalone story but after falling so in love with Cimorene I hate to wrap up the series with her not really in the picture.
Oh, thank you for giving me an excuse to consider that one non-canon. It was really, really disappointing. So very standard fantasy novel, “Dude Gets Cool Sword & Discovers Parentage and Destiny” nonsense. It had nothing to do with the rest of it. Such a letdown.
I think I wanted to be a hare 75% of the time. So many sketchbooks are testament to that period of my life. So many.
I think I was torn between being an otter or a badger. I mostly just wanted to eat all the food described.
Yes, I wanted to be a hare as well. Mostly for the same reasons I loved Mulan: I wanted to have a sword and fight people. I still vividly remember the passage in The Long Patrol when the main character gets his dirk (can’t remember the hare’s name but you bet I can remember what kind of sword he got! [it’s not really a sword according to Redwall, it’s halfway between a sword and a dagger and a PERFECT length for hare-the-main-character])
I loved the Enchanted Forest books so, so, so, so much. Formative as all heck, especially the way the heroes kicked ass while being so polite all the time. I didn’t get a chance to physically wear the books down, though, as for some reason I didn’t own the whole series, I just kept checking it out of the library. I’ve since picked some up at used book sales and I think books one, three, and four are still in my childhood bedroom, although number two may have been my favorite (MENDENBAR).
The Enchanted Forest series is just so great. I love how she deftly avoids all girl-on-girl hate while still playing with the ‘not like other girls’ trope. Cimorene has multiple female friends! With whom she is not competitive or catty! Her boss is a woman(dragon)! She sends airheaded princes off to rescue appropriate airheaded princesses, recognizing that they’re still good people even if they’re a little bit silly! And isn’t there one scene where Mendanbar is trying to rescue some supposedly dumb abandoned princess and it quickly becomes apparent that she is quite deliberate and calculating about her helplessness?
TLDR: Patricia Wrede hates the game, not the player, and is awesome.
I remember reading all the Redwall books despite generally rooting for the invading vermin hordes. Those guys seemed like they were a lot more fun, when they weren’t getting hacked to pieces by improbably militant monks and peasants
I really loved one of Brian Jacques books called Castaways of the Flying Dutchman. It was about an eternally living kid named Ben and his labrador Neb. They solved riddles and various evils in the world. Did anyone else even read that?
Oh MAN I had so many emotions about those books. I’m sure there was a lot of Brian Jacques tomfoolery, food, and adventuring, but mostly what I remember is the angst. The middle book (set mostly aboard privateer ships I think?) stands out as a highlight.
A day late to this party, but I LOVED that book.
Me too! Maybe it was my first palindrome or something but I thought that their names being reversible was the best ever, ” It’s like they have to be besties forever cause their names are the same just backwards! wow!”
I got 5 Novels by Daniel Pinkwater for my birthday in fifth grade, and in particular “Young Adult Novel” and “The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death” clarified to me what my best-case scenarios for facing adolescence looked like. If I somehow ever become super-rich I am going to recreate the Snark Theater and run late-night double features on film unto eternity.
Snarkout Boys!!! So disappointed when my adolescence did not involve taking auto shop, dyeing my hair green, and snarking out to meet people with names like Winston Bongo. Yes, please, let’s build that theater.
Oh goodness. I would move to whatever city you decide to run that theater in and open an all-night cafeteria or chili restaurant or coffee shop across the street. Those books were very important to me and I am ready to dedicate my life to re-creating them.
I just bought that used on Amazon! Lizard Music was one of my favorite books when I was a kid, and with Alan Mendelsohn right behind it. I discovered Alan Mendelsohn at the library when I was in middle school and I would go back to check it out several times a year. And now I finally own it!
you would not believe how happy it makes me to see this comment here!
i was just reading young adult on the train this morning! and rat from the snarkout boys and the avocado of death was a serious role model for me as a pre-teen/teenager.
PS. i once wrote a message to daniel pinkwater and he answered me and made my year (here). he answers to everyone who sends him a message, as far as i can tell. what a guy!
I love Daniel Pinkwater’s books SO MUCH. Time for a re-read, I think.
Also, the first time I ever tasted a decent craft beer brown ale, it tasted like the beer described in TSBATAOD. I was so happy.
It still surprises me that Cleveland is such an underdog city, because when I was 9 my best friend moved there and she did so with the air of Milhouse moving to Capital City. I spent a large part of my childhood bitterly imagining that she moved there because Cleveland was cool and I wasn’t.
Was she actually moving to the Cleveland of 30 Rock?
“We ALL want to escape to The Cleve, Lemon.”
I mean, they’re not wrong.
“Would you like to pet a HORSE?!”
“Are you a model?”
If it’s any consolation, I believe there is a Hellmouth there.
The book that stayed with me throughout adolescence and beyond was the original Farseer trilogy by Robin Hobb. It was the first books I read that really put down on paper angst and melodrama I could relate to by sheer depth of emotion. I was a pretty angsty teen but kept a lot of it bottled up for fear of being a disappointment to others (have a very stoic family) so it was refreshing to see that depth of emotion elsewhere.
Liveship Traders for me, fantasy that doesn’t shy away from issues like rape, but actually gives a sense of how someone is affected by sexual violence–and survives emotionally. Malta may be my all time favorite example of character growth. Actually, I love that about all of Fitz and Fool novels–characters cope with abuse and trauma, and go on. Not in the “shake it off sense,” Fitz spends years as a hermit isolating himself. I think Hobb captures the way trauma shapes and changes people without pandering to sensationalism.
This got more rambly than I intended.
Yes, this! Very much the dealing with trauma and long term effects. All of her series explore those dark corners so effectively.
As tragic as Fitz is, it is always The Fool who bled so close to my heart. I cried so hard at his/her appearance in Liveship Traders, especially as I am dense and didn’t realize who it was at first.
Older-kid/teen book, probably Jacob Have I Loved. I think it was pretty much the law in Maryland that when you turned 12 you got a copy. Still makes me all teary-eyed.
As for the most well-thumbed book of my teenage years, did anyone else have a copy of An Incomplete Education? It’s a humorous encyclopedia of everything you might need to know to get through a highbrow dinner party, and it was my guide to life. I basically memorized the sections on correct usage and pronunciation, and it’s still helping me out.
When I was 12 or 13, a YA librarian recommended Mercedes Lackey’s Arrows of the Queen to me, and… yeah. That was it. All of the Valdemar books, but especially that original trilogy.
A friend loaned me Winds of Fate when I was a sophomore in high school. It had magical “horses” that you could speak to with your mind and also magic and hot men with raptors. There was no way I wasn’t going to become obsessed with those books. I still read almost everything Mercedes Lackey writes, even though I now notice the faults in her writing.
I finally gave up during the Mags books because of her insistence on phonetically writing out the character’s accent. She did that in Take a Thief too, and I think I mostly just skimmed that one. And she’s up to like book 5 or 6 in the Mags series!
Yeah, I’ve kind of given up on that series as well. I mostly just don’t care what happens to Mags anymore. I’ll just go back and read about all the badass ladies farther back in Valdemars history instead!
Take a Thief was one of my favorites, bc Skif <3 I’ve never minded the phonetic accents, for whatever reason, but I can def see why you would.
And the Mags books need to be condensed, a lot. I’m ready for him to go discover the backstory of his home country, or whatever, but we could have gotten to this point 3 books ago, at least.
hahaha, I think starting with Winds of Fate might have been too much for me at 12. I devoured them pretty quickly after, though- and as you say, talking horses, magic, hot dudes with raptors. I always wanted to come back to Valdemar, though.
But yeah, I still read pm everything as well, even tho the writing suffers. It doesn’t stick with me the way the earlier stuff did, but I also cannot stop.
The pacing is really weird in the last few of her books I’ve read. It’s about 200 pages of worldbuilding and character development and tension building and then 15 pages of everything wrapping up.
yeah, it’s weird bc the Mags books are shorter and also they do much less. and I’m just… not sure why. Mostly I’ve felt like they’ve been rehashing the same story without actually moving very far?? Like, I guess Mags is growing up or whatever, but I feel there could be a lot more show-dont-tell when it comes to his internal development, and lot more time devoted to actual plot, and we maybe would have gotten somewhere interesting three books ago. Plus you can see what she’s leading up to (Mags is definitely a secret prince of this far-away as-yet-undiscovered country, like, come on) but she’s taking FOREVER to get there.
Don’t forget the baths. Everyone took so very many baths in her books.
Yes! I feel like I was recommended Arrows of the Queen at that age as well. So important.
The Vanyel books made a big impression on me. One reason I am so passionate about diversity in books, as the first books I read with a gay main character and it really opened my 13 year old eyes.
:))))))
(and also, same)
Vanyel! One of my dearest friendships was founded on talking out our mutual love of the Vanyel books late into the night during freshman year of high school. Oh my, those books still have a special place in my heart.
Yesss. I found book one of Vows and Honor (the Tarma and Kethry books) in my middle-school library (where it perhaps did not belong?) when I was eleven-ish, and I devoured the Valdemar books for probably the next three years. I find them a little harder to enjoy now, but they were definitely really formative.
Using the metric of “most disastrously shredded paperback,” my two most cherished books as a teen were The Fellowship of the Ring (the other two escaped shredding, possibly because on about 60% of my re-reads I run out of steam around the Council of Elrond) and The Last Command (also part of a trilogy in which the other two are mysteriously less destroyed, but weirder because it is book 3 of the trilogy).
TAMORA PIERCE. I started with the Daine books, so they have a special place in my heart, and then moved quickly onto Alanna. She signed my copy of Emperor Mage a year or so ago and wrote “GIRL POWER” in it and it was the best day of my life.
I was super into the Alanna series. I had such a crush on George!
Didn’t we all!
SAMSIES.
I have never made it to a signing but I didn’t have a copy of the second Alanna book because my former stepsis had it and I didn’t need it, but I finally picked up a copy of the same edition I have from a used book store a couple of years ago, AND IT IS SIGNED. (Unfortunately not with “Girl Power” but it’s still pretty good.)
Oh, what a great question. My most formative text, I think, was Angels in America. My (SIGNED) copies of both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika both have so many creases and curling pages from reading over and over, and I could probably quote you just about any line in the play.
DAD MOMENT: despite the fact that it made him VERY UNCOMFORTABLE, he took me to see the Broadway production of Angels when I was just 14 or 15. Nothing like sitting with your dad while watching a portrayal of anonymous gay sex in Central Park.
I definitely read and re-read Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters throughout high school. I first read it on the bus during a French class field trip to Quebec (from Massachusetts) and it was quite a scandal amongst my classmates that I was reading a book that had sex scenes.
I bought that book on an organized trip to the UK I took in middle school. I remember being confused by aspects of it (I didn’t get the class dynamics at that age) and very interested in the sex scenes.
yes! I read this super early (probably around 12?) because my hometown library placed Judy Blume’s adult books in the YA section and I didn’t realize it would be any different from Tiger Eyes or Deenie. I was scandalized and INTRIGUED.
I was all about the Francesca Lia Block books in high school: I Was A Teenage Fairy, Missing Angel Juan, and Girl Goddess #9 were my favorites. (I still have a soft spot for Witch Baby to this day–I related to her far more than any of the other characters in the Weetzie Bat books.) High school was also when I discovered Good Omens which in turn sent me down both the Gaiman and Pratchett wormholes. The only reason my copy of Good Omens isn’t completely destroyed is that I lent out several copies to friends who then refused to return them. (Or rather claimed to have “lost” them of “didn’t remember” me lending them out. Likely stories…)
I totally didn’t find Francesca Lia Block until I was in my twenties (WELL inot my twenties), but my 20 year old self was UPSET that 13 year old me did not get to read these books.
I feel so lucky I found them when I did. A year after my best friend introduced me to her books I moved from a suburb of Chicago to small-town Kansas. I made a group of friends who were wonderful beyond all words–and all seniors. When they graduated her books kept me sane. (Nothing against that small town or small towns in general–I had a lovely time but I missed having friends who understood my pop culture references and with whom I could talk politics without things getting heated.) I’ve made it my duty to spread her books to the young folks in my life.
Tamora Pierce! Song of the Lionness Quartet, of course, but also the Immortals series. Mmm, Numair. Formative stuff.
Catherine Called Birdy by Karen Cushman. Taught me about feistiness and how life can sometimes deal you a break. The Promise by Monica Hughes. Taught me how life can often be cruel, as can the people around you, and you make your own bonds. (ATBIN YOU DISAPPOINTED ME)
Now … The Course of Honour by Lindsey Davis. Captures a lot of My Feelings about Love.
This thread is dead and buried, whatever, but thank you so much for reminding me about the Sandwriter books and Monica Hughes. I’d all but forgotten and those books were wonderful. The Seven Magpies, another one of hers, is the reason my superstitious self still greets magpies on the street (to ward off bad luck, natch.)
As I commented above, I re-read LotR quite a lot, as well as Little Women and Prince Caspian. I know my copy of Many Waters was broken in the spine at the childbirth scene, because for some reason that fascinated me when I was young. My copy of Stephen King’s “Insomnia” is in TATTERS because apparently that was my favorite back when I first discovered it. I think my most-read story, though, is Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, because Molly Grue speaks to me in a deep and meaningful way and I always come back to her when I need to hide from life.
At this point in my life I rarely reread something that isn’t an old, old favorite. I’ve got a “I want to read this” list a mile high!
My copy of Little Women literally disintegrated a couple of years ago, so I get you.
I’m a dedicated rereader. Especially for the last few years, when my life went off in a wildly different direction than I thought it would and I have needed something anchoring.
My first copy of Little Women from when I was 9 is in three pieces, held together with a rubber band, in the back of my closet somewhere. I got a second copy later on (as a gift) but it was a Focus on the Family edition where they edited out certain lines for, like, moral reasons *eyeroll*. In particular I remember them cutting out the line where Jo says she wants to marry Meg to keep her in the family because OF COURSE they did.
Robin McKinley! Beauty is the only one of my original copies that I bought new and then had to replace because it had literally fallen apart, so I suppose that is probably the one that was most formative, but really, all of them, all of them were my favorite. I haven’t loved most of the more recent ones quite as much, but I still own them ALL and reread the ones from my teens at least once a year. Some things are important.
BEAUTY! I started to reread it a while ago, gonna get back to it.
Oh, I read so much McKinley as a kid. Rose Daughter was my favorite by a mile. I have a kind of shaky relationship to her more recent work–I definitely prefer the books with third-person narrators and entirely imagined settings. I liked Chalice quite a bit, though I suppose that’s not so recent anymore.
I agree with you entirely, there is a definite correlation between my favorite of her books and her books that were written in third person. Sunshine is probably the exception to that — there are some structural issues to it and things I wished that she had revised, but I love the character and the setting and the cinnamon rolls so much. Cinnamon rolls! It is crucial to have baked goods and tea readily available when rereading Sunshine, and just as critical to have honey on hand when reading Chalice.
The blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown… I named my first born Aerin and I am not (too terribly) ashamed. she is proud to be in a book, so win?
I named my first born Aerin
Dude, that is badass. Respect.
I went through THREE copies of Diana Wynne Jones’ Witch Week between 4th and 6th grade. Diana Wynne Jones is the main force (along with my dog) behind how I managed to survive adolescence.
Also, Robin McKinley. At first it was The Blue Sword but then it was Deerskin that mattered to me more. Jane Eyre became my most important book later in high school, and remains so to this day. (I AM NO BIRD)
Caddie Woodlawn anyone??? Waterlogged, covers falling off, I loved it to death.
I read that on repeat for a solid 5 years of my life. I am a little scared to read it now, because I’m sure like a solid 49% of my personality is based on that book.
Born Confused! It was SO great at this very specific time in my life and now my copy is falling apart. I’ve moved with it a million times and it’s like my book teddy bear. I’ve been refusing to read it again now that I’m an adult because I have a sneaky suspicion it won’t hold up and I don’t want to ruin my memories.
Born Confused TOTALLY holds up. For me, I think it’s actually better now that I’m older and understand parts of it differently. I was super disappointed by the sequel though.
I haven’t read Born Confused, but I really love the label “book teddy bear”. That is absurdly apt. 🙂
Oh 8 years is such a long time! But…I think what influenced me most in those years were probably things like Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series, which I DEVOURED and got me so hooked on Anglo-Saxon/Arthurian legend/history; Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsong trilogy, because music and dragons were an A+ combo that allowed me to skim the relationship parts that I found boring/problematic; and The Count of Monte Cristo, teaching me all about masquerades and revenge. I was a happy, odd child.
Oh yes, I loved the Dark is Rising series! Hmmmm now I want to re-read – it’s been years.
I have all the audiobooks and listen to them about once a month. Only because I spend more time driving and doing listeny-stuff than having time to read them all that often.
The audiobooks are so good. Sometimes I just put a chapter on as I’m falling asleep because they’re all so well read.
Do you think the reason they have a different guy reading the Grey King was that the original dude didn’t want to do all the Welsh accents? It always bugs me, because he does them OK in Silver on the Tree!
I like to think maybe it was just a scheduling conflict, though maybe it was just the sheer amount of Welsh in the Grey King that was the real problem. I think Alex Jennings is fantastic (I liked his work enough to go track down other stuff he’s done), but the American accents in Greenwitch prove that he isn’t perfect.
Susan Cooper! One of my adolescent favorites! I found the illustrations in the first edition tres creepy. I just reordered the series so I could read it again.
Yes!! I need to actually re-purchase the whole thing (and the Prydain Chronicles), because they all vanished somehow over the years/through various moves.
The Harper Hall trilogy is where it’s at, in my opinion. Another disintegrating book at my end. Can’t go wrong with a “nobody in this stupid conservative town understands me/oh wait, I have a place in the world after all” narrative.
I *loved* the Harper Hall books. Sure, dragons are great and all, but I’d rather be the misunderstood and underestimated genius with a bunch of fire lizards.
Oh man. 10-18 is a big, big range…
10-11: The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. Girl sails to America after her family has already arrived, joins ship’s crew, witnesses mutiny, arrives in America, dresses up for a little while, runs back to rejoin crew, sails away. AKA, no, you don’t have to do what they tell you, make your own way. Huge thing to realize at ten.
12-15: Hitchhiker’s Guide et al.
16-18: I think the only book I asked for in that time period was the complete works of Allen Ginsburg, which I still have and still love. Why Ginsburg? Because in my 11th-grade English classroom, I sat next to a shelf of old textbooks that we’d occasionally use for classwork. English classes never really moved anything like fast enough for me, so more days than not I’d grab one of these old books and read on my own. In every single copy, Ginsburg’s “America” was cut out, leaving only the first couple of lines on a facing page, and I needed to know why.
CHARLOTTE DOYLE!!! I thought I was the only person who read that!! Oh she was such an inspiration to 10 year old me. I remember getting to the end of that book and desperately wishing she didn’t have to go back to her “real life,” and then she didn’t! And it was great!
I WAS ALSO VERY INTO CHARLOTTE DOYLE. I think I read that book to literal pieces.
I didn’t ever re-read books until I was older (and stupider, such that sometimes I forget just what happens and it’s fun to find out again), but I did go through the Chronicles of Narnia several times. I remember realizing partway through a book on the third or fourth time through that it was a Christian allegory, and I stopped right there and never picked them up again.
There’s more than one most important book from ages 10-18. In order of introduction:
The Lord of the Rings (first and foremost, between 4th and 5th grade)
The Lioness Quartet, by Tamora Pierce (with the Daine books secondarily)
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, etc. (7th grade-ish)
Mists of Avalon (8th grade)
Dragonriders of Pern/Valedemar books (8th grade-ish)
Dune (9th grade, starting a new school)
IT (Stephen King) (between 9th and 10th grade)
Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequels (same as above)
I’m pretty sure I just had these books on a constant loop during that time period, cycling through them and having more feelings about them every time. Probably nothing was more of a talisman than Lord of the Rings though, unless it was Hitchhiker’s. Why are books so epically important at that age?
Game of Thrones, Kushiel’s Dart, and the Wheel of Time. I just really really loved long, epic fantasy series of varying quality and style. There are others, but those three stick out to me. Also, the first Terry Goodkind book is actually pretty decent (in my hazy memory from age 14), even if the rest go off the rails in a way to make even the many sequels to Dune blush.
Oh man, your talk of long fantasy epics just reminded me that I read a LOT of David Eddings in that early-adolescent phase. I don’t think I can go back to those series, as I suspect they would not hold up.
I tried to read Eddings in late high school/ early college and could not get into it.
In high school I re-read the Harry Potter books alongside whatever else I was reading. (1-4, anyways. 5 came out the summer I graduated.) There were a few L.J. Smith novels I rescued from the giveaway pile at my school library and I read those until they fell apart, too.
The book I read to death as a kid was “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”. I still have my paperback copy, which is being held together by a shred of paper at the spine. The other ones would be all of the L.M. Montgomery books and “Jane Eyre”. Basically, I was all over any story with a misunderstood, bookish heroine.
ohhh A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, there was so much in it that I didn’t quite understand as a kid, now I find something new to love whenever I reread it. I want to give a copy to every lawmaker currently trying to strip away every opportunity for joy from poor people, like, LOOK HOW IMPORTANT CANDY IS and SEE, POOR KIDS ARE LISTENING TO YOU AND THEY UNDERSTAND MORE THAN YOU THINK.
A Ring of Endless Light, anyone? I wanted to save Zachary and marry Adam. And cuddle with Leo. And live in a converted stable and swim with dolphins…
I loooooved that book. I often tell people to read it (it seems that many Madeleine L’Engle fans did not read that one as a child because they thought the talking to dolphins thing sounded dumb…I might’ve too if it hadn’t been MADELEINE L’ENGLE). I generally convince them by telling them that the dolphins are incidental – and it’s basically kything anyway – and it’s really about growing up and dealing with grief.
I wanted all those things. And then to befriend Adam’s grandmother who is interesting and wealthy and she could send me to Antarctica.
Ohhh, that book. All the books with Vicky were important to me, but especially this one and Troubling A Star. But since I read the book with Polly travelling through time first (and Zachary is just awful), I mostly just wanted to dump him in the ocean and go for Adam.
Oh hells, yes, Adult Me says ditch whiny, spoiled Zachary. Team Adam FTW. But at 14, he was exactly the kind of delicious I thought I wanted.
And such is the seductive aspect of Zachary Gray. He’s exactly the kind of delicious that appeals to those too young to realise exactly what breed of asshole he is. Poor Vicky, she couldn’t read the other books to see what Polly dealt with.
Oh god, that’s a big age range.
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, especially Carpe Jugulum, and Night Watch, and Monstrous Regiment, and Small Gods.
Most of Diana Wynne Jones, and Diane Duane, and Tamora Pierce.
And “Sunshine” by Robin McKinley which I checked out and read from the library at least five times before buying my own copy.
As a fan of Diana Wynne Jones, I have to mention the best thing ever, The Tough Guide To Fantasyland, which I still re-read to this day.
I still have a copy of it on my bookshelf! It’s so good!
For years 10-13, I think I’d have to go with Diane Duane’s “So You Want to Be a Wizard” and its sequels. There were only two sequels when I first read them, and now they’re up to 8 or 9. That’s maybe the only series from that time of my life that I still check for updates every time I go into a bookstore.
When I was about 14, though, I read Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked.” This was before the musical existed, and my original paperback copy of that book has pages falling out from excessive re-reading. I eventually bought another copy for lending to people (partly because my first copy is now signed by Maguire and some folks from the musical). That was the defining book of my high school years.
Ella Enchanted. Oh my god, Ella Enchanted. Except I would stop my re-reads after she’d sent Char away on pretext so that she couldn’t endanger him with her curse, then she scries him writing a bitter letter about her and I’d cry and cry and then close the book before the ball and the happy ending because the misery was the best point for me to continue the story in my head and make it even more tragic and maybe even insert a “she dies tragically and THEN THEY’RE SORRY” scene. And probably some sex too.
That pretty much sums up age 10-15, at least.
my mom still makes fun of me because when i was 10, we went on a week-long vacation (which was a novelty for my family) and in preparation, i assembled a whole stack of books for the trip…and ended up just reading and rereading ella enchanted until the cover fell off.
Good God, those Anne McCaffery dragon book series, I read those as a very young teen, vaguely recall loving them…but I devoured The Black Stallion series, the Earthsea Trilogy and every Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison short story I could lay my eyes and hands on…sigh, now I’m feeling slightly melancholic for that weird, horse and science fiction obsessed 9 year old, coke bottled, intensely shy kid.
oh hai, were you me? I read ALL the horse books in every library I came to (we moved a lot) and when they didn’t age with me I kept them for guilty secrets and started on other things.
DRAGONRIDERS OF PERN!?
I am embarassed to admit this but there was a point when I was like 14-15 when I was pretty into the Acorna books.
I need to read the David Profumo book, I always wanted the background that after it was mentioned in Byatt’s Babel Tower.
I finally remembered which books were the most formative in the pre-teen/early teen years:
Walk Two Moons and Absolutely Normal Chaos by Sharon Creech.
To a lesser extent, many of Creech’s other books, but Walk Two Moons was a favorite. The friendship between Sal and Phoebe was so familiar to me, Sal’s relationship with Ben seemed like the pinnacle of romance, as did the relationship between Sal’s grandparents, and the ending messed me up. I think I read those two books at least a dozen times each.
I remember reading Walk Two Moons and Chasing Redbird multiple times as a kid, but for the life of me I can’t remember anything about them other than that they always made me cry.
Yes! I remember reading Absolutely Normal Chaos over and over one summer.
as a teenager, i was absolutely devoted to rats saw god by rob thomas. i haven’t read it in ages, though, and i don’t think i’ll revisit it. i’m not sure if it would hold up.
It’s a tie, between Wuthering Heights and Anne of Green Gables (the first three books especially).
In terms of a single book, it would probably be Bjo Trimble’s Star Trek Concordance, which I literally read to pieces. In terms of authors overall, I have to admit that I was seriously into Harlan Ellison, both because the stories (at least through Stalking the Nightmare) were very good and still hold up, and because I was young and naive enough to take his ceaseless self-promotion of his personality cult at face value. The bloom started to come off that rose at about that time, though, and I stopped following his work well before the Connie Willis thing.
Also, I wanted to pull this bit out: “Any major challenge to the familiar narrative of Kurt Cobain as an angsty, reluctant rocker with an unfortunate heroin habit. Despite breathless claims to the contrary and with a few interesting exceptions, this story hits all the expected beats.” One of the things that I kind of detest is how someone will publish a new biography of a famous person for no other particular reason except that they’ve got some kind of hook, some new and outrageous or counterfactual claim, no matter how thinly substantiated. I don’t think that a new biography necessarily has to “challenge… the familiar narrative” to be worth reading; it could simply, you know , be better written than its predecessors. Then again, book reviewers probably prefer that a biographer have a hook in their book because it makes the reviewer’s job easier by giving them something to build the review around.
I think I was torn between an otter or a squirrel, but I would have been any creature so long as I could have eaten that food (actually, being me, I probably wanted to be a cat, but a GOOD cat, one that the Abbey folk would grow to accept and love as one of their own)(Up until middle school, every single story I wrote was about cats)
There’s a wonderful used book chain in my hometown, and I used to love wandering around there for hours and picking up books based on their covers, or the author’s name sounding cool. I bought a book called “The California Book of the Dead” by Tim Farrington when I was about 14 and read it over and over during high school. I thought it was so sophisticated – it’s about a group of friends in the Bay area who share a home. They are all into Buddhist philosophy and crystals and such. There is a masseuse and a writer and a gay best friend who is dying of AIDS. If I read it now, I would probably be appalled, but teenage me couldn’t WAIT to be a grown-up with such grown-up problems.
When I was 13 my mom rented out our apartment and took me to Europe for 2 1/2 months. We mostly lived in youth hostels. In one (immaculate) youth hostel in rural Denmark, the only english book in the place was the complete scripts of Fawlty Towers. We read them out loud to each other and laughed for a full day. It’s one of my favorite memories of the whole trip (the Sistine Chapel and Tivoli were pretty grand, too!)
Oh man, Probably Alexandra Ripley’s were my most read teenager books, particularly On Leaving Charleston. I went through a pretty hard-core fascination with the antebellum South in my teens. That’s totally old enough to realize the problems with being fascinated by a society built on slavery, I was just dumb. I even had a beloved hardcover copy of Scarlett, her GWTW sequel…heaven help me.
A lot of mine have been mentioned, so I’ll throw in the Below the Root (Green-Sky) trilogy by Zilpha Keatley Snyder (with a bonus shout out to her Libby on Wednesday as well.) I think I may have been read the Green-sky books, at least the first two, when my brother first got the computer game for our Apple IIC (and I was happy just to watch him), but they briefly came into print again when I was in middle school and when I could read them again on my own I was knocked out by how willing it is not to give easy moral answers (and even gives a nifty little example of how cultural morals–like premarital sex–can be directly shaped by practicalities, like when one society has the ability to manufacture effective birth control and one with more finite resources overall doesn’t). I also just loved the way Book 2 starts in the middle of Book 1 from a different character, so you see the same events in a totally different light. In general, her books are full of little easter eggs (like the rabbit like “lapans” and monkey like “simas” in Green-sky, and the parody of Watership Down done with gophers in Libby on Wednesday.)
Also, I first read The Bean Trees when I was fourteen, and it was My Book for a really long time, that I read at least twice a year and that broke my heart and gave me faith in the world and who I wanted to be.
Oh gosh, Libby on Wednesday was the first thing I thought of seeing this thread! I NEVER hear anyone mention it, but it had a huge effect on ten-year-old me. How badly I wanted to live in a giant old house with a lot of eccentric brilliant relatives!
Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, Gaudy Night (shaped my thoughts on what relationships ought to be like before I even hit puberty), Dark is Rising, Alanna…
Cynthia Voigt’s stuff was key for me – Homecoming, Dicey’s Song, Come a Stranger.
Me too. All of the books in Dicey’s universe, not really Voigt’s other stuff. I’m sort of surprised there aren’t more of us.
I loved those too (again, just the Dicey books, not really any of the other vaguely Lurlene McDaniel-y teen death books). I didn’t realize there were so many – I had Dicey’s Song and Homecoming, but didn’t know there were like five others in the cycle! I wonder how well they hold up.
pretty well for me! Part of what felt so important to me was coming to them as they were written but feeling like they were written during my youth, if you know what I mean?
I love Voight for her contemporary stuff, but kind of hate her fantasy work.
I’ve been feeling a strong nostalgic longing for the Cleve lately (well, the nearby small town where I lived from the age of 6 to the age of 22). Mostly because central VA thunderstorms are pitiful, and I miss the torrential rains, rushing winds, and apocalyptic thunderclaps of my youth. Those were thunderstorms that made you feel alive (and cooled the air by about 10 degrees, so they actually made a difference).
My non-Harry Potter faves were probably Meg Cabot and Sarah Dessen. My copy of The Princess Diaries is super well-worn, and I checked out most of Sarah Dessen’s books multiple times from the library.
Mercedes. Lackey. I am showing my age – her books definitely got worse with age, and her collabs were truly awful. But Magic’s Promise, Magic’s Pawn, Magic’s Price? Formative. Especially the main character’s aunt sternly and patiently explaining to the out-of-town-kids that being gay is NORMAL, nevermind what you have heard, and bigotry WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.
Any other V.C. Andrews readers out there? I got over them pretty quickly, but was somewhat obsessed around the 12 – 15 age…
I went through three copies of Jane Eyre between the ages of 10 and 15. The first two were paperback. By the third time, I’d learned my lesson, and went hardback.
It was one of those books where I knew exactly where the words would land on each page, which made adjusting to new editions difficult.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler yet. That book had a not-insignificant role in my decision to move to NYC as an adult. I still reread it every couple years, and think of it every time I go to the furnished room galleries at the Met or pass Greenwich, CT.
I liked that book, but when I read it NYC seemed about as distant as Beijing or Barsoom. By the time I actually moved to NYC, I think I’d forgotten about it, even when I went to the Met. You know what really stuck in my mind that I wanted to retrace the steps of when I was in NYC? The Warriors (the movie, not the book, which is considerably more downbeat). I wanted to retrace their route from the Bronx to Coney Island, but I couldn’t find a copy at any video rental place in Park Slope. (They may have been reluctant to stock it because of the reputation the movie got for encouraging violence when it was first screened.)
i loved that book but it definitely influenced me more as a child than as a teenager. but i will say that i picked it up last year before visiting NYC for the first time, and it was a very good decision.
Adolescent me was very much into murder mysteries and PG Wodehouse. Sayers, Marsh, Christie, Allingham–1930s British country house murders my forte. But I also loved, and still love, the John Putnam Thatcher mysteries by Emma Lathen. Thatcher’s a vice president the Trusts division of a big Wall Street bank and gets involved in murders that arise from financial shenanigans. What’s fascinating is watching the evolution of the American (and global) economy from the early ’60s to the early ’00s–the earliest mysteries involve family owned businesses, the latter ones international conglomerations; I don’t think there’s a single one involving a new technology or trend that hasn’t turned out to have long-term impact on life. And I adore his secretary, Miss Corsa. If I were ever to write a reboot of a classic mystery series, it would be a mystery series starring Rose Corsa.
Sadly, the series is pretty much out of print, and I don’t see any signs of ebook republishing despite years of hitting the “I’d like to buy this book on Kindle” button. Lathen was actually a pseudonym for a pair of women, one of whom died just before Kindle took off, and I suspect there are rights issues. But honestly, my first thought when the Enron scandal hit was “I wish there could be a John Putnam Thatcher mystery about this. It’s the only way I’m ever going to understand what’s really going on.”
Until 13 it was all the horse books, and whatever happened across my path that had magic in it. My childhood books seem very English – Swallows and Amazons and Narnia particularly informed How To Adventure such that there were always apples, cheese and chocolate.
At 13 I tried to read every single book in the Jr high library. I started fiction with A, finding no Aiken I had not already read, and made it as far as Philip Wylie’s Spy Who Spoke Porpoise (That was deeply surreal, and I understood suddenly where he got the idea when I read Karen Pryor’s book Lads Before The Wind about training dolphins in Hawaii and realized he was her father and had visited her at the [brand new and unheard of before] dolphin training facility. And then she wrote about breastfeeding and clicker training dogs and horses and every other creature. So.) There were a lot of Heinlein juveniles that made an impression on me as well. And Enchantress From The Stars.
By High School I was reading a book a day. I had NO discrimination, I would read anything, because it was all more interesting that what I was required to be doing. More Heinlein happened, and warped me for a a solid decade. I did read leGuin with relief, but mostly the SFF available to me was manly men doing manly things in SPACE (while 2nd wave feminism happened all around me).
Honestly i am almost more grateful for books that happened to me later than during that particular time? I didn’t McKinley until college, or Pamela Dean or any sustained diet of Wynne Jones. Finding them was like a hammer of awakening. I mean, there was MZB in there, although I was alone in hating (HATING. HAAAAAATING!!!) Mists of Avalon. And early Derynii books (I remember watching her improve) and the first Charles DeLint books were fun. I think I am older than you guys, and had to wait longer for some things I loved to show up.
But reading everything, that was a good habit.
Man, this has reminded me of a whole bunch of books that I haven’t thought about in a long time. I forget that I once had the time and desire to read whatever the hell I came across, without worrying about reviews or thinkpieces.
I read Rifles for Watie every year of intermediate school, getting it from the school library every time because we never owned it. I re-read Island of the Blue Dolphins ALL the time, but I’d skip the sad part because it devastated me the first time I read it. And my replacement copy of Blue Skin of the Sea is still with me, but missing a front cover.
I know that feeling, it was great just going to the library or paging through one of those school book fair catalogs and just picking stuff out with zero context. Not like having this super skeptical/jaded/overinfomed mindset.
Well…it was great, but often disappointing! It was lovely to stumble upon a gem but so rare. No wonder we all had special books that we reread so often – so many of the kid books I plowed through were ultimately forgettable.
Those Scholastic book fairs! The first time my son brought home one of those forms I got really excited because I’d forgotten all about them. I got my first dictionary from a book fair! Which is kinda lame, now that I think about it.
And you’re so right about the disappointment – it’s easy to forget all the bad or just boring books that we went through.
Like other people have said, the Harry Potter books are in a completely separate category. I will never in my life, ever, be as obsessed with anything as I was while I waited for the fifth and then the sixth book. I learned the basics of literature analysis by reading fan theories that tried to predict how it all would end. No teacher in the world could have motivated me more.
Buuut apart from that I’m going to have to mention the Tomorrow When the War Began books. So great! They felt realistic, and I loved that the kids were competent without suddenly becoming action heroes. They were scared out of their mind sometimes, but still able to handle themselves.
I also really liked that they were written by a man and yet had so believable female characters. As a 12-year-old I still hadn’t discovered real feminism, and I was used to reading Narnia and David Eddings, so to really see that “they” could understand “us” without stereotyping us as hyperfeminine was a real game-changer. Now I KNEW that they could get it if they tried and that the sexes weren’t very different (I had started to suspect this a year earlier when I read a book about a grown man and really understood him, but John Marsden confirmed that men/boys actually could understand girls/women too).
Also, Lee. LEE. Be still my heart.
Tomorrow When the War Began! Yes! So formative for me in so many ways. I remember parts of those books so clearly, and Ellie may be my very favourite female character ever, at least in memory. Flawed, scared, determined Ellie. And Fi! Stronger than she ever knew Fi! And beautiful, pragmatic, pacifist Robyn! Damn there were some top notch characters in those books. Now I’m dying to reread them, but I’m scared they won’t stand up.
Also, I’m pretty sure that Ellie and Lee’s scene in the third book was the first proper sex scene I ever read and I have to say, it genuinely made early teenage me a lot less nervous about sex. The talking! The being sleepy and warm and comfortable and wrapped up in a blanket with sleep hair! The fumbling out in the dark to find condoms! The tenderness! It just made it seem like something that maybe I could possibly one day almost consider doing. You know, if I could find a guy like Lee.
That’s a big ask, 10 to 18; I would place ALL of the Madeleine L’Engle books I could find; I think I discovered A Wrinkle In Time at age 10 (I have a weirdly vivid memory of this, in the gym of my elementary school with the rest of the choir waiting fro practice to start and looking at the wire bookshelf, one of the tower-style ones that rotates, and noticing the weird cover and being fascinated by the idea of the tesseract). After that I read the whole series and then found the non-fantasy ones, including A House Like A Lotus which is still one of my favourite books of all time. Around that age I was also re-reading the Lord of the Rings at the Jersey Shore every summer, I had my own paperback copies wiht hilarious covers that included this one: http://i.imgur.com/2qDIkak.jpg and ended up full of traces of peanut butter and jelly and also sand that would appear out of the spine when I read it in bed.
Now I only want to talk about kid books all day. and I’m a bit envious of kids who got to grow up with Harry Potter. I really can’t remember any books that EVERYONE was excited about like that, not to mention ones that inspired parties and midnight release celebrations.
His Dark Materials & I Capture the Castle
Then, and forever.
From age 12-14 I read an embarrassing amount of Lurlene McDaniel…where’s her “teenagers with cancer” movie deal?
Somewhere between 16-18 I picked up my sister’s copy of “Just an Ordinary Day”. It was my introduction to Shirley Jackson and remains one of my favorites. I essentially stole it from my sister so I could have it at college. 10 years later, it’s falling apart and I only loan it to the most trustworthy friends.
I did a book report on McDaniel’s Don’t Die, My Love in 3rd or 4th grade? We had to design a cereal box based on the book, complete with activities on the back. That was not a particularly happy cereal box.
How have we not mentioned Roald Dahl yet? His books are at 4th-6th grade reading level. I may have started reading them around age 8 or 9 but I was definitely re-reading Matilda and The BFG for several years after.
As a child, I did not know that Roald Dahl also wrote adult books. Some very creepy short stories and some quite dirty adult books. My parents also gave up on monitoring my reading material pretty quickly, because it was easier to just let me pick up what I wanted from their shelves than deal with my crankiness if I was out of more age appropriate books.
Which is how one of my favourite books as a pre-teen became My Uncle Oswald.
“The nameless narrator has revealed snippets of the lovable, lascivious Uncle Oswald’s life in other collections, but this is the only novel—brief though it is—dedicated solely to the diaries of “the greatest fornicator of all time.” Inspired by stories of the aphrodisiac powers of the Sudanese blister beetle, the palpable seductiveness of the lovely Yasmin Howcomely, and the scientific know-how of Professor A. R. Woresley, Uncle Oswald anticipates the concept of the Nobel sperm bank by some 40 years, flimflamming crowned heads, great artists, and eccentric geniuses into making “donations.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Uncle_Oswald
Tam Lin retellings are REPRESENTING in this comment thread. A new one just came out, either YA or NA, called “A Court of Thorns and Roses” by Sarah J. Maas. Reading it was like revisiting my Tam Lin-obsessed adolescence, but sexier.
Well, this is going on my list. I have never actually read the oft-discussed Pamela Dean book, somehow, but Janet McNaughton’s An Earthly Knight (which uses Tam Lin AND Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight as source material) was fucking formative in establishing my love of retold ballads and folk and fairytales. It is possibly out of print/was maybe Canada-only, but it’s wonderful.
I loved those too (again, just the Dicey books, not really any of the other vaguely Lurlene McDaniel-y teen death books). I didn't realize there were so many – I had Dicey's Song and Homecoming, but didn't know there were like five others in the cycle! I wonder how well they hold up.
Dread pirate Robert
pretty well for me! Part of what felt so important to me was coming to them as they were written but feeling like they were written during my youth, if you know what I mean?
I love Voight for her contemporary stuff, but kind of hate her fantasy work.