Formative books

[anghara]

norilana posts in her journal on the 18 books she considers "formative" - she qualifies her choices by saying that she is considering only books she had read or encountered before high school - and I suppose I could have done it on that basis but I decided, instead, to come up with the first 20 books that came into my head that I would consider to be "formative" for me in the sense that they matter to me deeply or that they were milestones of sorts in my life or reading career. Although much of this list - nearly half of it - does meet norilana's criteria, some of the others were encountered when I was older, some merely by virtue of having been encountered later than they should have been because my level of English, the language in which I read them in, governed the chronology rather more forcefully than the actual age that I was at the time - and one or two I read as more or less an adult, but they have left a lasting impression on me and I consider them, at this point in my life, as formative as anything else I can remember.

So - here's my list:


1. Heidi by Johanna Spyri - the book on which I learned to read. Talk about formative!

2.The GOod Earth by Pearl Buck

3. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

4. "Vreme Smrti" ("The Time Of Death") by Dobrica Cosic (yes, there IS a translated version - but I read it in the original Serbo Croat and I honestly don't think that while it is a gripping book in any language it will not resonate half as much for someone who ISN'T part of that culture and that land as it did for me)

5. Winnetou by Karl May (It was the first book that made me cry while I read it - I realise it's corny and utterly devoid of any realistic ideas, written by a German whose ideas of the Wild West and the Noble Savage were less than, uh, accurate and whose evangelistic tendencies drove me nuts sometimes, but hey, it was a small price to pay...)

6. My son, my son by Howard Spring - hell, ANYTHING by Howard Spring, the man is a genius at giving you the story of a life in a way that makes YOU, the reader, share it.

7. Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay - that spoke to my MARRROW...

8. Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres - the man really knows what makes people change.

9. Cat;s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

10. The Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkien

11. the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde

12. the poetry of Desanka Maksimovic (Hey, I can't help it if I can read in several languages!)

13. Ivanhoe by Walter Scott

14. "Through Desert and Jungle" by Henryk Sienkiewicz (also read originally in my own language, as a child, and a beloved book to this day)

16. Almost anything by Ursula le Guin

17 Le Morte d'Arthur by Mallory (and, as corollary, "The once and future king", by T H White)

18. the ORIGINAL Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales (not the sanitized stuff, thanks very much, I loved the visceral quality of the originals)

19. The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy (I learned English at ten; at thirteen I was reading the full-blown, unabridged, fulsome and stylistically tough set of Forsyte novels. That was a milestone for me)

20. Narnia books by C S Lewis


What a mix... It's often been said that mixing one's drinks leads to faster and harder intoxication - here I'm mixing genres, languages, reading levels and subject matter with such wild abandon that it's no wonder I wound up as drunk on language as I am...

So. What books are rattling around in YOUR head...?

Comments

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

There are very few books I can point to and say, "That! That one helped make me who I am!" But there are a few.

The Lord of the Rings, of course.

The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold. The Boudica books by Manda Scott. Chameleon by Mark Burnell. Diplomacy of Wolves by Holly Lisle. Stay by Nicola Griffith.

Those are the ones I remember having visceral impact. There are others: at least a thousand, probably more. Every book I've read has had some formative influence on me, one way or another. :)

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

I don't know that I can necessarily limit this to books I read when I was 18 or younger, but....

1.) The Black Stallion series. Horse fantasy writ large.
2.) The Little House books. Hey, I come from Pacific Northwest pioneer stock, so it was encouraged.
3.) Sometimes A Great Notion by Ken Kesey. High school book. Powerful, powerful language with images I could relate to as a kid growing up in a Pacific Northwest timber town.
4.) The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart. Heck, a lot of other stuff by Mary Stewart (Airs Above the Ground especially), but this one actually made Merlin and Arthur *work* for me.
5.) The Lord of the Rings. Of course.
6.) Quest Crosstime by Andre Norton. My first Norton, followed by devouring the rest of them in the library.
7.) Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (high school).
8.) Several novels about the youth of Elizabeth I.
9.) The James Bond novels.
10.) Short story--The Game of Rat and Dragon by Cordwainer Smith. Now *that* one clobbered me but good.
11.) The Muller-Fokker Effect by John Sladek
12.) Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
13.) The Elric series by Michael Moorcock
14.) Dune by Frank Herbert
15.) Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey

Okay. All those were under the age of 18.

I may be revealing more about my warped teenage mind than I intended.
;-)

[anghara.livejournal.com]

I can offer a resounding "CHECK!" to nine out of your fifteen. So our teenage years might have been similarly, uh, warped, at least to some extent... [grin]

[tcastleb.livejournal.com]

These are all the ones I can think of that I could read over and over and never get tired of that I found in high school and under:

1. The Gom on Windy Mountain quartet by Grace Chetwin

2. Dragon's Blood and Heart's Blood by Jane Yolen

3. The Indian in the Cupboard books and The Fairy Rebel by Lynn Reid Banks

4. The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones

5. The Crystal Cave series by Mary Stewart

6. The first few Redwall books by Brian Jacques

7. The Three Musketeers and Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas

8. Any Madeline L'Engle book, especially Many Waters

9. Narnia books by C.S. Lewis

10. Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls (made me cry every time)

11. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (This was my first memorable introduction of how cruel and unfair the world and other people could be, and I still remember bits of it after reading it only once.)

And, I'm almost embarrassed to say, the first thirty or so of the Star Trek: the Next Generation books, because I was a huge Trekkie, but those got my imagination going and got me really serious about making up stories.

I never did make it through LOTR. I read Les Mis in middle school--took me three weeks. And, after a four-year reading drought during college, I owe a lot to Mercedes Lackey's earlier books (especially Firebird and Magiic's Pawn/Promise/Price) for getting me reading again and getting me serious about writing.

Me too on the Malory

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Which I read at 12, I think.

I'll have to think about the others.

[aliceaudrey.livejournal.com]

I suppose I could say a lot of books were formative but only one comes strongly to mind. Star Beast by Heinlein. Is that not pathetic or what? At least his chauvinism wasn't as strong in his "juveniles" as in say, Stranger in a Strange Land.

Alice