![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Dancing with a ball and chain
I've been wanting to do this post all week. Here are the ten books (or book series) that I consider to have been formative in my young Sageling years. These are all books I read when I was 12 years old or younger.
10. The Greek Myths - Robert Graves
So probably like most other kids, a lot of the books I read were books I yanked down from my parents' bookshelves. I got my sci-fi and horror from my dad, and mythology and fairy-tale based stuff from my mom. The most precious book that she ever let me read, and even let me keep later on, was a copy of The Greek Myths that she had bought in the late 60's, and I read it obsessively, repeatedly, until I was a total egghead about the stuff.
By that point I had already read all of the Old Testament, which had some okay stories in it, but the Greek stuff was far more entertaining and dramatic. Hera and Athena are my two favorite goddesses - some of my first forays into RP were with Athena and Hera-inspired characters. Prometheus and Hephaestus are my favorite gods, and I will not die before I write a decent retelling of the myths of Prometheus, Epimethius, and Pandora. Usually my favorite stories were of the mortals and the demi-gods rather than the gods themselves, and I REALLY enjoyed watching Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess with actual context behind where they were going and what enemies they fought against.
(When I was 13 and realized that Sailor Moon was actually in part based on the Selene/Endymion myth, I shat bricks.)
9. The Book of the Dun Cow - Walter Wangerin Jr
This is kinda bizarre, but I read this book when I was maybe 8 because I really loved the Don Bluth movie Rock-a-Doodle!, and I saw this book on my mom's bookshelf and look! It also stars a rooster named Chanticleer! This is going to be awesome!
It is also A BILLION TIMES MORE DEPRESSING. I guess this was to me what Animal Farm was to other kids, and Animal Farm and Watership Down didn't have the power to phase me cause I had read this sucker first.
(Well, I was also the kid who wasn't phased when Bambi's mom died. That was probably because I have been a vegetarian since I was 3 and already aware that something was wrong if people got upset at Bambi's mom dying, but five minutes later have no problem eating a hamburger.)
Anyways. I still love this book.
(Valentino came by his totem honestly! I didn't pick rooster ONLY because of the cock jokes. >> )
8. Beauty and the Beast - translated from the original fairy tale, illustrated by Hillary Knight
The Disney B&B is nice and all but this is the image I always think of:
7. Anything written by Michael Crichton, because when I was a kid Michael Crichton was Shakespeare as far as I was concerned
I can't remember if I read Sphere first, or Andromeda Strain - I'm pretty sure I read Andromeda first though. I must have been 7 or 8. I got Andromeda Strain and was fascinated by the medical/scientific mystery in it, but Sphere totally flew over my head until I re-read it when I was 12. I read Jurassic Park maybe when I was 8 or 9 - I was too afraid to watch the Jurassic Park movie when that came out, so I ended up reading the book about two or three years before I was brave enough to finish the movie (The Lost World is by far the better book - it's a shame the movie was so much worse). I read Eaters of the Dead and loved that one too. I even read god damn Five Patients, which has to be the most boring book ever but I was determined to read everything I could out of this guy.
6. Raptor Red - Robert T. Bakker
My dad actually gave me this book, cause he knew I enjoyed Jurassic Park so much. This was a book about a female Utahraptor named Red, and it was written by the POV of Red. So you have a first-person account of the age of the dinosaurs from a friggin' dinosaur's point of view.
If you could imagine the adventures of Red Sonja, if Red Sonja was a dinosaur and also obsessed with the way things smell, then you have the synopsis of this book.
5. The Game - unknown author
I haven't been able to find this book or who wrote it, even with the power of the interwebs in my hands :< But this was by far the book I rented the most often from my elementary school library, and assuming my elementary school library is arranged exactly as it was 15 years ago, I could find it again for you on the shelves right now.
The basic story for this book was that it was the far future, and it followed a set of 4 teenage kids who were considered 'delinquent' but were really just square pegs who couldn't be jammed into circular holes - they were too imaginative or too clever or too assertive to get on well with their peer group. Because they weren't allowed to continue into the same higher education as their peers, they were given a choice - immediately take on jobs as work drones in futuristic construction, or participate in an experimental virtual reality survival game. In an Ender's Game kind of twist (actually I would wonder which book was published first, cause The Game very well could have been a rip-off), the kids find out during one of the 'games' that they are not just in a VR simulation of an alien planet, but were actually cryogenically frozen and shipped off to colonize a world all on their own. Half of the book was futuristic dystopia, and the other half was The Hatchet in fucking space. Also, the main character was an awesome girl, and to my young kid shock, she got knocked up at the end.
This book was insane and I LOVED IT TO DEATH.
4. Cujo - Stephen King
I read Cujo when I was 6 years old, cover to cover. God knows where my parents were at the time. That book gave me insane nightmares and a terror of large dogs and scared me away from Stephen King for 8 years...though I did eventually go back to him and read like, everything he published.
3. Choose Your Own Adventure
Did you know that I once wrote a 130 page Choose Your Own Adventure for ANCD? I did it as a pre-Nanowrimo warm-up one year in October and totally steamrolled through it. THEN I LOST MOST OF IT IN A COMPUTER CRASH. GOD DAMN.
Anyways, CYOA is boss and I totally need to try it again one day. The CYOAs with time travel or space travel were by far my favorites - fuck being a champion ice skater, for serious.
2. Animorphs - K.A. Applegate
I do not cry at books, at TV shows, or at movies, and I can count the times I have maybe on one hand ( Pokemon: The First Movie being one of the very few, and I think I saw a movie recently that did the same...Kol would remember cause I think we both cried at it). But one of my most vivid memories as a kid was reading the first Animorphs books and bawling like an infant at the end of it. I stopped reading the books at about book 28, but my favorite books were Megamorphs #2 (Tobias killed all of the dinosaurs), Animorphs #11 (Jake and the crew all get murdered in South America, though they do get better), and Animorphs #26 (Jake again, all of them are teleported to another planet for a Battle Royale against a species of super-killers).
Marco was by far my favorite character. Deon might have tipped you off to that.
1. Maniac Magee - Jerry Spinelli
If I become published in YA, then I want to create a novel that is a homage to Maniac Magee, though with a female protagonist. (She even has a name, Oberon, and she looks like a Salvation Army-chic Dakota Fanning.)
There are two lasting impressions that this book gives me. One is that it has BALLS. I'm not sure if I can think of many YA that approached racism and homelessness right in the face as this novel has. The second impression was that of freedom. Of course Maniac's degree of freedom sucks half of the time, since he's starving or living with buffalos or whatnot, but he is a kid who defied the family who hated him and defied the social constructs that made no sense to him, and was determined to make life the way he wanted it to be. His philosophy is what I consider to be an incredibly brave one, and I find him to be one of the most inspiring characters I can think of.
I think of this book whenever I see butterscotch krumpets too.
Did any of these books affect you guys as well? What books were very important and powerful to you at a young, impressionable age? (I hear "Clan of the Cave Bear" is a common answer, by the way.)
10. The Greek Myths - Robert Graves
So probably like most other kids, a lot of the books I read were books I yanked down from my parents' bookshelves. I got my sci-fi and horror from my dad, and mythology and fairy-tale based stuff from my mom. The most precious book that she ever let me read, and even let me keep later on, was a copy of The Greek Myths that she had bought in the late 60's, and I read it obsessively, repeatedly, until I was a total egghead about the stuff.
By that point I had already read all of the Old Testament, which had some okay stories in it, but the Greek stuff was far more entertaining and dramatic. Hera and Athena are my two favorite goddesses - some of my first forays into RP were with Athena and Hera-inspired characters. Prometheus and Hephaestus are my favorite gods, and I will not die before I write a decent retelling of the myths of Prometheus, Epimethius, and Pandora. Usually my favorite stories were of the mortals and the demi-gods rather than the gods themselves, and I REALLY enjoyed watching Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess with actual context behind where they were going and what enemies they fought against.
(When I was 13 and realized that Sailor Moon was actually in part based on the Selene/Endymion myth, I shat bricks.)
9. The Book of the Dun Cow - Walter Wangerin Jr
This is kinda bizarre, but I read this book when I was maybe 8 because I really loved the Don Bluth movie Rock-a-Doodle!, and I saw this book on my mom's bookshelf and look! It also stars a rooster named Chanticleer! This is going to be awesome!
It is also A BILLION TIMES MORE DEPRESSING. I guess this was to me what Animal Farm was to other kids, and Animal Farm and Watership Down didn't have the power to phase me cause I had read this sucker first.
(Well, I was also the kid who wasn't phased when Bambi's mom died. That was probably because I have been a vegetarian since I was 3 and already aware that something was wrong if people got upset at Bambi's mom dying, but five minutes later have no problem eating a hamburger.)
Anyways. I still love this book.
(Valentino came by his totem honestly! I didn't pick rooster ONLY because of the cock jokes. >> )
8. Beauty and the Beast - translated from the original fairy tale, illustrated by Hillary Knight
The Disney B&B is nice and all but this is the image I always think of:
7. Anything written by Michael Crichton, because when I was a kid Michael Crichton was Shakespeare as far as I was concerned
I can't remember if I read Sphere first, or Andromeda Strain - I'm pretty sure I read Andromeda first though. I must have been 7 or 8. I got Andromeda Strain and was fascinated by the medical/scientific mystery in it, but Sphere totally flew over my head until I re-read it when I was 12. I read Jurassic Park maybe when I was 8 or 9 - I was too afraid to watch the Jurassic Park movie when that came out, so I ended up reading the book about two or three years before I was brave enough to finish the movie (The Lost World is by far the better book - it's a shame the movie was so much worse). I read Eaters of the Dead and loved that one too. I even read god damn Five Patients, which has to be the most boring book ever but I was determined to read everything I could out of this guy.
6. Raptor Red - Robert T. Bakker
My dad actually gave me this book, cause he knew I enjoyed Jurassic Park so much. This was a book about a female Utahraptor named Red, and it was written by the POV of Red. So you have a first-person account of the age of the dinosaurs from a friggin' dinosaur's point of view.
If you could imagine the adventures of Red Sonja, if Red Sonja was a dinosaur and also obsessed with the way things smell, then you have the synopsis of this book.
5. The Game - unknown author
I haven't been able to find this book or who wrote it, even with the power of the interwebs in my hands :< But this was by far the book I rented the most often from my elementary school library, and assuming my elementary school library is arranged exactly as it was 15 years ago, I could find it again for you on the shelves right now.
The basic story for this book was that it was the far future, and it followed a set of 4 teenage kids who were considered 'delinquent' but were really just square pegs who couldn't be jammed into circular holes - they were too imaginative or too clever or too assertive to get on well with their peer group. Because they weren't allowed to continue into the same higher education as their peers, they were given a choice - immediately take on jobs as work drones in futuristic construction, or participate in an experimental virtual reality survival game. In an Ender's Game kind of twist (actually I would wonder which book was published first, cause The Game very well could have been a rip-off), the kids find out during one of the 'games' that they are not just in a VR simulation of an alien planet, but were actually cryogenically frozen and shipped off to colonize a world all on their own. Half of the book was futuristic dystopia, and the other half was The Hatchet in fucking space. Also, the main character was an awesome girl, and to my young kid shock, she got knocked up at the end.
This book was insane and I LOVED IT TO DEATH.
4. Cujo - Stephen King
I read Cujo when I was 6 years old, cover to cover. God knows where my parents were at the time. That book gave me insane nightmares and a terror of large dogs and scared me away from Stephen King for 8 years...though I did eventually go back to him and read like, everything he published.
3. Choose Your Own Adventure
Did you know that I once wrote a 130 page Choose Your Own Adventure for ANCD? I did it as a pre-Nanowrimo warm-up one year in October and totally steamrolled through it. THEN I LOST MOST OF IT IN A COMPUTER CRASH. GOD DAMN.
Anyways, CYOA is boss and I totally need to try it again one day. The CYOAs with time travel or space travel were by far my favorites - fuck being a champion ice skater, for serious.
2. Animorphs - K.A. Applegate
I do not cry at books, at TV shows, or at movies, and I can count the times I have maybe on one hand ( Pokemon: The First Movie being one of the very few, and I think I saw a movie recently that did the same...Kol would remember cause I think we both cried at it). But one of my most vivid memories as a kid was reading the first Animorphs books and bawling like an infant at the end of it. I stopped reading the books at about book 28, but my favorite books were Megamorphs #2 (Tobias killed all of the dinosaurs), Animorphs #11 (Jake and the crew all get murdered in South America, though they do get better), and Animorphs #26 (Jake again, all of them are teleported to another planet for a Battle Royale against a species of super-killers).
Marco was by far my favorite character. Deon might have tipped you off to that.
1. Maniac Magee - Jerry Spinelli
If I become published in YA, then I want to create a novel that is a homage to Maniac Magee, though with a female protagonist. (She even has a name, Oberon, and she looks like a Salvation Army-chic Dakota Fanning.)
There are two lasting impressions that this book gives me. One is that it has BALLS. I'm not sure if I can think of many YA that approached racism and homelessness right in the face as this novel has. The second impression was that of freedom. Of course Maniac's degree of freedom sucks half of the time, since he's starving or living with buffalos or whatnot, but he is a kid who defied the family who hated him and defied the social constructs that made no sense to him, and was determined to make life the way he wanted it to be. His philosophy is what I consider to be an incredibly brave one, and I find him to be one of the most inspiring characters I can think of.
I think of this book whenever I see butterscotch krumpets too.
Did any of these books affect you guys as well? What books were very important and powerful to you at a young, impressionable age? (I hear "Clan of the Cave Bear" is a common answer, by the way.)
no subject
I have my copies of Animorphs on the bookshelf above my bed too ;_; SAME QUESTION, did you have a favorite book or character?
no subject
I won't lie - Ax was my favourite character. I LOVED THE ANDALITES. I loved how derpy he was.