Dancing with a ball and chain
Dec. 1st, 2011 06:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
impersonaI'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
Date: 2011-12-02 10:01 am (UTC)Interesting question, though! I'm going to list the first ten I decided on and not let myself revise the list, otherwise I'd spend forever nitpicking over narrowing it to just ten. In a semi-arbitrary order:
10. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsburg
This book was my biggest wish-fulfillment fantasy as a kid, or one of them, definitely. When I wasn't dreaming about some idyllic pre-WWI childhood involving some kind of animal companion (Rascal, for instance), I was thinking about running away. At the time Mixed-Up Files was like, the coolest runaway fantasy ever -- living in the Met off fountain coins and sleeping in antique beds, how genius is that? Many a childhood runaway plan was based on this book.
9. Elizabeth I: Red Rose of the House of Tudor, by Kathryn Lasky
This was one of the Dear America Royal Diaries books, and though I wasn't big into Dear America in general (though I read a lot of them), man did I love this book. I reread it to death. The intrigue and pageantry all appealed to me, I loved hearing about the different palaces for different seasons and the masques and the balls and the things they all wore, plus the fucked-up Tudor family held its appeal for me at the time, even in YA form; I think I was also invested in tiny Elizabeth Tudor/tiny Robert Dudley for one reason or another.
8. Agent Arthur (and other Usborne Puzzle Adventures)
I FUCKING LOVED USBORNE PUZZLE ADVENTURES. I loved puzzles in general, but Usborne Puzzle Adventures had a sense of humor that I adored, as well as taking place in all these bizarre fun over-the-top worlds of pirate treasure and villainous archaeologists and shit, or in the case of Agent Arthur, bumbling Bond/M:I-esque secret agents. Also they had puzzles, which made me feel like I was contributing. I was so delighted spending so much time working out illustrated mazes and simple ciphers.
7. d'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths and d'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths, by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire
I think a lot of people had some kind of Formative Children's Myth Book or two and mine were the big d'Aulaire anthologies with their black-and-white illustrations. I actually read the binding right off both of these. The second one sparked off my childhood identification with Loki.
6. Dragon Prince and Dragon Star (Dragon Prince, The Star Scroll, Sunrunner's Fire; Dragon Star, The Dragon Token, Skybowl), by Melanie Rawn
Not gonna lie, I adored Melanie Rawn as a kid and her fantasy worldbuilding and ridiculous million-family-member noble house melodrama probably planted the seed for what was eventually going to be my love for A Song of Ice and Fire. Lord Andry of Radzyn Keep was my favorite. I think Pol and Andry opened the door to my love of stories about ugly but not evil human beings.
5. Galax-Arena, by Gillian Rubinstein
Has anyone else read this book? It was on lend at my elementary school library. It probably shouldn't have been, since it was a creepy dystopian story about adult exploitation of children, body image, death, child trafficking, and Lord of the Flies society-making in slavery situations, but it was the most bone-chillingly insightful thing I'd read at the time and I kept checking it out to read after my library helper shift was over. Terrifying stuff.
4. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Ha, where to even begin with this one. In a world full of jock hero archetypes I hated and nerd hero archetypes I thought were stupid and condescending, Sherlock Holmes was like, the hero I wanted to be before I admitted to myself I wanted to be things. You could probably boil down my biggest fictional role model influences to a cross between Holmes and Batman. Also, I shipped Holmes/Watson before I even knew what shipping was. Be still, my tiny gay heart.
3. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
It is now a little uncool to admit you ever loved the crazy reactionary granddaddy of YA sci-fi, Orson Scott Card, and his fucked-up jingoistic Randian views promoted in Ender's Game, but you know what, there was a time when I did. A pretty sizeable time. I think there's a reason why Ender's Game is so dangerously alluring to lonely, serious, misunderstood-feeling kids the world over. It's the ultimate revenge fantasy.
2. Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson
I've read the entire run of C&H collected in trade, cover to shining cover. I had time to kill before swim practice every day. Bill Watterson is still probably my gold standard for satire and his illustrations my gold standard for sequential art -- I learned so much of what I learned about the world from C&H, and unlike Ender's Game, I do believe it taught me well.
1. Matilda, by Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl wrote the truest, most validating fables about bullying and abuse and how sometimes life just fucks you over, particularly as a kid. Roald Dahl was like a proto YouAreNotCrazy.com, with all his stories that weren't afraid to say, no, sometimes adults don't mean well, sometimes they're just fucking sadistic, sometimes you just have to survive. I think somewhere in his cocktail of black humor and absurdity was a real, non-Dan Savage-tainted It Gets Better message that I really, really needed. Also his books are amazing anyway, for humor and fantasy and just straight-up solid YA. I've never been happy with how people adapt them to screen, the darkness is always watered down and made less disturbing, especially with Matilda. Matilda was like, really spot-on solace for smart kids living in abusive situations; Miss Trunchbull and Matilda's parents are still standards for shudder-inducing antagonists in writing for me.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-02 10:25 am (UTC)Let's not speak of the movie. :( :( :(
no subject
Date: 2011-12-02 03:20 pm (UTC)I will comment more when I'm not rushing out the door to work XD
no subject
Date: 2011-12-02 05:22 pm (UTC)