BOOKS REMEMBERED
An Alphabetical Remembrance
by
(This article first appeared in the journal of the Children’s
Book Council of America)
There have
been several false starts to this article. I began writing it in a hotel in
The problems were many. First of all, I couldn’t
possibly fit in all the significant books and authors of my childhood. The
first dredging of the deep sludge of my mind made it clear I was also unable to
organize the books in any meaningful way. All the books I wanted to mention I
remembered because they were great books. All were and are important to me in
many different ways and for many different reasons.
I couldn’t order them chronologically from when I read
them because I mostly couldn’t remember when I did. Most of them I read
in that space of true discovery, from the age of nine or so to maybe seventeen
or eighteen. I didn’t think there was much point to ordering them by
publication date either. They were new when I discovered them, regardless of
whether they had been discovered by other readers days, months, years or even
decades before.
Ultimately, I was left with one of the simplest organisational methods of all for this piece. A cunning structure, beloved of librarian, booksellers and
highly-motivated book owners.
Alphabetical by author.
So this is my own personal reading alphabet, the highlights
of the years when I read six or seven or a dozen books a week. An annotated alphabet, with my comments and some rough notes as to
what kind of books they are. I’ve focussed
on Science Fiction and Fantasy, because that is the theme of this issue, but
others have crept in. Many others have had to be left out, for reasons of
alphabetical, spatial or mental failure.
I’m sure there will be many old friends of yours here,
dear reader, but I hope there will some new (and old) discoveries as well.
A is for Lloyd Alexander, Joan
Aiken, and Poul Anderson
I
remember reading Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles
of Prydain completely out of order, but it
didn’t matter. I loved the combination of humour
and adventure, and as I got older, my favourite book
in the series changed from one to another and back again. I suspect this is
because the careful mix of the serious and the light-hearted is different in
each book, so they appeal to different moods and times. Taran Wanderer probably retains pole position to this day, but I love
all the books. (High Fantasy, meaning that the story is set
entirely in an invented world, not our own.)
Joan
Aiken’s short stories are wonderfully imaginative and inventive as are
her novels. My particular favourites are her short
story collections, such as All You Ever
Wanted and the ‘unhistorical’ novels set in a 19th century that
never happened, from The Wolves of
Willoughby Chase and Black Hearts in Battersea to The Cuckoo Tree. The later sequels (read
with childhood long behind) never quite connected so well with me. Midnight Is A Place,
the tale of two orphans forced to live by their wits in a horrendous 19th
century industrial town, is another one I come back to re-read every now and
again. (The short stories are typically fantasy, but of the kind where fantasy
impinges on the real world. The ‘unhistorical’ novels are alternate
history, I guess.)
Poul
Anderson was one of my ‘must-read’ SF writers as a teenager. I
particularly devoured his Dominic Flandry books,
tales of a naval intelligence officer in a decaying galactic empire, fighting
the good fight while also cynically looking after himself.
The books became more complex over time, as did Flandry
himself. A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows is the stand-out, but all of them
are good. Start with the first, Agent of
the Terran Empire. (Science
Fiction, with a firm nod towards the space opera.)
B is for John Brunner and
Barbara Ninde Byfield
John
Brunner’s Traveller in Black had a major impact upon me. I
loved everything about it, from the bizarre, elemental characters of a chaotic,
magical past to the dreadful fates of many of the selfish people who unwisely
wished for something when the Traveller was nearby.
Brunner plays with ideas of fate, self-will, time, creation and much else with
baroque mastery. (Fantasy, one of a kind, though possibly a
kind of cousin to Jack Vance’s books.)
Barbara Ninde Byfield’s book The Glass Harmonica (reissued a few
years ago as The Book of Weird) is
paradoxically not a book remembered from my childhood. It is a book I wanted
desperately to get after I read a reference to it in The Book of Andre Norton. If memory serves me correctly, Norton
referred to it as the book you need to have to find out what a
‘castellan’ is and the difference between a wizard and sorceror. But I didn’t get my hands on a copy until
many years later, only to discover that it was worth the wait. Delightfully
illustrated by the author, its subtitle hints at its contents: ‘A Lexicon
of the Fantastical, in which it is determined that: wizards see best with their
eyes closed; Torturers reek of mutton, cold sweat and rust; It is Unwise to
take a Herald on a Picnic ...’ and much more. If only I’d got hold
of a copy when I was 10, instead of 36! In minor tribute, I named one of the
four main characters in my book Shade’s
Children Ninde. (Whimsical Non-Fiction)
C is for Susan Cooper and Joy Chant
I am
sure The Dark Is Rising sequence by
Susan Cooper needs no further introduction here. I read The Dark is Rising first, didn’t know
Red Moon, Black Mountain
by Joy Chant is what I would call ‘Harder-edged Narnia’.
This is a novel in which children are transported to a fantasy world and take
part in a great struggle against evil. Grittier and tougher than Narnia, , it was unjustly
neglected, probably because it was way ahead of its time. There is a sequel of
sorts, but I never took to it. (High Fantasy, though it does start in our
world)
D is for Dumas
The Three Musketeers
is not SF or fantasy, but it has much in common with them. History, after all,
is another world to which we cannot travel except in the mind. This is a great
adventure story, a great love story, and a great portal to what is, in effect, another world.
Be sure to find a good translation, one that captures the humour
and energy of the original (from memory the Bantam Classics paperback is a good
one). And be sure to watch the best films made from the book, The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, directed by Richard
Lester and adapted by George MacDonald Fraser. (Historical Adventure)
E is for Edward Eager
Where do
you go after reading all the way through E. Nesbit? This was a particularly
good question in the early 1970s when there wasn’t an awful lot of
fantasy around. Eager was Nesbit’s natural
successor and, to an Australian, his American children and settings were of
interest in themselves, even apart from the fantasy elements. Knight’s Castle is still my favourite. I bought them all again recently, in their clean
white newness, as reissued by Harcourt/Odyssey with lovely Quentin Blake covers
(but also thankfully with the original N. M. Bodecker
internal illustrations). (Real World with Fantasy)
F is for C. S. Forester
I’m
a sucker for Napoleonic nautical adventures, and C. S. Forester started it all
with his Hornblower books. They’re more
accessible than Patrick O’Brian of current Master and Commander film fame (though I very much like his books
too). Again, these are historical novels that have much of the same appeal as
fantasy. Adventures in another time and place. Hornblower is a strangely likeable unlikeable
character with much more to him than you might expect, and there are many
personal, human stories in addition to running out the guns, climbing to the
topmast, hoisting all sail and so forth.
G is for Nicholas Stuart Gray, Alan Garner and Robert Graves
Nicholas
Stuart Gray wrote charming, clever English children’s fantasies,
sometimes drawing on fairy tales like Rapunzel as he
does in The Stone Cage, where the
story is observed from the point of view of the witch’s cat. I’m
also very fond of Grimbold’s Other World and The Apple Stone. Some of his books are rather too dated now, and
self-conscious, but the good ones have not aged.
Like
other authors on this list, Alan Garner probably needs no introduction. Suffice
to say that if I could write three pages that were as good as the last three
pages of The Owl Service I would be a
very happy author. Like many, I love Garner’s earlier work more than the
later books, though I always admire what he does. My favourites
are The Weirdstone
of Brisingamen, its sequel The Moon of Gomrath, and The Owl Service. When
I was nineteen, and travelling around the
Robert
Graves was important to me for three very different books. I, Claudius and Claudius the
God seemed to me not to be novels so much as actual accounts given by the
real Claudius. As I was fascinated by Roman history (particularly Roman
Britain, thanks to Rosemary Sutcliff) I was deeply interested in an actual Emperor’s
real story – or so I assumed at the age of twelve or thirteen. The third
book was Goodbye To
All That,
H is for Robert Heinlein and Georgette Heyer
Robert
Heinlein was probably my favourite science fiction
writer through my teenage years. With books like Red Planet, Between Planets, Starman Jones,
Have Space Suit Will Travel, Space Cadet (not a perjorative
term when it first came out), Tunnel in
the Sky, Farmer in the Sky, Starship
Troopers, and Citizen of the Galaxy
how could he not be a favourite? All great stories,
told with such surety that they seemed real to me, to be almost true tales from
far futures, somehow sent back. He lost some of his sense of story, I think,
after The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a
book I loved in my later teens. I can still re-read all the titles I’ve
mentioned, which illustrates my high esteem for the books both then and now.
(Science Fiction)
I came
to Georgette Heyer in my late teens. I don’t
like her murder mysteries and her ‘serious’ historical novels like Lord John don’t interest me
either. But I love her Regency Romances. Some are better than others, but the
best are enormously entertaining, historically accurate, and very funny
adventure stories. Oh, and there’ll be some
romance in there somewhere. I heartily recommend Friday’s Child, Uncommon
I is for Incomplete
I
couldn’t think of any authors whose surnames
begin with I. Naturally a dozen of them will fall off my shelves as soon as
this article appears in print, and I will be e-mailed hundreds more names. Regardless,
at this point, ‘I’ is for Incomplete, as in The Incomplete Enchanter by L. Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt.
Either of these authors could have appeared here on their own, De Camp for Lest Darkness Fall (modern engineer
falls back in time to the late Roman period) and Pratt for The Blue Star (a fantasy set in a kind of 18th century
pre-revolutionary France). Both authors were way ahead of the fantasy pack,
beginning their work in the 1940s.
J is for Tove Jansson
Moomintrolls! I
still want to live in a Moomin House on an island
somewhere. These books are for any age, but I loved them most ferociously from
the age of eight or so to ten or thereabouts (I’ve never stopped loving
them, of course; now I just spread my affections among more books). My mother
made puppets of the entire cast of Moominland Midwinter
and put the book on as a puppet play when I was eight. Sadly, only the Groke survives, as no silverfish or mouse would dare eat
that cold personage. For no other reason than the fact that it was the first
one I read myself, I suggest starting with Moominsummer Madness, or perhaps Comet in
Moominland. Chronology is not really important to
the Moomin books, though the later ones are tinged
with melancholy, perhaps from the long Northern nights. (Fantasy, of a unique
kind)
K is for Rudyard Kipling
Captains Courageous
introduced me to Kipling. A great sea adventure and a sharp
insight into the relationships between boys, between sons and fathers, and
between husbands and wives. It was contemporary when Kipling wrote it,
so I’m not sure if can be called a historical novel, though now of course
it is. For other Kipling, my favourites are (of course) Kim and The Just So Stories. And I liked The Jungle Book as a child, before every
shred of its narrative power was used and re-used and turned to dust by Disney.
L is for Ursula Le Guin
A Wizard of Earthsea was a fantasy that like The
Lord of the Rings, seemed to me to be a true tale from somewhere else. Not
a made-up story, but something real. I read and re-read it, and wished I knew
the true names of the world around me. I felt the same with the two sequels The Tombs of Atuan
and The Farthest Shore (the later
sequels came out in my 20s 30s). I also found this sense of truth or reality in
Le Guin’s science fiction, particularly The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. (Fantasy and Science
Fiction)
M is for John Masefield and Arthur Mee
The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights by John Masefield
(the English poet) are two little-known fantasies. They are full of invention,
connection to myth, legend and folklore, and fascinating characters. They have
their faults, mainly (I think) because of some assumptions about how
children’s books were supposed to be written in the 1920s. But they are
still excellent fantasy novels of normal children slipping into marvellous realms that co-exist with our own world. Be sure
to get unabridged versions. (Fantasy/Real World of the 1930s mixture)
Arthur Mee was probably a horribly well-meaning Christian
gentleman who lived and breathed children’s education. Nevertheless, his Children’s
Encyclopaedia, of which there were many editions over
the years, was a vital source of much of my abstruse [AG1]knowledge and peculiar trivia. I think I learned all my
Greek legends at an early age from an old set of Arthur Mee’s
Encyclopaedia that had belonged to my grandmother.
Where else could you look up the number of groats to
a penny, or the heart rate of a stoat? (Non-Fiction.
Buy a 1930s second-hand edition if you can.)
N is for Andre Norton and E. Nesbit
Andre
Norton ran neck-and-neck with Heinlein as my favourite
SF author in my childhood. Interestingly, while I can re-read Heinlein, many of
the Norton novels do not fare so well. though she was
a great storyteller, her prose has dated more. But the good stuff is still good
stuff, and in that category I would include Sargasso
of Space, Plague Ship, Postmarked the Stars, Star Man’s Son, Star Guard,
Android at Arms, Beastmaster, Catseye
and Star Gate.
E.
Nesbit was for an early part of my reading experience the only fantasy author available
apart from Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Some of her books were read to me by my
parents and others I read when I was only six or seven. I recently re-read The
Enchanted Castle and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I’m going to dig out The Phoenix and the Carpet, Five Children and It and some of the
others.
O is for “Oh, dear, I’m running out of
space.” Slave to the word count, we shall skip to the next letter.
Otherwise I would have something to say about the poems of Wilfrid
Owen here.
P is for Philippa Pearce
To be
honest I haven’t re-read Tom’s
Midnight Garden since I was nine or ten and I can’t remember much
about it, other than that I really liked it at the time. This
points up the fact that I do re-read my favourite
books, usually once every five to ten years. It only works with really good
books, but with them you can always get something new, in addition to the
comfortable nostalgia of re-reading old favourites. I
haven’t re-read Tom’s
Midnight Garden because I don’t have a copy, a situation that I will
soon rectify. (Magical Time Travel/Historical/Real World Mixture)
Q is really quite a difficult letter to find an author for. I
shall have to embark upon a Quest to find one that I actually read when I was
younger.
R is for Arthur Ransome
Swallows
and Amazons Forever! I think that Swallows
and Amazons and its sequels can be classified almost as fantasy, in that
they are children’s adventure stories that couldn’t happen now and
probably couldn’t have happened even in the 1920s and 30s when they were
written. But then again, they are completely believable and, as a child, I so
wanted to be in one of them. Preferably as a Swallow, not an
Amazon. My all-time favourite is Winter Holiday. If
S is for Rosemary Sutcliff
The Eagle of the Ninth
introduced me to Roman history when I was nine or ten. It was a potent seed,
growing into a still-spreading tree of many branches, because I’m still
reading fiction and non-fiction about the Romans. The two sequels (though not
direct ones), The Silver Branch and The Lantern Bearers, were great
discoveries. I remember the excitement of finding out they existed and ordering
them in to my local children’s library. I like many other Sutcliff
historical novels, but my absolute favourite is not
one of the Roman novels, but a medieval one. It is Knight’s Fee, the story of a Saxon dog-boy and his friendship
with a young
T is for J.R.R. Tolkien and James Thurber
I’m
sure that everything that could be said about childhood infatuation with The Lord of The
Rings has been said. It is enough for me to add that my mother was reading
it when she was pregnant with me, dooming me to the life of a fantasy author.
And to add that I love and respect Tolkien’s work so much that while I
may try and imitate some of the epic feel and sweep of his work, I trust I will
have the courage to never steal his elves, dwarves, dark overlords and other
coin to debase for my own foul purposes. (The very pattern of High Fantasy)
James
Thurber must be mentioned for The
Thirteen Clocks. This is a deceptive book, for in addition to being hugely
entertaining, it is written in kind of hybrid prose-verse style which I suspect
many people may have attempted but been unable to bring off. The Golux and the Todal are
tremendous inventions, but it is the language which I love most. (The original
Twisted Fairy Tale)
U is for . . . uh . . . Uther Pendragon, which allows me to mention T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, though I think
the first part The Sword in The Stone is the best. Once again there are two
versions, the stand-alone book is not the same as the text as included as part
one of the entire sequence. (Fantasy with touches of history and whimsy)
V is for Jack Vance
My
father’s favourite science fiction and fantasy
writer was naturally going to get a head start with me. Jack Vance’s
prose style is instantly recogniseable, as is his
baroque and lustrous imagination, always coupled with a sly sense of humour and great erudition. My favourites
are the five ‘Demon Princes’ books, which despite the series name
are science fiction novels: the Demon Princes are criminals on an interstellar
scale. I also return often to the ‘Planet of Adventure’ series. Of
his fantasies, the later Lyonesse series are a
personal favourite, though I think only the first one
was published while I was still in my teens. Almost anything and everything by
Vance is worth reading. (Science Fiction and High Fantasy)
W is for Victoria Walker
It’s
also for P.G. Wodehouse (the Psmith and Uncle Fred
novels are my favourites, not the Jeeves ones), and the historical
fiction writer Ronald Welch, who would run second to Sutcliff as my childhood favourite in this genre. But space is of the essence, so I
will mention The Winter of Enchantment
by Victoria Walker. A charming forgotten fantasy from the late 1960s, the story
of a young boy in the 19th century who must take on a great
Enchanter to help a girl rescue herself from his clutches. Lots of people are
interested in republishing this work, but the author has proved difficult to
find, possibly by choice. It’s a pity, because the book should have
another run out on the bookshop shelves.
X is for the reader participation segment of this article. If
you can think of a writer whose surname starts with ‘X’ that I
might have read in the years roughly between 1970 (when I was seven) and 1983
(when I turned twenty) let me know.
Y is for Jane Yolen, whose books I
didn’t read when I was a child (because they weren’t yet written), but wish I had.
Z is for Roger Zelazny
Not just
because his name starts with ‘Z’. The first Amber series, beginning
with Nine Princes in Amber were
important reading for me as a teenager. I really, really liked the idea of a
central world that cast shadows of itself, our Earth
being but ones of these shadows. I also liked that Zelazny
didn’t explain stuff. There was a lot of action and the story kept moving
and you had to keep up, only after reading and re-reading the whole series did
I begin to understand what it was all about. The story was everything and it
was all there, only you might not get it the first time through.
Now you
know my ABC of books remembered. Or at least one version of it, for there are
many authors left out, and many more books that I could have remembered, should
have remembered, would have remembered . . .
[AG1]abstruse
or obtruse?