Every book now seems to be either part of some long complicated series with merchandise tie ins, films, cereals and videogames. Sure, there were series I read when I was little but, with the exception of high fantasy (which I got into when I was 10, with the purchase of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, first of the Dragonlance novels), most of the stuff I read was either stand alone or episodic.
What where my favourite books then?
I was particularly good at reading individual books that were part of longer series without actually realising that there was a lot more I could have read. I must have read and reread Swallows & Amazons a dozen times but it’s only in the past few years I found out there were actually 11 other books in the series. Part of me mourns the fact I didn’t know this when I was little. I haven’t read the remaining 11 as an adult because the magic was there when I was little. I also never realised there was a sequel to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen nor that Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising was the second book in a four book series. But what was apparent was that from an early age I was particularly predisposed to the fantastical. Some of it was no doubt down to my personal circumstances. I wasn’t a popular or confident little boy after we moved and books were a definite form of escapism.
Dragons of Autumn Twilight was a book that changed much for me, it was a gateway into adult fantasy literature, but I have to say I didn’t much enjoy it. Partly I was too young and it was too difficult for a 9 year old me to read. It’s 450 odd pages of what now would be seen as very clichéd fantasy and I struggled but wanted more. It was a couple of years later that I picked up a bright yellow copy of David Eddings Guardians of the West, the first book in his Mallorean series. This began a protracted period of reading his work, the preceding 5 book series called the Belgariad, the subsequent books in the Mallorean, the Sparhawk novels and various spin offs.
But by the time I was in secondary school (1987), Eddings had become, even to my youthful self, far too twee. It was around this period, my first year in secondary school, that I stopped reading kids books entirely (Eddings would probably be classified YA now if such a thing had existed back then). I got into arguments at school in English library lessons because I wouldn’t take kids books out of the school library; I’d bring in the adult books I had borrowed from the public library. The book that triggered it all was Stephen Donaldson’s lesser known fantasy series Mordant’s Need. The first of two volumes weighed in at over 650 pages and it was hard work but much more rewarding than Dragonlance. I ploughed through it, read his Thomas Covenant series and embarked on a phase of not reading anything that could be considered remotely short (aside from a Terry Pratchett addiction that started around the release of Sorcery!). It was complete luck that I picked it up in the public library, it wasn’t on a rack but instead on a display shelf so I decided on the spur of the moment to take a punt. That pretty much changed my reading habit for the rest of my life. I took a detour into horror, most notably Stephen King and Dean Koontz, who often trod the border line between horror and fantasy anyway, but my heart was with the big doorstop fantasy that I still read to this day. In fact I’m currently finishing the tenth and final book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen, a full 30 years after I read my first adult fantasy novel.