Ten books...

[lady_schrapnell]

sartorias just reposted an older post, which was a list of the ten books that influenced you the most. I read it this morning and naturally was tossing books around while showering (yes, metaphorically! Books in the bath are heaven, but even I'm not hard-core enough to try to read in the shower). Of course her list is far more interesting than mine, both because of her becoming a writer (and starting at such an amazingly early age) and because she seems to have that clear memory for childhood reading (not the books themselves - but also the whens and experience of reading) that I so admire in Francis Spufford. I have neither, but it's still fun to think about influential books, so here's a not-very-definitive list of my own, and I hope other people may read the link and be inspired to join in with their own...



1. The Water Babies, by Charles Kingsley - I had a very abridged version, about 50 pages long with illustrations on each page (though a good wodge of text on each too). (Couldn't find any images of books which looked right, sadly. If I ever get the scan mode on our printer working, I'll scan in a picture.) I always remembered having received this book as a prize for Sunday School attendance, but apparently I was mistaken - must have been equivalent edition of Don Quixote I'd confused with it. Anyway, I knew I'd liked it a lot, but it was only on very recently reading the real thing that I realised quite how vivid and even visceral my memories of it were. I didn't read my old copy to the girls, so it was all there from early childhood. Just looking at the pictures now makes me feel the same flutteriness of the tiny seaweed wings on the water babies shoulders and even the hard coldness of the pebble Mrs Be-done-by-as-you-did gives Tom instead of a sweet. I've no idea if my disparate loves for fantasy and 19th century social justice novels came from reading and loving this book, but it can't have hurt.

2. The Queen Elizabeth Story, by Rosemary Sutcliff - might not have been the first historical (historical fantasy - hey - even a very trendy cross-over novel!) I read and reread and loved, but it would have been one of the earlier ones. I lost this book and for years couldn't remember the title or author, though I very much wanted another copy. I finally found it in time to read to the girls while they were young enough to love it too. Though neither shared my annoyance at just missing out on the Midsummer's birthday which would have let me see the 'Pharisees', like Perdita. It's certainly not her best, but I think the deeply romantic view of the Elizabethan age stage I went through came from this one. And there are wonderful scenes too to balance the occasionally precious ones. (Many other Rosemary Sutcliffs followed and were life-long unto the second generation favourites as well, of course.)

3. To Kill a King, by Madeleine Polland/Towers in the Mist, by Elizabeth Goudge. Well, it's a tie. Both romantic historicals I loved as a teen, equally for the romantic and the historical - To Kill a King being set in Scotland and London in maybe the 11th century, (I did know this, and relearned it when we went to Edinburgh a few years ago), while Towers in the Mist is Elizabethan Oxford. I'm still a romantic sap, but the harsher historicals taught me a lot about accepting the realities of what it might really have been like to live in earlier times. No matter how beautiful the dresses. And despite it all, I can still feel my blood run mushy just at some of the names of flowers which feel Elizabethan. Eglantine, for example... (Still love historical fiction too!)

4. Pride and Prejudice. For many reasons. I was in my very early teens and going on a bus trip, so asked my mother what I might like from the books around. One of the few crystal clear memories I have around books is my mother pulling out P&P, and answering my question about it by telling me it was about five girls looking for husbands. Thank goodness I didn't say thanks but no thanks! I loved it of course, and never had the least feeling about its being a classic or a duty read or anything of the sort. And if I spent much of my later teens checking the Oxford Companion to English Literature for books which sounded good (meaning, I'm afraid, ones that ended happily), at least I was never scared off classics.

It gets double-influence because it was the first novel we studies on the first straight lit course I did with the OU, and I was very nervous. Although I'd loved English in school, I'd had decades to hear people moaning about the pleasure of reading being taken away by being forced to analyze books, and was still half afraid that studying Pride and Prejudice would spoil one of my favourite-ever books for me. I needn't have worried. And I've always had a warmer feeling for genre studies than many because I found it so interesting to realise the difference it made to read P&P as a romance and as a realist novel. (Okay, probably in part due to the fact that block of that course, 'The Realist Novel', was one of the best. Thanks, Dennis Walder!)

5. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, by Joan Aiken. Another one that was a childhood favourite read to the girls, but this was especially significant, I think. When OD was five, she read some scary book from school, which didn't look very good to me. She had that nervous 'not sure if I liked it or not' look, so I suggested that if she wanted a scary book, I'd read her Wolves. She loved it, and of course loved the later books in the series proper even more. I'd been reading to her (and YD once she'd joined us) every day for years and for long periods each day, but there's still something special about this. It was a book I'd loved that she responded to equally, but also it was a book from home (Dublin), not all that easily found in Tucson at the time. We added to the series when we started coming over here, and of course got the new ones as they were published later on. There were books we shared together she loved as much or even more, so I'm not sure how highly she'd rank this on her influential book list, but I bet it'd be on it somewhere. YD too.

6. Devil's Cub, by Georgette Heyer. Gulp. This is one of my out-of-step-with-the-world books. Because I'm a romantic sap, all right? And I like nothing better than a good romance. But rereading this, after loving it as a teen, made me realise how much I can't take a romance which doesn't fit in with my ideas of how people should treat each other. Unless it's farce and meant to be so - I can still enjoy The Grand Sophy for its comedy of manners and not that important romance, but Devil's Cub is dead to me now.

7. Beauty, by Robin McKinley. Bigger gulp, for the first huge, wildly out-of-step reaction. Only on the second reading, admittedly, when I was reading to OD. (First time I'd enjoyed it but not been pushed to own or reread - and was encouraged to do the reread by its being a Truth Universally Acknowledged that this book was wonderful and everyone loved it.) I don't really enjoy not sharing Everyone's opinions about the favourites (hmm, thinks v. quickly - they're almost all fantasy books, which I hadn't noticed before), but McKinley, Pullman, Dahl, Rowling ... I'd get lonely out here on these not-loving-them limbs if it weren't for the occasional company.

8. Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones. I've said it before, but what the heck... I could put The Lives of Christopher Chant as THE book which most literally changed my life, as it was the one by which I discovered DWJ, but for now I'll stick with Howl. Fun book - love it for itself, of course. Anyway, a mass of synchronicity piled up around a discussion we had on the DWJ list about eight years ago, related to why Sophie doesn't see her own gifts, which was very relevant to my feelings at the time, and indirectly led to my presence at an adult education fair, where I fell in with the Open University lot. Six years and a lot of essays later, I got a BA in English Lit from them. Also got a lot more grey hairs and definite exacerbation of the eczema, but I never for a second truly regretted that stop at that stall...

9. To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis. Not just for the real Lady Schrapnell! This book is just so perfect, but it was also my introduction to Connie Willis, who almost, almost brought me to believe that some writers I'm willing to follow even when they shock me senseless by going into tragedy. That said, I've read all her novels except Doomsday Book, but I'm sure I'll gather up the strength at some point. (And I do not recommend anyone read Lincoln's Dreams just at a time a beloved dog has to be put down...)

10. Calypso Dreaming, by Charles Butler. Hey - it probably wouldn't have made any real difference, but I do like being able to say with perfect honesty (and witnesses! even if they're my daughters) that I read it and thought it was excellent before I got to be friends with Charlie. He'd probably have been the first, if not the last, to doubt the complete sincerity of my response had it been the other way around.