Books, books, books

I like books.  I should get that out of the way before I say anything else, because that is the sum of where I am from.  I hesitate to say that as a child, I had books instead of friends - rather, I had books for friends.

My first true love is and always will be fantasy - I loved it before it Harry Potter made it popular.  Normal books for children never interested me.  They were all about kids with best friends and bullies and ambitions, things that were completely foreign to my life that made it impossible for me to connect with them.

Now that makes it sound like fantasy would be even less interesting to me, because I did not have magic powers and had never ridden a unicorn (neither of those things have changed, sadly).  Yet fantasy was in fact more relevant to my life because sometimes they were about people like me - the kids who had no friends and no life outside of reading books, until they were whisked away on a magical adventure.  Certainly my life did not fit the pattern of a typical kid's book; it was far too bland.  That only made it all the more likely that something extraordinary was about to happen.

Well, in a way it did.  If you count finding out that my life is in fact a YA novel of overdramatic college students.  I imagine that in the text, eighteen years of my life is summed up as "She had an unremarkable childhood."

But back to the topic at hand.

Though I have branched into other genres, a normal book for me to read is still something fantastic, and after a seven-or-eight-year hiatus, I have gone back to the children's books as well.  There's some good stuff there - while many writers of adult fantasy are locked into the Tolkien Paradigm, children's fantasy tends to be a bit more creative.

Still to come:  Tolkienism, Coming of Age, The Author of my Life, Books I Used to Like Before I Had Taste, Translation, Non-Fantasy Books I Like, Writing

PS. If you're curious, here are some of my favorite children's books, some of which I read as a child

The Seventh Tower - series, by Garth Nix.  Most people rave about his Sabriel, but I found Tower to have a far more engaging premise.

The Unicorn Chronicles - series by Bruce Coville.  I waited nine years for him to finish the third book, and it was worth it.  The fourth one, not quite as much, but still epic and mostly satisfying.  To me it is still the definitive unicorn text.

Diana Wynne Jones - author.  She has such a diverse range of series and stand-alones that I could not possibly pick the one I like best.  Dark Lord of Derkholm would be a good place to start.

Gregor the Overlander - by Suzanne Collins.  I started reading this series right before the Hunger Games made her popular.  It's good.  Dark.  The sort of thing that would have kept me in the kid's section if I had read it at a younger age.

Inkheart -by Cornelia Funke.  Second book okay.  Third book epic awesomeness.  First book, the book for people who like books.

I'd better stop before I feel compelled to add Artemis Fowl, Charlie Bone, Prydain, Warriors, Narnia...

Books, books, books.  So many books!