Reading Provenance
Feb. 13th, 2006 04:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
leahbobetSpurred by a chatroom conversation on this interesting discussion from Matthew Cheney, I'm interested in your provenance as a reader. What did you start out reading? Which of those authors did you keep, and which discard? Which authors are you reading now?
And, well...why?
I'll start. (and so has![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sosostris2012, here)
Five Authors I Read -- Grade School and Younger
C.S. Lewis -- The Narnia series, and when I was a little older, his more Wellesian science fiction. What captured my imagination here? I'm not entirely sure anymore: maybe it's the appeal inherent in telling shy little kids they are heroes somewhere -- all one has to do is walk through the right wardrobe door, or look in a certain slant of light... (kept)
Susan Cooper -- ...or perhaps it's in your own world, through your own door, and the time hasn't yet come. This was my introduction to the whole concept of Celtic-based fantasy. I've wearied of that genre, of plot-coupon fantasy in general, but this series was the first exposure to that and from it I understand the appeal. There's a comfort in structure, in knowing what one has to do; there's a delight in watching a dance unfold this way. (dropped)
Lloyd Alexander -- and this followed the other two almost like a conversation. The Assistant Pig-Keeper and his friends were fallible people: they were regular people, and they screwed up, and they paid for those screwups in their way. They fought. *g* But they still got the job done. One of the most hurtful and frightening thoughts in my life is still that I might find my avocation, like Taran Wanderer, and have to walk because I simply don't have the chops. (kept)
Patricia McKillip -- particularly the Riddle-Master books, which gave me my first taste of completely second-world fantasy, and my first exposure to some seriously proactive female characters. (kept)
Madeleine L'Engle -- The first quasi-science-fiction I picked up, and yes, it's very quasi -- more science fantasy. The ways the worlds tied together, characters migrated between two cosmologies that were pretty obviously very seperate, and the general structural neatness kept me rearranging these constantly, trying to figure out in what way the pieces of this huge story really went... (kept)
Tried and dropped: all kinds of authors in this period, including Judy Blume, the requisite Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Babysitters' Club books, Scott O'Dell, and Piers Anthony.
Tried and kept: Meredith Ann Pierce, Kenneth Oppel, George MacDonald (The Princess and the Goblin), and all sorts of stand-alone little books like Bridge to Terabithia, Tuck Everlasting, The Seventh Princess, The Snow Queen, The Phantom Tollboth, and From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the book that makes me still want to run away from home and live in the ROM.
Five Authors I Read -- Grade School/Junior High
David Eddings -- pretty much every iteration of the same story, for the same comfort reasons as the Cooper. It was nice that while tromping around the map, the characters had actual relationships and dynamics: these could be read as character studies then, if you ignored all the godslaying. (dropped eventually)
Francesca Lia Block -- bought because of a book review in the one teen magazine that actually reviewed books, and enjoyed enough to collect the rest. These were a first exposure to both the idea of magical realism and certain brands of feminism: looking back, I think they influenced my way of thinking and writing more than I thought they had. I enjoyed the simplicity-complexity of these books, and then ultimately got angry because they were all saying the same thing -- they had ceased to give me new truths. (kept, if casually -- I still did get new editions of the Weetzie Bat books when they came out year before last)
Gael Baudino -- pure elfy New Age elfness. *g* Liked the jumps in historical era, liked the fact that they all really centred around identity at the end of the day, around finding your place, but again, got frustrated with the repetitive nature of the stories. (dropped)
Ru Emerson -- Girl-Is-Warped-Into-Fantasy-World-fantasy, but...they run out of coffee! And aspirin! And one character sets up a trade multinational by replicating jeans! (dropped, but only because there doesn't seem to have been a new original fiction release here in about 10 years)
Poppy Z. Brite -- yes, that young. My parents were not the most discriminate in monitoring my reading. It sounds almost preachy, but these are the books that impressed into my 12-year-old head that gay people were just regular people doing their regular things. Even when they were vampires. Also, gave me a taste for rich, rich prose and how delicious that can be; there's bits of these books in my prose style still. (kept -- reading and enjoying the Rickey and G-man books, even if I miss the chocolate mousse prose)
Tried and dropped: Stephen R. Lawhead, Anne Kelleher Bush, Anne McCaffrey (the Rowan books), lots of others I just can't remember.
Tried and kept: Michael Stackpole, Margaret Atwood (the poetry), Douglas Adams, Louise Cooper, WIlliam Goldman, Eva Ibbotson, Sherryl Jordan, Julia Alvarez.
Five Authors I Read -- High School
Robert Jordan -- I read through five books just to get to the igloo sex, so I could find out what everyone else was snickering about. Quit around book eight, when I figured out nothing had happened in 1000 pages or more; this is around when I contracted my Deathly Allergy to high fantasy, which is just carefully wearing off now. (dropped. off a cliff.)
Douglas Coupland -- Girlfriend in a Coma is sort of a watershed revelation book for me: right day, right place, right girl, right book. From there I went back and forward, and have read all of them except, ironically, Generation X.cpolk has opined that it's a Canadian Thing. (kept)
Ray Bradbury -- In seventh grade, we were given "All Summer in a Day" to read and do an assignment on. Around ninth grade is when I started hunting down all the Bradbury I could find, in search of that elusive story whose title I didn't remember but which haunted me at night. I read through most of his body of work in the process. I found it when I was 19 or 20, and promptly cried for joy. (kept)
Sharon Shinn -- Again with the science fantasy, although the book I started with here was a fairytale -- The Shape-Changer's Wife -- which is a book perfect for me in every way. Shinn I've kept despite her books doing something that make me inexplicably angry: I figure the ending, like clockwork, between 1/4 and 1/3 of the way through. Then I pray the rest of the way that it'll surprise me. Then it doesn't and I get mad and sad and bad and want to move to Australia. Yet I still read them. (kept, although Samaria is dropped)
Ursula K. Le Guin -- I wish I could say it was the ethnicity of the characters that struck me when I first picked up A Wizard of Earthsea, but it wasn't -- I generally don't envisage a character from the outside, anyway. It was more the atmosphere, the way the roads and walls and places felt, not tinged by formula and convention but a certain reality. I have wanted to read more of her backlist for years, and I never have time. (kept. one of these days, I swear.)
Tried and dropped: all the Star Wars Expanded Universe books, Terry Pratchett (just doesn't do it for me), Arthuriana (got sick of it), Canlit on general principles unless it's really good.
Tried and kept: a lot of classics and more literary authors, including Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Jane Austen, Tennessee Williams, H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, George Orwell, A.S. Byatt, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Five Authors I Read -- Present Day
Charles Stross -- I will read anything this man writes. Why? Sharp, snappy, grounded prose and dialogue, tension, motion, a plethora of ideas, and my sense of humour. (provenance: I think elements of the Emerson and Coupland here, especially in the Family Trade series)
Peter S. Beagle -- Everything said here is still true. A lot of the authors I ditched over the years...we grew apart. They weren't talking to me anymore, or I was listening for different things. Beagle and I are still in the same conversation, and I think we always will be.
Karen Traviss -- I just loff this series with the loff. It has to do with the synthesis of ideas, the precarious politics, and the characters I'm rather fond of. Just the loff. :)
Peter Watts -- Dark. And rigorously logical, and dark. And prose so sharp it could slit your wrist. And true, in its ways. I'm still mad at Lenie Clarke for being real in some respects and not adhering to narrative convention.
Robin McKinley -- They're slow in coming out, but worth the wait: less retold fairy tales than reimagined, and there's always something to pull from them, something being said. Not in the trite way. Something real and important.
What's on my To-Read Shelf Right Now
Patricia McKillip, Harrowing the Dragon and the new hardcover, Solstice Wood.
Jo Walton, Farthing
Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora (halfway through)
Ann Halam, Siberia
Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives
Kristine Smith, Code of Conduct
Garth Nix, Sabriel
Connie Willis, Fire Watch
Tobias Buckell, Crystal Rain
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
There are patterns here. At some point around high school, my reading window broadened, I jettisoned a bunch of things I'd been reading since early childhood, and I settled comfortably into a steady diet of fairy tales and hard science fiction. And there are more common elements to those two genres than you'd think: they're both very concerned with the application of fictional (dare I say allegorical, sometimes?) concept to real life, they're both quite grim at times, and they're both...highly structured without being formulaic. They also both have enough of a tradition behind them that they can be subverted within their own text, which is harder to do with high fantasy.
If this partial list can be believed, I read for structure. I read for character, and I read for prose style. I read to know things I didn't before about people and how we work, and I read for shiny ideas, and sensawunda, and rigorous plot logic, and thematic resonance. None of these things are mutually exclusive.
How were your reading habits formed? When? What results in your own data surprised you?
Consider yourselves all tagged.
And, well...why?
I'll start. (and so has
sosostris2012, here)Five Authors I Read -- Grade School and Younger
C.S. Lewis -- The Narnia series, and when I was a little older, his more Wellesian science fiction. What captured my imagination here? I'm not entirely sure anymore: maybe it's the appeal inherent in telling shy little kids they are heroes somewhere -- all one has to do is walk through the right wardrobe door, or look in a certain slant of light... (kept)
Susan Cooper -- ...or perhaps it's in your own world, through your own door, and the time hasn't yet come. This was my introduction to the whole concept of Celtic-based fantasy. I've wearied of that genre, of plot-coupon fantasy in general, but this series was the first exposure to that and from it I understand the appeal. There's a comfort in structure, in knowing what one has to do; there's a delight in watching a dance unfold this way. (dropped)
Lloyd Alexander -- and this followed the other two almost like a conversation. The Assistant Pig-Keeper and his friends were fallible people: they were regular people, and they screwed up, and they paid for those screwups in their way. They fought. *g* But they still got the job done. One of the most hurtful and frightening thoughts in my life is still that I might find my avocation, like Taran Wanderer, and have to walk because I simply don't have the chops. (kept)
Patricia McKillip -- particularly the Riddle-Master books, which gave me my first taste of completely second-world fantasy, and my first exposure to some seriously proactive female characters. (kept)
Madeleine L'Engle -- The first quasi-science-fiction I picked up, and yes, it's very quasi -- more science fantasy. The ways the worlds tied together, characters migrated between two cosmologies that were pretty obviously very seperate, and the general structural neatness kept me rearranging these constantly, trying to figure out in what way the pieces of this huge story really went... (kept)
Tried and dropped: all kinds of authors in this period, including Judy Blume, the requisite Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Babysitters' Club books, Scott O'Dell, and Piers Anthony.
Tried and kept: Meredith Ann Pierce, Kenneth Oppel, George MacDonald (The Princess and the Goblin), and all sorts of stand-alone little books like Bridge to Terabithia, Tuck Everlasting, The Seventh Princess, The Snow Queen, The Phantom Tollboth, and From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the book that makes me still want to run away from home and live in the ROM.
Five Authors I Read -- Grade School/Junior High
David Eddings -- pretty much every iteration of the same story, for the same comfort reasons as the Cooper. It was nice that while tromping around the map, the characters had actual relationships and dynamics: these could be read as character studies then, if you ignored all the godslaying. (dropped eventually)
Francesca Lia Block -- bought because of a book review in the one teen magazine that actually reviewed books, and enjoyed enough to collect the rest. These were a first exposure to both the idea of magical realism and certain brands of feminism: looking back, I think they influenced my way of thinking and writing more than I thought they had. I enjoyed the simplicity-complexity of these books, and then ultimately got angry because they were all saying the same thing -- they had ceased to give me new truths. (kept, if casually -- I still did get new editions of the Weetzie Bat books when they came out year before last)
Gael Baudino -- pure elfy New Age elfness. *g* Liked the jumps in historical era, liked the fact that they all really centred around identity at the end of the day, around finding your place, but again, got frustrated with the repetitive nature of the stories. (dropped)
Ru Emerson -- Girl-Is-Warped-Into-Fantasy-World-fantasy, but...they run out of coffee! And aspirin! And one character sets up a trade multinational by replicating jeans! (dropped, but only because there doesn't seem to have been a new original fiction release here in about 10 years)
Poppy Z. Brite -- yes, that young. My parents were not the most discriminate in monitoring my reading. It sounds almost preachy, but these are the books that impressed into my 12-year-old head that gay people were just regular people doing their regular things. Even when they were vampires. Also, gave me a taste for rich, rich prose and how delicious that can be; there's bits of these books in my prose style still. (kept -- reading and enjoying the Rickey and G-man books, even if I miss the chocolate mousse prose)
Tried and dropped: Stephen R. Lawhead, Anne Kelleher Bush, Anne McCaffrey (the Rowan books), lots of others I just can't remember.
Tried and kept: Michael Stackpole, Margaret Atwood (the poetry), Douglas Adams, Louise Cooper, WIlliam Goldman, Eva Ibbotson, Sherryl Jordan, Julia Alvarez.
Five Authors I Read -- High School
Robert Jordan -- I read through five books just to get to the igloo sex, so I could find out what everyone else was snickering about. Quit around book eight, when I figured out nothing had happened in 1000 pages or more; this is around when I contracted my Deathly Allergy to high fantasy, which is just carefully wearing off now. (dropped. off a cliff.)
Douglas Coupland -- Girlfriend in a Coma is sort of a watershed revelation book for me: right day, right place, right girl, right book. From there I went back and forward, and have read all of them except, ironically, Generation X.
cpolk has opined that it's a Canadian Thing. (kept)Ray Bradbury -- In seventh grade, we were given "All Summer in a Day" to read and do an assignment on. Around ninth grade is when I started hunting down all the Bradbury I could find, in search of that elusive story whose title I didn't remember but which haunted me at night. I read through most of his body of work in the process. I found it when I was 19 or 20, and promptly cried for joy. (kept)
Sharon Shinn -- Again with the science fantasy, although the book I started with here was a fairytale -- The Shape-Changer's Wife -- which is a book perfect for me in every way. Shinn I've kept despite her books doing something that make me inexplicably angry: I figure the ending, like clockwork, between 1/4 and 1/3 of the way through. Then I pray the rest of the way that it'll surprise me. Then it doesn't and I get mad and sad and bad and want to move to Australia. Yet I still read them. (kept, although Samaria is dropped)
Ursula K. Le Guin -- I wish I could say it was the ethnicity of the characters that struck me when I first picked up A Wizard of Earthsea, but it wasn't -- I generally don't envisage a character from the outside, anyway. It was more the atmosphere, the way the roads and walls and places felt, not tinged by formula and convention but a certain reality. I have wanted to read more of her backlist for years, and I never have time. (kept. one of these days, I swear.)
Tried and dropped: all the Star Wars Expanded Universe books, Terry Pratchett (just doesn't do it for me), Arthuriana (got sick of it), Canlit on general principles unless it's really good.
Tried and kept: a lot of classics and more literary authors, including Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Jane Austen, Tennessee Williams, H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, George Orwell, A.S. Byatt, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Five Authors I Read -- Present Day
Charles Stross -- I will read anything this man writes. Why? Sharp, snappy, grounded prose and dialogue, tension, motion, a plethora of ideas, and my sense of humour. (provenance: I think elements of the Emerson and Coupland here, especially in the Family Trade series)
Peter S. Beagle -- Everything said here is still true. A lot of the authors I ditched over the years...we grew apart. They weren't talking to me anymore, or I was listening for different things. Beagle and I are still in the same conversation, and I think we always will be.
Karen Traviss -- I just loff this series with the loff. It has to do with the synthesis of ideas, the precarious politics, and the characters I'm rather fond of. Just the loff. :)
Peter Watts -- Dark. And rigorously logical, and dark. And prose so sharp it could slit your wrist. And true, in its ways. I'm still mad at Lenie Clarke for being real in some respects and not adhering to narrative convention.
Robin McKinley -- They're slow in coming out, but worth the wait: less retold fairy tales than reimagined, and there's always something to pull from them, something being said. Not in the trite way. Something real and important.
What's on my To-Read Shelf Right Now
Patricia McKillip, Harrowing the Dragon and the new hardcover, Solstice Wood.
Jo Walton, Farthing
Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora (halfway through)
Ann Halam, Siberia
Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives
Kristine Smith, Code of Conduct
Garth Nix, Sabriel
Connie Willis, Fire Watch
Tobias Buckell, Crystal Rain
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
There are patterns here. At some point around high school, my reading window broadened, I jettisoned a bunch of things I'd been reading since early childhood, and I settled comfortably into a steady diet of fairy tales and hard science fiction. And there are more common elements to those two genres than you'd think: they're both very concerned with the application of fictional (dare I say allegorical, sometimes?) concept to real life, they're both quite grim at times, and they're both...highly structured without being formulaic. They also both have enough of a tradition behind them that they can be subverted within their own text, which is harder to do with high fantasy.
If this partial list can be believed, I read for structure. I read for character, and I read for prose style. I read to know things I didn't before about people and how we work, and I read for shiny ideas, and sensawunda, and rigorous plot logic, and thematic resonance. None of these things are mutually exclusive.
How were your reading habits formed? When? What results in your own data surprised you?
Consider yourselves all tagged.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-02-13 11:12 pm (UTC)Don't remember when I started reading. Haven't stopped yet. Was reading (among others) Narnia at 8ish, H. M. Hoover at 11ish, any science fiction I could lay my hands on at 14ish... Have dropped pretty much nothing, but keep on adding. Spec-fic, whodunnits, kidlit, non-fic, thrillers, chick-lit...it's all grist to my mill. (Yesterday I surprised myself by reading two trashy historical romances, and enjoying (parts of) them.)
Give me either characters I can give a shit about, or setting details to make me love (or preferably, both), and I will forgive an awful lot of else.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-13 11:50 pm (UTC)What a cool meme. Thx for sharing.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 03:05 am (UTC)I'm sure I didn't get the full sense of a lot of what I read before age 13 or so -- there's a lot of age and experience-related subtext that goes on in a book -- but I was capable of reading it for that surface layer, at least. And it means that going back to those books and finding more, deeper, is a delight and a pleasure I'll be able to spin out for a long, long time. :)