Recently, for
my course, I got a book from Nathan’s Griffith university library called “A Passion for Narrative”, by Jack
Hodgins (1993 and 2001) and started to read it last week. I’d got that one
because the course said it was ‘required reading’: I didn’t think, before I
started it, that it would make sense to me. I read quite a few pages of the book,
and put it down for a rest, started thinking about books I used to read, and
drifted into the fantasy reading which enchanted me over many years ago.
As a child I
read Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree,
J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, C. S. Lewis’
Chronicles of Narnia and Lewis
Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland
When I was a young
adult I bought a trilogy called Lord of
the Rings, written by J. R. R. Tolkein, which still sits on my bookshelf –
one of my most favourites. Sometimes I wished I had bought an ‘original’,
because it was certainly valuable to me!
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the
Unbeliever by Stephen
R. Donaldson was the fantasy series I started reading in the early 1980s. I
bought a trilogy, which started with Lord
Foul's Bane (written in 1977), The Illearth
War (1978) and The Power that Preserves (1979). Later in the 1980s I
read The Second Chronicles of Thomas
Covenant as separate books, including The Wounded Land (written 1980),
The One Tree (1982) and White Gold Wielder (1983). I didn’t know
until today that a third series was published in the 2000s - I think I need to
get those four!
By the time I
finished Donaldson’s trilogy I was captivated with other fantasies. David
Eddings The Belgariad series had five
books that I loved. I soaked all that in and went onto his five books of The Mallorean. All those books vanished
off my shelves, yet I still have the three books of The Elenium.
I started
reading dragon novels: most of those in my collection were written by Anne
McCaffrey. Many dragon books exist now, and Eragon,
written by Christopher Paolini – a young writer when he started in his teenage
years – has become the era of ‘modern’ dragon writers, such as Elizabeth A.
Lynn’s Dragon’s Winter in 1998 and Dragon’s Treasure in 2003, and Naomi
Novik’s 2006 trilogy called Temeraire.
In the last
15 years I moved away from fiction and started collecting my non-fiction, which
takes up most of my shelves these days. However, recently I looked up fantasy
books in Google, wondering what I could be reading now... A friend of mine had
collected so many books from Terry Pratchett, but I hadn’t read any of them.
Marion Zimmer Bradley showed up: I had read one of her fantasies, such as The Mists of Avalon yet she wrote so
much that I haven’t read enough from her – maybe I should. Raymond E. Feist,
Stephen King and R. A. Salvatore ring a bell in my memory, but they were never
my favourites. King also wrote horrors along with his fantasies, but I stopped
reading him a while ago... horrors turn me off!
It’s nearly
five years since my stroke. Before that I read every day, nowadays I don’t, but
I have found fantasies which I remember
and which I know I loved. I don’t think I could re-read them, but I think I
need to go into a book store and see if I can find anything on my very long
list with a price I can afford!
Merry
Christmas to me...
And to you!
