Fantasy reading

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!