what was your gateway?

[ljgeoff]

james_nicoll post about Harry Potter as a gateway to other fantasy made think a bit about the first books I read --

I didn't really start reading a lot until I was around 14 -- we moved from Great Lakes (the Navy base north of Chicago) to Marquette (in the U.P.) the summer after I turned 13, and I started the first Star Trek Fan Club in the U.P. It was 1975.(1) I remember reading all of those Blish books.

That year, when I was in eighth grade, and I picked up one of the Heinlein YAs. Podkayne or The Rolling Stones. Then Asimov's I, Robot, and Bradbury's 451. I remember reading several of the Best Of series that Asimov edited, which lead to his magazine. (and Ellison, Sturgeon, Turtledove...) I didn't read my first fantasy until Bruce, my boyfriend at the time, gave me The Hobbit and Watership Down for my 15th birthday (for which I will always love him.) They, of course, lead to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which lead to McCaffrey's Pern books, and from there to Cherryh's Morgaine books, (and on to the Faded Sun and Chanur books), which in turn lead to Elizabeth Moon...

I'd read my sister's copy of The Harrad Experiment when I was 13, so Stranger In A Strange Land reinforced the already growing realization that monogamy didn't make much sense to me.

My mom loved to read about the Tudors, and any other English royals. She gave me Stewart's Merlin Trilogy, which, in some way, lead to De Lint. Somewhere along the way I read John Myers Myers' Silverlock and then on to Zelazny's Amber series...

Good grief, I better just stop now. Books, books , books...

So, what were your gateway books?

1) A visual: 14 yr old LJG doing Capt. Kirk in the Graveraet Middle School library with Jeff Marlow (who is currently the Commander of the NMU chapter of Starfleet) as Spock and Cliff Neisen as Scotty or Sulu (no one ever wanted to be McCoy. I don't know why.) "Scotty! You've got to give me more power!" "We canna do it, Captain!" "Spock! What do the sensors read?"

Comments

[lissamc.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, my first sci-fi book was 'The Island Stallion Races', I believe. One of the Walter Farley horse books, but he snuck in a space ship and some aliens. That was Soooooo Cool! :)

And for fantasy, I also picked up the Merlin trilogy from my mother. I still have a soft spot for the first two books. I think I need to hand those to my daughter...

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

I've read the Merlin books to the boys, but Luke was too young. Maybe this fall. I miss reading to the boys.

[ebenstone.livejournal.com]

It all started with Star Wars really and that led into LOTR followed by the original Dragonlance and RA Salvatore books. Really thought it was A Song of Ice And Fire in my late 20s that turned all around for my reading.

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

You might like Rothfuss' Name of the Wind.

[limnrix.livejournal.com]

My mother was an SF reader, so I was reading Madeleine L'Engle and Heinlein when I was 7. I haven't read fantasy for a few years, although the gateway of that for me was Narnia, then LOTR.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I think I had a few gateways. I hear that I didn't read THAT much until say, third grade or so. I could read and write very well very young, but I didn't choose to do it as a primary hobby until around that time. What turned me on to reading in that first bout was mostly Choose Your Own Adventure books. I couldn't get enough of them. I still sometimes dream about building up a collection of them, but then I remembered that I've started to do that a couple of times before then realized that we don't have the shelf space for it and it's kind of a non-productive use of my money. Still, I really love those books.

The big shift into reading "much more seriously", though, was about in 5th grade when I read The Hobbit, then Lord of the Rings, then, surprisingly, The Silmarillion. I finally stalled out on The Book of Lost Tales, I think. I'd even read J.R.R. Tolkien's Father Christmas Stories. :) Despite these having really turned me on to more serious reading, I actually don't like any of them anymore, at all.

And then the big moment when I realized that reading could be intellectually stimulating was probably Frank Herbert's "The Dosadi Experiment". I haven't re-read it since, but I've got every reason to believe that it's not an awesome book. However, I transitioned really rapidly from there into hard sci fi and existential literature and other things that were more than just manufactured-to-order fantasy "epics".

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

My very early books were The Three Investigators (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Investigators); man, I loved those books. And I read My Side of the Mountain over and over.

Despite these having really turned me on to more serious reading, I actually don't like any of them anymore, at all.

Have you enjoyed the movies?

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Not wildly. I liked the first one a fair bit, especially the extended version. I liked the second enough so-so, enough that I didn't mind seeing it in the theatres, but never wanted to see it again and especially not the extended version. The third one was icepick-through-the-brain time for me, and I kind of wish I hadn't bothered to see it in the theatres.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I'm remembering more as I ponder it -- I really, really liked A Wrinkle in Time, The Chrysalids and Z is for Zachariah, all of which I read quite young. And when I was really young, my aunt bought me a collection of The Great Brain books, which I really loved.

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

I got an anthology called Tomorrow's children with a bunch of short stories starring kids, and the authors in that book turned out to be gold when I looked up their novels. I still remember Some are born cats with a shiver.

I had read Chronicles of Narnia before I stumbled into The Dark is Rising, and that was my first peek into magical realism and religions older than Xianity.

And of course, the Heinlein juveniles rocked my world.

For a class project, we wrote letters to our favorite authors, and I was into John Christopher at the time. His personalized, hand-typed reply gave me the thrill of my young life. I'd still love to see a TV miniseries based on his Tripods trilogy.

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

Did that anthology have Bradbury's "The Veldt"? That one still haunts me. I never read the Narnia tales, nor The Dark is Rising.

Wow, I'm tired. *smooch*