December posting meme: Day 22

drazzi asked ‘When you were a child, say under 10, what were you obsessed/fannish over??’

Reading! I was a horse girl and did some riding which I was pretty obsessed with, and a couple of TV shows fired stuff in my brain in a kind of fannish way (especially Randall and Hopkirk, Deceased, for some reason) but definitely books is the main one.

Enid Blyton, Gillian Cross, Malorie Blackman, Jacqueline Wilson, Anthony Horowitz, Philip Pullman, C S Lewis, Tamora Pierce, Dick King Smith, Roald Dahl. I reread Malory Towers over and over, and Pig-Heart Boy, and the Demon Headmaster books. Philip Pullman! Certainly The Northern Lights, but also of course his more standard kids’ books - The Firework-Maker’s Daughter especially.

As a small bookworm I adored Matilda, as well as other Dahl, especially the underrated imo Danny The Champion of the World. Anne Fine (Charm School! The Angel of Nitshill Road! I already mentioned The Tulip Touch once this meme) and Eoin Coulfer. Terry Jones! OMG the sound I made when I found out that there was a new The Knight and The Squire book. Frances Hodgson Burnett was a favourite; I ended up doing my undergrad dissertation on The Secret Garden (and Colin as a Gothic Other). And Gobbolino The Witch’s Cat still has pride of place on my bookshelf.

And a lot of stuff that was slightly sideways on, lol, in the way that happens when you’re a kid discovering stuff basically by chance. Like I read King of Shadows by Susan Cooper over and over again without hearing about The Dark is Rising; Tamora Pierce was basically me rereading The Magic in the Weaving over and over for like 5 years before I found anything else she’d written; I had one beloved copy of Eva Ibbotson’s The Secret of Platform 13 and nothing else. Lois Lowry I loved but I didn’t have that many of her books, and I hadn’t even heard of The Giver, let alone read it, until I was at university - I think being British was a factor there, lol. To some degree I’m not sure it occurred to me to go hunting for authors’ other books unless they were in front of me in the library.

Which changed with Diana Wynne Jones. I found Charmed Life when I was 9 or 10 and reread it over and over that year; it’s still one of my favourite books ever. It has so many of the things she’s great at - fantastic magic that combines excitement with ordinariness so it feels real; fabulous, funny side-characters; a great twist; complex, messy family relationships, especially ones between siblings and cousins. It’s also got a fantastic ending, which isn’t guaranteed with DWJ, much as I love her. But omg when she has a great ending (The Lives of Christopher Chant, The Merlin Conspiracy, Year of the Griffin) she REALLY does.

I started hunting down more Diana Wynne Jones over the next few years; it’s what made me decide I was a fantasy fan, having been genre-agnostic. When I was 13 we went on a school trip to France and I discovered two new DWJs in the ferry bookshop (Homeward Bounders and The Power of Three) and promptly spent 25 of the 30 francs I’d been given for the week.

For all Amazon’s depredations… god I love buying books in the twenty-first century.

(More days available over here if you'd like to ask a question.)