(no subject)

[the_rck]

I usually have a hard time coming up with anything when people ask me about books/movies/TV shows that had a strong impact on me, that actually changed me/made me who I am. Part of that is my age. Chances are good that anything with a real impact would be something I ran into before age 12, and a lot of stuff is a blur with most things being memorable in tiny bits. Part of that is that, my mother banned 90% of all TV. I watched PBS, seasonal specials (mostly around Christmas), and not much else, and I read books, so very, very many books. My father took me to movies, but those were things he wanted to see that mostly didn't make positive impressions on me.

I remember that HM Hoover's The Treasures of Morrow was the first book I read that made me realize that looking for another book by the same author might be a fruitful strategy. My school only had Treasures, but I could tell, in reading it, that there was obviously a previous book (the dust jacket and interior of the book never mentioned the other book's name or existence). Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffrey led me from the children's room at the public library to the adult section. The works of Diana Wynne Jones were enticing enough for me to learn how to use the interlibrary loan system (pre-computer) in high school.

But none of those changed who I was or what I thought was important for me to be. They just enlarged my scope in terms of being able to look for things to read.

Today, I read a blog post that asked who was the first character that people had looked up to/wanted to emulate. I couldn't come up with anyone at first. Then I remembered talking about Watership Down yesterday and went, 'Oh, of course!' because it really has to have been Hazel.

I was eight or nine. Watership Down was the book that my father picked to read to me and my sister after we finished The Return of the King. We got partway through, and then I just had to finish it myself. That was the end of him reading to us. Too slow.

For The Lord of the Rings, I had mostly really liked Sam Gamgee. Merry and Pippin didn't start interesting me until the Scouring of the Shire, and at that age, Frodo didn't make any sense to me at all. Sam could have been the right character for me if the books had arrived in my life slightly later, but really, I think Hazel's a better role model. Sam is crushingly practical, but he's also kind of narrowly focused in a way that Hazel isn't and can't be.

Comments

[lunabee34]

I think Samwise Gamgee and Hazel-rah make excellent role models.

[the_rck]

I just kind of wish I could have found a human girl or woman who fit, but it was the 1970s. I didn't want to be Cherry Ames or Nancy Drew. Cherry got a future, but she gave up a lot of normal for it (not much referenced in the books, but I noticed). Nancy just got an eternal now with money to make sure mundane things didn't bother her.

Maybe, tomorrow, I'll see what I still own from that time. There must have been some worthwhile adult women.

Still Hazel showed me persistence and looking at things from different angles when the straight approach wouldn't work. I was the oldest child, and my mother ran an in home daycare. I had the idea of having to be responsible for the other kids early on.

[lunabee34]

I didn't have a lot of human girls I wanted to be as a kid either. I'm sorry to say that I was not a very enlightened kiddo and spent most of my childhood pretending to be Luke Skywalker (instead of Leia) or Worf (instead of Tasha Yar).

[the_rck]

I'm really glad that there are more varied female characters available for kids today. Cordelia wants at least two female characters in the core group of characters and prefers more.

[lunabee34]

Emma is the same way. Tolkien bores her to tears for that reason.

[laurajv]

I love Hazel. He’s amazing. (I also love Bigwig, but for different reasons.)

[the_rck]

I love Bigwig, too, but it never occurred to me that I could be him. I was never going to be an athlete or even remotely physically intimidating. But being Hazel actually seemed within possibility if I worked at it.

Bigwig's physical abilities weren't actually his greatest strength, though. He was good at judging who to rely on for things outside his area of expertise. He didn't assume that being big and strong made him automatically right about everything, and he listened even to truths he didn't want to hear.

I always believe that Bigwig and Hazel both ended up in the same place, post-canon, because they were both extraordinary.

[fred_mouse]

I suspect that the Wombles were an early formative experience for me, but I don't remember reading them for the first time.

[the_rck]

I'm not familiar with the Wombles. Are they a book series or TV or movies or something else entirely?

I expect that all of us have formative stuff that is that basic.

[fred_mouse]

The Wombles of Wimbledon Common were a set of non-human sentient bipedal mammals who live underground and collect the things that humans leave behind, and make things out of them. I read the children's books by Elizabeth Beresford, but there was also a television show, which I've never seen. I can, however, sing snatches of the theme tune.

I wandered off to find a useful summary, and discovered that there is a Wombles Wiki, but sadly it has been hacked and is not suitable for linking.

[chelseagirl]

Hah! And I had a copy of Children of Morrow that my aunt, who worked for the publisher, had given me. I didn't know until I was an adult that there was a sequel, but I read the book over and over.

[the_rck]

I think that Hoover's books had more of a role in making me a reader of SF than Andre Norton's did. The public library had more Norton, and I read it all, but Hoover had female characters interacting with other female characters, so those were the books I reread more.

[fred_mouse]

I think that I can also say the same. I've picked up a lot of Hoover in ex-library book sales, but never been all that motivated with Norton. Ditto Monica Hughes.

[the_rck]

A bunch of Hoover's books came out in paperback when I was in middle school and high school (ages 12-18), so those are the editions I bought. My favorites were The Rains of Eridan and The Lost Star. I can't tell, at this point, if they're more the sort of thing I like or if I just happened to read them at exactly the right point in my life for me to love them.

Hoover's interesting because her settings are so often dystopic without the characters realizing that they are. The revolutions tend to be personal rather than societal (though they can be the latter sometimes).

[summerstorm]

I think my mom still doesn't understand how she raised a child who loved reading so, so much and still falls asleep within three pages of Lord of the Rings, which she loves. And doesn't like space, which she also loves.

Sometimes I wish I'd started logging what I read when I was a child instead of when I was like, 15, because I forget so much.

[the_rck]

One of the things I had to accept with my daughter is that she's unwilling to try books that I recommend. Either they look too old/dirty or they just have to be boring because I'm her mother.

I think that people are very individual in terms of what appeals to us. When I talk about books and such, I try to bear in mind my reaction won't be the same as that of many other people.

[summerstorm]

Yeah, I actually kind of had to accept that with my mother -- I'm much more fannish than she is, even when it comes to discussing books, so I was disappointed when I realized we had wildly different priorities. I like simple setups and a focus on character dynamics, and she loves epic world-building and plot. Every now and then we hit something we both like (usually procedurals on TV), but it's rare.

[the_rck]

That kind of mismatch is hard. I had a comment on a WIP recently that I looked at and realized that the reader and I had that degree of mismatch. They were giving me feedback on the fic I could have written if I was interested in the same things they were, and I was looking at the comment with a bit of horrified 'But-- That wouldn't be fun to write!'

Writing for exchanges has an added layer of challenge in terms of trying to find an intersection between what I can write, what I want to write, and what the recipient will enjoy.

[lady_of_mists]

I had a lot of weird references. I liked Nancy Drew (mainly because I was exploring the mystery genre and loved the look of the yellow backed books in my bookshelf). I wanted to be old enough to drive places and discover the answers to mysteries. I loved the descriptions of places that I would not have otherwise gone (like Hawaii or Louisiana).

Star Trek (ToS) -- I wanted to be a Vulcan so badly when I was in fifth/sixth grade. I wrote bad fanfiction with the kids that I babysat for, printed it out on the dot-matrix printer, and decided that I wanted to be the science officer or an astronaut. Much later, I discovered my love for Dr. McCoy.

Anne of Green Gables -- I wanted to be a writer like Anne. :) I still do. She gave me the impression of someone who was true to herself and her faith who loved writing, her family, and her community. Her optimism was always cheering to me.

I first got into fantasy with the Valdemar novels -- The Arrows of the Queen series. I loved Talia beyond all belief. I've re-read and I'm no longer as interested in her as I am some of the supporting characters.

The X-Files -- Hey, can I be an FBI agent/forensic scientist with flaming red hair? Um, yes, please. How many of us tried to dye their hair to look like a T.V. character? Be honest! ;)

Elizabeth Bennet -- I love Lizzy and her optimism, spirit, and willingness to stand up for her opinion. I'm sure that Austen as her creator had none of those qualities, right? (JK)

[the_rck]

My relationship with Star Trek is odd because my timing was off. I knew TOS mainly through the Blish adaptations and the handful of really bonkers novels that came out in the 70s. I'd seen half of three different episodes while visiting my grandparents and snagged the adaptations when I found them on my 7th grade English teacher's shelf because I really wanted to know how one particular episode ended. I read everything because I didn't find the right episode (I had no idea what it was called) in the first few books.

I think I watched some of the cartoon when it was airing, but after all of these years, it's hard to be sure. NG started airing while I was an undergraduate, and I didn't have television access during most of its run.

I've just spent a lot of my life with friends (and a husband) who love ST, so I've gotten a lot by osmosis.

I have to confess to not having read Anne of Green Gables. I think I may have come upon the book at the wrong times because I know I started reading it more than once.

Scott and I tried The X-Files about four times. Each time we tuned it, we got a gross out episode, so we gave up.

[evalerie]

I too missed "Anne of Green Gables" as a kid. I finally read it as an audiobook just a few years ago. Librivox has a nice (free!) audiobook version available for downloading.

I don't think childhood me would have liked that book, because the main character was too different from me and had different flaws than I did, the same as Meg in "A Wrinkle In Time." But as an adult I thought the book was neat. I keep meaning to go back and listen to the rest of the series and find out about what happens next.

Hey wait, I thought your Cordelia was partly named for the one in "Anne of Green Gables," and I always thought that was a neat pun (since that Anne is named Anne and she wishes that she was named Cordelia, and you're Anne and you named your daughter Cordelia). How can this not be true??? I am so confused!

[the_rck]

Cordelia's named for one of my great-grandmothers, actually. We only looked at family names when we were trying to decide. It seemed like a reasonable way to have a varied but limited set. My mother was doing genealogy then, so we could go back many generations.

[lady_of_mists]

:grins: It kind of skipped a generation in my family. My grandpa loved TOS. I caught Next Gen on the first run, got a little interested in that, saw the movies, and was hooked at the point of Star Trek II.

The Anne books were/are so interesting to me. It has a lovely description of Prince Edward Island and just kind of a sweet coming of age story of a spunky orphan adopted by her family. We watched the original Wonderworks series (with a young Megan Follows), but I can't remember if I saw that or mom bought me the book first.

Oh, wow, yeah -- X-Files had some pretty bad gross-out stuff. I always liked the ones about the psychic phenomena or the one about the haunted house was also lovely. I couldn't tell you which episodes were better than others -- just that I loved the intrigue. This went along with my obsession about Silence of the Lambs too, I'm sure.

[evalerie]

Me too -- It was Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong and Dragonsinger that led me out of the kids' section, to go look for her books in the grownup section. That opened doors to all kinds of amazingness.

Earlier than that, I remember when it finally dawned on me that if I liked one book by an author I would probably like others by the same author, but recently, frustratingly, I have forgotten which author that was. Most likely either Joan Aiken or Madeline L'Engle. Probably Aiken, because as a kid I made a project of working my way through the entire kids' fiction section, from A to Z, and Aiken is near the beginning of the alphabet. Also, as a kid I didn't like "A Wrinkle In Time," though later on in my project I remember gobbling up everything the library had by Madeline L'Engle and being pleased by how she had about five different serieses where the characters all met each other in her book "The Arm Of The Starfish." :) But that probably means that my younger self wasn't binging on Madeline L'Engle's books.

[the_rck]

I can't remember why I didn't bond with A Wrinkle in Time, but I recall that I didn't. I might have read A Wind in the Door first and had that change my approach to the first book when I finally got to it. That happened to me with a lot of series in the 70s and 80s.

Joan Aiken's books are just plain weird. Re-reading them now, I find myself surprised by how short they are and how straightforward. Having everything a few degrees off from my perception of reality was enough to make younger me assume vast complications.

Though I don't know that that was Aiken so much as it being how I read things. When I was eight or nine, there was so much of the world that was completely unknown to me and that might contain anything at all, so I just assumed that simple books had the same depths as the world around me did. Really complicated books tended to bewilder me at that age.

[evalerie]

When I was a kid, it really badly bothered me that Meg in "A Wrinkle In Time" had flaws, plus she had different flaws from me and I didn't yet have the empathy to understand why she wouldn't (couldn't!) just decide to stop having them, so I thought she was annoying. Plus, when I was a kid, everybody else who did a book report almost always chose that book, so I got tired of hearing about it.

As an adult I love Meg and all of her flaws, but for me I needed to have that adult's perspective before I really liked the book.

[lady_of_mists]

I think I liked A Wrinkle in Time, but when I tried to read the next book or two in the series, none of them worked for me. I think that I was trying way too hard to understand the science aspect of the fiction in some ways. :)

[the_rck]

I never really thought I was reading anything with scientific underpinnings (which is one of the reasons I think I read the second book first. That one's much more obviously Not Science). I liked A Swiftly Tilting Planet because I liked the invocation poem a lot, not so much as poetry but as ritual of power.