(no subject)

[cupcake_goth]

Because I saw a related post scroll by on Pillowfort:

What are the building blocks of your taste in genre fiction? (Genre fiction defined as having a separate section in a chain bookstore - sci-fi/fantasy, horror, romance, and so on.)

Mine are pretty obvious: not only did I read Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat in my teen years, but I read V.C. Andrews books pretty young, too.

While Something Wicked This Way Comes is part of my soul, it did not, er, influence my id the way stories about vampires and horrible people with horrible family secrets did.

Comments

[jadislefeu]

I think The Hero and the Crown, Ronia, the Robber's Daughter, and the Enchanted Forest Chronicles were the most formative of my tastes in media (in that I love vaguely pseudo-medieval second world fantasy with fairy tale elements and children living alone in the wilderness happily best of all the things). And maybe The Martian Chronicles for scifi--there's really no one like Bradbury, and I definitely prefer my scifi more fantastical and less scientific on the occasions when I read it.

[ignotussomnium]

Enchanted Forest Chronicles was amazing. It absolutely got me into reading more fantasy, and more dragon books. Some of it went over my head when I was ten, but the feel of it was absolutely perfect.

[jadislefeu]

I was so devoted to those books as a kid. I still love them, though I wince a little now at some of the Not Like Other Girls stuff--but it was important to me as a tiny bookish tomboy!

I'm pretty sure it's Cimorene and Aerin's fault that I've been growing out my hair since I was five, also.

[ignotussomnium]

Yeah, the "not like other girls" stuff is kind of annoying. But at that point it was what I needed to explain why I was different, before I understood that agender was a thing. It's definitely not perfect, but it holds a special place in my heart.

[sara]

Swords, horses, girls dressing up as boys, revolutionaries, boats.

When I was very small: C.S. Lewis, Robin McKinley, Ursula K. LeGuin, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Madeleine L'Engle, and that whole series of biographies of figures from US history as children (probably 90% fiction but six-year-old me didn't know that). Slightly bigger: Roger Zelazny and Patricia McKillip.

[musyc]

I was a pre-teen in the mid 80s, so smack-dab in the middle of the whole unicorn/fantasy heyday. Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Princess Bride. Barnum and Bailey's unicorn (which I begged and begged and BEGGED to see and was the most thrilled little girl when I got to go). Eddings' Belgariad. If there was a princess or knight anywhere near it, preferably with a unicorn if not a warhorse at the very least, I was all over it. My heart beats faster for leather jerkins and polished armor, and I think if a man asked me to tie a favor to his lance before the joust, I might dishonor my family crest right then and there. XD This explains why a guy with long hair and a swagger will literally make me spin around in mid-sentence, as my coworkers once had a field day giggling at me about.

And oh dear, I don't have a single unicorn icon. Something that needs corrected right away.

[sistawendy]

Tolkien, for better or worse, but also The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, which I read for a class in college and loved. No, Pynchon isn't technically genre fiction, but he's come close several times.

[morseren]

In grade school I was obsessed with Dracula by Bram Stoker. So when Interview with the Vampire came out I was in 9th grade and I read it after getting in from one of those spin racks at the grocery store. I liked it but still preferred Dracula for whatever reasons. But when The Vampire Lestat came out I was in college and loved it so much I wrote a paper on it for an existential literature class :)

[staxxy]

I've been thinking about this since you posted it, and I think I have finally settled on my answer.

The authors that influenced me as a child most were Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Stephen King, Madeline L'Engle, and Anne McCaffery. The *poets* that most influenced me as a child were Shakespeare, Christina Rosetti, William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe (really, just the poetry - his prose has never really been a fav of mine), Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound, Ogden Nash, Doctor Seuss, Dolly Parton, and Shel Silverstein.

But there were a few names that radically changed my approach to words when I was introduced to them later in life (in my teens and twenties) - Jim Morrison (his poetry & spoken word, not his songs), Nick Cave (both for him, although I was introduced to him via his poetry first... I think I still have King Ink on my shelf), Suzanne Vega, Leonard Cohen (I think he might have this effect on most people who are introduced to his work, the heavens only know how many musicians list him as an influence across all genres), and Theodore Sturgeon (scifi truffles for your brain).