I saw a Facebook post from the SF and fantasy writer C.J. Cherryh, soliciting ideas from readers for books to give a hypothetical 8-year-old, and she leads off with the books she herself got drawn into at that age. Lucky Bucky in Oz – I had to look it up – a later book in the Baum series, but written by their longtime illustrator, John Rea Neill. Disney’s duck comics. Pyle’s Robin Hood, illustrated. Edgar Rice Burroughs, not Tarzan, but the Mars books. Then she throws the nominations open.
Reading
the responses, there’s a lot of overlap, which is interesting because it
suggests not a lack of material, but that
certain writers hit our sweet spot. C.S.
Lewis and Narnia get high-fives - but it turns out I’m not the only one who
thinks The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe is terrific, and the rest kind of sag. Same with Walter Farley. The
Black Stallion is aces; the sequels, not so much. Everybody’s head-over-heels for E.B. White, Stuart and Charlotte. Laura Ingalls
Wilder. Tolkien. Nancy Drew.
Andre Norton. Madeleine
L’Engle. Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonrider
novels. Robert Louis Stevenson. Heinlein.
T.H. White. Kipling. Twain.
Lewis Carroll. Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks. The
Wind in the Willows. Anything with
N.C. Wyeth illustrations. Ursula Le
Guin’s Earthsea. The
Call of the Wild. Sherlock
Holmes. Jules Verne. The
Scrolling through, I recognized stuff I hadn’t thought of in ages, the Doctor Dolittle series, for one. I was crazy about the books, at the time, but I’d be reluctant to go back. Maybe it was my imagination that made them so good. Burroughs is another one, the Tarzan books are ghastly, utter racist claptrap, but the Barsoom books are fabulous. Kipling is one of my favorites, still. I think the Carl Barks duck comics are genius. Somebody mentioned My Father’s Dragon, a book of such complete charm I can’t even fathom it’s having slipped my mind, all these years later.
The coolest thing about this is seeing other people open themselves up to a larger world, and how it happened. In some respects, it’s not the book itself, but the place and time we discovered it. C.J. herself says that she read her first actual fantasy, Jirel of Joiry, when she was sick in bed, once, and she still remembers the room, the bed, the window, the curtains, everything, the experience being that vivid. I know what she means.
There’s
a great moment in How Green Was My Valley,
the John Ford movie, when the boy Huw is recovering from pneumonia, and the
minister, Gruffydd, loans him a copy of
I’m not sure, but I think this is what C.J. Cherryh is trying to conjure up, and I think that’s what she gets, in the responses. What drew you in, and didn’t let you go? Or more accurately, that you couldn’t let go of? I clearly remember the room, the window, the curtains, the summer I fell under the spell of Renault’s The King Must Die. I was under an enchantment I couldn’t break.
We think back and say, what was the magic, how did they cast the spell? And we brought a lot of the energy ourselves, our hunger to be transported, but these are the writers who gave us the lamp to rub, the genie to call, the carpet to fly on. I’m enormously grateful.