I'm sure I have. I'm not sure I can find it before I go to bed. Short version:
I was 12, and I had been reading Golden Age SF in quantity. I had always been a writing sort of child, but Golden Age SF is not really something I can do. My dad turned up with Beggars in Spain one day. I'm not even sure how he encountered it, as he is not dedicated to the pulse of any one genre in his reading material, but it was one of the two books he gave me that year, out of the blue, that changed my life. Anyway. There it was, and I read it, and it was not like anything else I had ever read. It cracked my head open about the practice of SF. And the way it cracked my head open and let the light in was a way that said, "Hey. I can do this. I can do this."
The other book that year was A Brief History of Time; I was going to be a physicist for quite some time and got as far as grad work before abandoning ship on that. It still affects how I write and what I write. And the third book that Changed My Life was two years later, not my dad's fault: War for the Oaks. Because I'd read so much fantasy, but this, this was in my city. This was fantasy I could touch from here, and not by sitting in the coat closet hoping it would turn into Narnia.
I don't think these are my top three most loved books ever. But they're the ones that were the most direct lightbulb moments.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-03-07 04:20 am (UTC)I was 12, and I had been reading Golden Age SF in quantity. I had always been a writing sort of child, but Golden Age SF is not really something I can do. My dad turned up with Beggars in Spain one day. I'm not even sure how he encountered it, as he is not dedicated to the pulse of any one genre in his reading material, but it was one of the two books he gave me that year, out of the blue, that changed my life. Anyway. There it was, and I read it, and it was not like anything else I had ever read. It cracked my head open about the practice of SF. And the way it cracked my head open and let the light in was a way that said, "Hey. I can do this. I can do this."
The other book that year was A Brief History of Time; I was going to be a physicist for quite some time and got as far as grad work before abandoning ship on that. It still affects how I write and what I write. And the third book that Changed My Life was two years later, not my dad's fault: War for the Oaks. Because I'd read so much fantasy, but this, this was in my city. This was fantasy I could touch from here, and not by sitting in the coat closet hoping it would turn into Narnia.
I don't think these are my top three most loved books ever. But they're the ones that were the most direct lightbulb moments.