Satima's Blogspot: Books and authors meme

Tuesday, 24 May 2016

Books and authors meme

Tuesday, May 24, 2016 |

Posted by Satima Flavell

Yes, it's another meme, courtesy of my friend Carole McDonnell. Copy and paste if you'd like to give it a go, and let us know in the comments below when it's done. Name all the influences you can think of within fifteen minutes. The fun of these memes, to me, lies in comparing my preferences with those of other readers and writers! Anyhow, here goes:

Rupert Bear, a children's comic strip character created by the English artist MARY TOURTEL. I was about three or four years old at the time, and my eldest sister was going out with a young man who, due to his European parentage, was fluent in both French and German. He translated Rupert into both languages for me, so I was able to read the story three times, with the English helping me to translate the other two. What a pity we lose our capacity to absorb languages as we grow up! But I do think it helped - I soaked up French in High School far more easily than most students did, and when I enrolled in German classes as an adult I was astonished to realise that I already knew how to conjugate the verbs, and could read out loud quite fluently, even though I had little idea what I was reading about!

The Famous Five series by ENID BLYTON kept me busy for several years after I started school. At seven I had a reading age of eleven, and at nine, a reading age of fourteen. They kept promoting me to higher grades in primary school because of my reading, completely ignoring the fact that I didn't know my times tables properly. I never did master mathematics. And I was nearly a year younger than my classmates when I started high school, which made it hard for me to make friends.

In about grade five, ARTHUR RANSOME's Swallows and Amazons series became my obsession. They are still a good read, I reckon! MARY STEWART's The Crystal Cave was my next influence, at the age of fourteen. I already knew the Arthurian stories slightly, but this was the book that really hooked me in.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, who should, to my mind, be posthumously knighted if not canonised, has influenced every writer in English since the C17, whether or not they realise it. What that writer didn't know about human nature, even as a young man, is not worth knowing, and his poetic and dramatic expression of probably every facet of the human condition has no peer.

DANIEL DEFOE, author of Treasure Island and Moll Flanders, is another who has influenced nearly every English-speaker who ever put pen to paper. His style is a bit dated, of course, but he certainly knew how to spin a yarn.

CHARLES DICKENS, whether we actually like his work or not, has also been a huge influence on the whole writing scene for the last century and more. Like many of you, I got Oliver Twist and Bleak House thrust upon me in high school or university. Others whose influence is inescapable for the same reason include CHARLOTTE and ANNE BRONTE and JAMES JOYCE, inter alios.

And then I turned eighteen, and I married a man who loved Sci-Fi. He introduced me to the work of DE CAMP and PRATT, and from there I went on to read URSULA LEGUIN, ISAAC ASIMOV, ROGER ZELAZNY, PIERS ANTHONY and the other giants of SF in that era. I kept up in reading in the genre (TIM POWERS was a longtime favourite, as was ANNE MCCAFFREY) for some thirty years before putting pen to paper myself.

And what about current writers? Main influences among my contemporaries have been JACQUELINE CAREY, NEIL GAIMAN, ROBIN HOBB, GUY GAVRIEL KAY, GLENDA LARKE, JULIET MARILLIER - and, of course, GEORGE RR MARTIN.

It took me far less than fifteen minutes to think of my influences, but over an hour to write this post. See how you go, and let me know!

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