Texty

I just closed a chapter in my life. Fitting, I suppose, to do so on this day.

My first introduction to SF/F, courtesy of my dad, was reading one of the I, Robot stories (Robbie.) Don't remember exactly how old I was at the time--10 or 11, maybe--but it did give me the jones for something more, so he handed over some of his Alan Dean Foster books. I don't remember which one I read first (may have been a short story collection or one of the Spellsinger books), but somewhere in those early days, I picked up For Love of Mother-Not, the (chronologically) first book in the Flinx and Pip series.

( Stories )

I've read and enjoyed many other series in this time, of course--Pratchett, Asprin, Jacques, Rice, etc.--but I didn't grow up with those books the way I've grown up with the Commonwealth. Flinx's journey has been a thread of my mental life for so many years now that it almost seems as if it's a story of my own (that the story covers his life from early adolescence to the completion of young adulthood also reinforces that feeling.) 27 years of my life have been punctuated by periodic returns to what he's been up to, like a childhood friend with whom I never really lost touch, so to finish his story is almost like saying goodbye to that friend.

Yet somehow, it's not melancholy. It was a satisfying enough end to the story that I don't feel a sense of loss. It feels, instead, more like graduating or something. Like saying goodbye to childhood, and moving on to the next phase. (Of course, given that I'm turning 39 this year, childhood isn't exactly a recent thing!) Reading these stories has been a unique experience in my life, and something I'm grateful for (and especially grateful to the author!) and I'm glad I could be there on this journey.

I only hope that maybe my own kid(s) can someday have a similar experience with someone else's stories.

Finally finished my journey through Narnia.

*shakes head*

( A brief recap, shall we? )

And then we have that ending. Egad. Some children's book. My kids aren't setting a finger on these until they're old enough to understand the context in which they were written.

It wasn't all bad, really. Some of it was just bizarre rather than creepy. But I think I need to go dive back into Oz to wash my brain out.

I think I've now experienced most of the classic/neo-classic children's fantasies, though: Oz, Middle-Earth, Narnia, Potter, L'Engle, Redwall... Am I missing any? Any recs?

Very nearly through Dawn Treader on my first march through Narnia.

Lewis is rather an opinionated, snotty bastard, isn't he? I'm actually kind of shocked at the amount of blatant sociopolitical opining in these. Not just from the religious perspective, which I expected, at least in the occasional allegorical forms, but in direct statements about things like taxes and monarchies.

There's similar moralizing in Oz, but at least Baum had the excuse of writing 50 years earlier.