Beyond Selidor

I came across this book meme a while ago, and had been waiting until I had a clear month or so to complete it. It looks like it will be a lot of fun, so feel free to steal it and do the meme yourself if you'd like.

Day one is a tough one: favourite book from childhood.

Now, depending on how old I was when you asked me this question, the answer would change quite a bit. I am a fairly loyal reader, and even in childhood I tended to have long stretches of time where a particular book was my favourite — and these can roughly be set out as follows:

Age 0-7: Unclear, but probably whatever my picture book du jour was. I can remember loving books by the Australian author/illustrator Alison Lester, a nonfiction book about ballet, Janet and Allan Ahlberg books, and, when I was about two, a book of children's poetry that included a poem about a horse that, when my mother got to it, I always insisted on sitting on the page and imagining I was riding the horse, so she had to memorise that particular poem.

Age 8-9: I was absolutely obsessed with three books: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett (I identified so much with how the title character was a reader, and used her imagination to escape from her surroundings), The Girls in the Velvet Frame by Adele Geras (a gorgeous, gorgeous book which is still one of my favourites — it's about five Jewish sisters living genteel poverty in Jerusalem in the early 1920s with their widowed mother, and explores their relationship in the most beautiful way), and Of Nightingales That Weep by Katherine Paterson (brutally tragic historical fiction set during the time of the Genpei War in Japan, and inspiration of ninety per cent of the melodramatic games my sister, cousin and I would come up with at family parties). I guess I really loved historical fiction at that age.

Ages 9-10: These were the years where I latched onto an Australian children's classic: Hating Alison Ashley by Robin Klein. This is a comedic story that explores issues of class, identity, and coming of age, pretty much every Australian of my age is likely to have read it, and it's responsible for the most On Brand™ story of my childhood: when I was ten, our teacher (as was common in Australian primary schools in those years) would spend about twenty minutes each day reading the class a portion of a children's novel that we selected, and the selected book was Hating Alison Ashley. For whatever reason, she would try to skip over massive chunks of text, or even single sentences (not for any censorious reasons; the book is solidly children's fiction with no controversial content whatsoever). I, however, had read the book probably a hundred times, so I knew the entire thing off by heart, and I annoyed her inordinately by constantly raising my hand and saying, 'I think you skipped a bit there,' and reeling off, verbatim, the parts of the book she'd missed.

Ages 11-12: That was when I got into Australian YA in a major way, and many of the books I fell in love with in these years remain my among my favourites still. There are too many to list together, but those with the genuine staying power that I still reread regularly include Galax Arena by Gillian Rubinstein (dispossessed and exploited children from around the world are kidnapped and taken to outer space to perform in a dangerous circus for aliens — or are they?), and Rubinstein's Space Demons trilogy (a group of Australian — and, later, Japanese — teenagers get sucked into a trio of sentient computer games which force them to confront the emotional things that are bothering them). Incidentally, Rubinstein no longer writes children's fiction, and in fact told me in an interview when I was a newspaper book-reviewer that she felt unable to do so after her children became adults — she felt she had lost a connection with the experiences of children. By a strange twist of fate, I ended up meeting one of her adult children here in Cambridge, as he lived in the house next door to mine with his wife, who was studying a PhD at my college! Rubinstein now writes adult historical fiction and fantasy under the pen name Lian Hearn.

Books that I loved in those years not by Gillian Rubinstein include Victor Kelleher's Parkland, Earthsong and Fire Dancer trilogy, and his novel The Red King. He's a very bleak writer who normally writes dystopian settings — the trilogy is loosely linked (Parkland is set in the far future when humans and other apes are kept in zoos to prevent us from destroying the earth through climate change, Earthsong sees two teenagers returning to Earth after humanity left it for Titan when it became uninhabitable, with the aim of repopulating it with cryogenically frozen embryos, and Fire Dancer involves two teenagers time travelling back to Neanderthal times and realising they have to stay and, ultimately, have children with Neanderthal partners in order to ensure the eventual existence of Homo sapiens humans), while The Red King is more of a standard fantasy quest novel. This was also the time when I discovered Catherine Jinks' Pagan Chronicles series, which I love inordinately and have talked about all over the place before now.

Age 13 onwards: This was when I read The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman, which was probably the most transformative reading experience of my life. I can trace a line back to this book, and pretty much every major life decision I made after that: the ten years I spent as a book-reviewer, the decision to go online and talk to people about His Dark Materials (and thus the reason why I am here, on Dreamwidth, writing about this, today), the degree I chose to study as an undergrad, which made it possible to apply to Cambridge for the MPhil, and thence emigrate, do a PhD, meet my husband, and end up in the career I'm in now. So it was a pretty momentous book for me!

As I said before, I can talk about favourite childhood books forever, and would love to hear about yours, or discuss any of my favourites, in the comments.


2. Best bargain.
3. One with a blue cover.
4. Least favorite book by favorite author.
5. Doesn't belong to me.
6. The one I always give as a gift.
7. Forgot I owned it.
8. Have more than one copy.
9. Film or TV tie-in.
10. Reminds me of someone I love.
11. Secondhand bookshop gem.
12. I pretend to have read it.
13. Makes me laugh.
14. An old favorite.
15. Favorite fictional father.
16. Can't believe more people haven't read.
17. Future classic.
18. Bought on a recommendation.
19. Still can't stop talking about it.
20. Favorite cover.
21. Summer read.
22. Out of print.
23. Made to read at school.
24. Hooked me into reading.
25. Never finished it.
26. Should have sold more copies.
27. Want to be one of the characters.
28. Bought at my fave independent bookshop.
29. The one I have reread most often.
30. Would save if my house burned down.