I grew up with an insatiable and utterly indiscriminate love of reading.
The first book I remember reading was in primary school. It had pictures and words on every page. It was about a farmer and his dog. The dog’s name was “Old Lob”. Unless that was the farmer. It was very boring.
At home, I remember Winnie the Pooh, Orlando the Marmalade Cat, Mary Plain, William and Biggles and the Arthur Ransome books (it was many years later before I felt even a slight worry about calling a teenage girl Titty, at the time it was just a name.)
I also read some of the stories of heroic deeds by prep schoolboys during the First World War who discovered that Fritz in Form IVB was a German spy. I even read some Billy Bunter books and loved Dr Doolittle but couldn’t get into Enid Blyton though I gained comfort from the cozy worlds of Wind in the Willows and Rudyard Kipling’s stories.
I still have some of these but the rest came from the library where I’d gather a handful of books for the week often chosen after reading the first two pages. If I found an author I liked, I’d read everything I could find by them and, I have to confess, I can’t remember a single book or author that I didn’t like, probably because they failed the 2-page test.
It was many decades before I realised that some people thought ‘normal’ stories were different from fantasy and science fiction because, to me, all fiction was fantasy: obviously William came out of Richmal Crompton’s head and wasn’t real.
I blame Andrew Lang. He and his wife Leonora produced a wonderful series of Colour Fairy Books which gathered folk tales from all over the world and I loved them.
At about the same time, I found George MacDonald’s wonderful stories and I also came across Vice Versa by F Anstey in which a boy and his father swapped lives. (The latter offered the basic plot for the Tom Hanks film Big and Jamie Lee Curtis’s Freaky Friday.)
Later, of course, there were the Mary Poppins books and those by E Nesbit and ‘BB’.
Thus did I find myself reading ‘real’ fantasy fiction without even realising I’d crossed a threshold; or that there was a threshold.
I was introduced to science fiction by Dan Dare in the Eagle comic and writers like Jules Verne, H G Wells, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. BBC’s Children’s Hour also added impetus with stories like Angus MacVicar’s The Lost Planet and went on to discover authors like Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, and that people like Eric Frank Russell and Harry Harrison could write science fiction that was funny.
Inevitably, I also read ‘horror’ and ghost stories, from the classic stories of Mary Shelley and M R James through Bram Stoker (who wrote one very good book and several rather silly ones) to the likes of H P Lovecraft. Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon wrote wonderful fantasy and I later discovered Roger Zelazny.
At the same time as I discovered John Steinbeck and the Saint and Hammond Innes books, I was reading books by Joan Aiken, Susan Cooper and Alan Garner that are probably exempted from the taint of fantasy by being called ‘children’s books’ (now probably ‘young adult books’). I also devoured those by Jan Mark and Helen Cresswell, both of whom could make me laugh out loud, which once cleared a space for me on a crowded platform on the Victoria line.
Having heard I was supposed to despise Mills & Boon books, I naturally had to read some and I enjoyed them; they were good stories and were well-written
My failure to understand the boundaries between the various sub-cultures of fiction was supported by what now appears to have been a similar problem facing publishers. While going through a phase of reading crime stories, the type published by Penguin in green covers, I came across Charles Williams (read Many Dimensions and you’ll understand my doubts about publishers’ classifications).
Williams was one of the Inklings, with CS Lewis who wrote a sci-fi trilogy and the Narnia fantasy series, while JRR Tolkien introduced a whole new depth to fantasy with Lord of the Rings. Sadly, Tolkien’s work inspired so many similar epics that I forget which one is which.
Nowadays, some ‘proper’ authors like Kazuo Ishiguro distance themselves from ‘science fiction’ and ‘fantasy’ despite writing books like Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant; others are less concerned about which shelf they go on and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was nominated for both the Booker Prize and the Nebula Award in 1986 and won the Arthur C Clarke Award in the following year.
My life now restricts my time so much that I tend to fall back on easy bedtime reading and tend to rely on Reacher books and books like Longbourn, which tells the story of Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of the servants; and of course, the incomparable Terry Pratchett, whose books combined humour with fantasy and social comment.
I have always had a feeling the only reason to classify fiction is to decide where they should be filed in libraries and bookshops but my publisher son tells me it helps their ‘Readers’ if they’ve read other books in the same genre. Last time my books moved house, I decided to organise them into reference books and others, which I sorted by the author’s name. This was a mistake. If I’m looking for the book on Richard Feynman, I have to remember it’s written by James Gleick, but if I want the book on chaos theory or the laws of chance, I’m buggered because I can’t remember who wrote them.
However, I’ve now worked my way up to 30-page rule: if I don’t care what happens next by the time I reach page 30, I give up and go to the next book on the heap by my bed.
Looking back now, I can see my reading habits developed at random, without being limited to particular genres or prejudices. I used to read non-judgmentally and was neither attracted nor appalled by the racism, misogyny, sexism and jingoism in so many of the books (though I do remember feeling a little uneasy about the cruelty in Billy Bunter books). They were of their time and I don’t think they embedded any prejudices in my mind but, as Mandy Rice-Davis almost said some years later in a rather different context “Well, I would say that, wouldn’t I?”
Lesser Mutterings 