What was the first fantasy book you ever read?

I always like to hear about the books that lead other folks into the genre.

When I was eight years old, Lloyd Alexander's "The Book of Three" (first book of the Prydain Chronicles) was on a summer reading list for school, and I got it from a book fair with my allowance. I devoured it in two days, and begged my mom to get me the rest of the books in the series. It started me on a lifelong love of fantasy that shows no signs of slowing yet. :)

Even when I was a little kid, I loved reading mythological tales (I used to pretend the living room sofa was a bull and try to jump over it like the Minoans did...not a good idea for a klutzy kid, LOL). I loved Alexander's use of Celtic mythology in the stories, it just made everything seem so grand and magical. Those books really appealed to my imagination, and I think they're a big part of why I'm who I am today. The characters also just seemed alive, more so than in the "mundane" books I was forced to read for school. Every fantasy archetype was there: the elderly wizard/sage Obi-Wan/Gandalf figure, the humble farm boy who grows up to be a great hero, the spoiled princess, etc. However the characters never felt cliche to me, and they grew to feel like old friends as the books went on. I was really, really sad to finish the last book; I didn't want to leave them behind.

What was your first experience with a fantasy novel?

mostly Nancy Drew and some things like that. :)

It was the Merlin Trilogy by Mary Stewart. The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment. It left me wanting to be a powerful wizard because the characters were beautifully drawn and so vibrant. I was a teenager and my mother really wondered why I wasn't reading more 'normal' stuff.

not as my first book, but yeah man Merlin was awesome. His omly weakness was women, but that made him all the more alluring.

Since Merlin was the best, I wanted to be a Merlinetta... Thank goodness for Hermione! :)

Wow, I forgot about that one. I remember I really liked it. I should go dig it up and give it a fresh read! Thanks. :)

but straight-up proper fantasy? Probably the Elric series.

ON EDIT: if we include children's books then it would probably be the Doctor Dolittle books.

We must have been separated at birth or something, hee! :hi:

I love the Elric saga. Unfortunately I lent my Elric books out to a "friend" years ago and they never came back. :( Yoshitaka Amano had some really nice Elric stuff in one of his older artbooks..."Hiten" I think? I'd have to go dig out the book (I practically live in a library).

If we all lived in the same town I'm sure we'd all be wearing black and hanging out together.

:evilgrin:

If you didn't know it, Moorcock has written his final Elric and overall Eternal Champion book. It's not out yet, but he's finally wrapped the whole saga up once and for all.

It's weird that he did it just as King finished the Dark Tower books, as there are some similarities between the two meta-series.

I remember my grandmother reading The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe to me when I was pretty little, I'm not sure how old.

Just remembered, I read A Wrinkle in Time when I was pretty young also.

.... but I guess Harry Potter was my first. I can't think of anything else I've read that is fantasy.

I didn't realize until much later that part of it was an allegory for protesting McCarthyism and conformity. Another book of hers, "The Firelings", also looks at a society that turns on its dissenters and misfits in a time of danger. She's a big-time Dem supporter (met her husband while working on a New Deal program).

She's retired now, living in Lawrence, Kansas. I was lucky enough to get a response to my letter, a while back ...

and enjoyed it very much. I'm looking for the sequel, but my local library doesn't carry it.

Yes, it's a children's book; I was a child. I read lots of science fiction, but there wasn't as much fantasy around back then.

Senior year (High School), I read "The Once & Future King"--partially fantasy, all excellent. Then this trilogy with psychedelic cover art came out....

I really liked it, as I recall. Every now and again I run into it in used books stores and always have to resist the urge to buy it. :)

Meant to respond to OP. D'oh!

I've been hooked on fantasy ever since. I prefer the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms series to any because they are set in the AD&D worlds. I loved AD&D as a kid and still do, hard to find anyone to play with though.

eom

I forgot how old I was at the time - maybe 3rd grade?

Or actually the German translation of it. Don't remember exactly when I read it, but probably around fourth grade.

:D

I know I was nuts about fantasy when I was 9 and 10. My favorites were C.S. Lewis and E. Nesbit, with Edward Eager a close third, but my children's library had a well-stocked fantasy section and I read tons of stuff nobody has ever heard of.

(I didn't hit The Lord of the Rings until I was 11 -- partly because my library was missing the first volume until then, and partly because it just looked scary.)

Before I was 9 though ... I dunno. The Hobbit. Mary Poppins. Lots and lots of fairy tales and modern imitations of fairy tales. Greek myths, starting when I was 7. Serial novels in Jack and Jill Magazine, many of which were fantasy or science fiction, going back to when I was 5.

But at that point, it was all just "kids' books." It wasn't until I was nine that I became aware of fantasy as a special genre and one where I would read anything I could get my hands on.

Then when I was 12, I ran out of fantasy, because it was 1959 and adult fantasy largely hadn't been invented yet. (I did come up with one James Branch Cabell novel which I think must have been my grandfather's, but I found it peculiar and unsatisfying.) So I turned to historical novels and spy thrillers and then science fiction as a substitute. But none of it was ever as magical.

But then, that was... ummm... 1967. There weren't a lot of fantasy novels on the market back then. But I was hooked. I read it over and over and over...

Dragons of Autumn Twighlight was the first book.

I remember it quite fondly.

Alice Through the Looking-Glass (my favorite of the 2). Used to read them over ever couple of years but haven't done that for a while. Also read a lot of mythology as a kid. Wasn't into fantasy per se, then read Anne Rice's vampire novels in my 20's (does that count as fantasy?) Only read LOTR books after seeing the first 2 movies!

I think it was the Stanley Steemer Piers Anthony Xanth
book when I was 15 or so.

I'd gotten bored with Harlequin Romances and Harold
Robbins sex stories and was looking for something
different.

I liked all the Mars and Venus series, and the Tarzan series. Basically, all simplistic but well done heroic adventures. But the one I liked the best was "The World of Tiers" series by Philip Jose Farmer. I got these as a bookclub edition when I was a kid, and I have read them countless times. I even have a signed author's edition by Farmer himself. I like everything he has written. I also liked everything Roger Zelazny (RIP) wrote. Another series I really liked was Frank Herbert's "Dune" series, which I consider fantasy, but cool.

Of course I also read lots of sword and sorcery type fantasy, most of which was truly awful, but I liked it at the time (Conan, Elric, etc.). I also like alternate timeline fantasy such as the Draka series by S.M. Stirling. I am much better read in the science fiction genre, but I really would like to go back and read more of the better sword and sandals fantasy written in the last few years. I thought this genre was all mined-out years ago, but evidently not. In fact, I just read "Lord Valentine's Castle" last week and liked it. (O.K., it's old, I know, but I bought it because I really liked Robert Silverberg's "Nightwings".)

the poems and footnotes (I read it in translation too). The drawings kept me going more than anything (it was the original edition ones).
Soon after that, we had our lit teacher read the Wizard of Oz in the classroom (quite revolutionary idea for the old country).
I also remember some beautiful fictional mythology - The Legends of Vam....

I think

No, they're not the same as *reading.* But Disney's versions of Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland (and to a lesser extent Cinderella) had a lot to do with giving me a taste for magical adventures when I was 5 or 6 that predisposed me to look for stories like that when I was 8 or 9.

Carl Barks' Uncle Scrooge stories figure in there as well.

Earthsea Trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia. I wore out two copies of Narnia by the time I was 14! Around 12 or so my mom got me The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, and while not fantasy, per se, took me a long way into discovering the importance of humor and imagination.

Then The Lord of the Rings. After that, it was just a downward glide along the slippery slope to being a SF/Fantasy fan. For a long time, I was a big reader of space opera/fantasy (Fritz Leiber;
Andre Norton; Ray Bradbury, etc.) Then I crashed into hard core SF
(Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, LeGuin, Cherryh, Card, Herbert, et al).

Lately, I'm in with the Potterites (JKR).

I would have read the first when I was about 9.

Mary was nothing like the Disney representation, she was much more
forbidding and stern, so the magical things that happened were
a delicious surprise. I loved those books, and explored them again
when my daughter was about the same age as I had been.

Lloyd Alexander's classic five-book series. Taran and Eilonwy, I loved those books.

It was either that or A Wrinkle in Time. I can't remember for sure, it was right around the same time.

DTH

but the wrinkle in time series (WiT, WitD, aSTP)

Swiftly Tilting Planet was the favorite, of course.

Lol hard to remember what my first fantasy book was, loooong time. But I remember having had the set of Naria when I was young and loved reading them. Also enjoyed norse mythology.

Some of the earliest memories were of "The Wishing Chair" or "The Farway Tree" - well, of the titles themselves anyway and some really hazy recollections. This was when I was like 6 or 7 years old. Whenever, I do think back to those days, it was magical if you know what I mean. I think that Enid Blyton was a wondeful childrens book writer - kind of like my "gateway drug" into the fantasy genre. Another "milestone" fantasy author for me was Terri Windling and her "Bordertown" stories - that influenced me during my teenage years more than the traditional D&D type.

It was in my first book of poetry, and I remember reading it aloud for my mother's friends. It's been 38 years and I still love the poem--plus it started my life-long love of fantasy literature.

Copyright laws prohibit me from posting it here, but Harvard has it on their server, here: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/Custard.html

On edit... I see you're asking specifically about fantasy books, not fantary lit in general. I don't remember the earliest unillustrated fantasy book I read, but I remember reading a book called "The Magic Buttons" (or something like that) about a girl who finds three magic buttons in the attic. Loved that book! I must have been in second or third grade at the time.

and i was an avid reader early on. I want to say the first one was the Hobbit, around age 8, but right around then was when I first read LOTR, Narnia, the Lloyd Alexander novels, the Xanth and so on. I too was really into mythology, especially greek myths. Between 10 and 13, I think I went through Hitchhikers guide, all the Burroughs John Carter of Mars books, most of Heinlein, and I remember absolutely loving McCaffrey's the White Dragon (I became somewhat obsessed with the early Pern books - don't really care for the later ones - in fact, I would get really pissed if anyone but Michael Whelan would do cover art for the series, excepting some of the covers for the first harper hall series). By 13 or 14, I had devoured the Foundation Novels and the Robot Novels by Asimov, some Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, the Dragonlance books, the Belgariad, Aspirin's Myth series, and at least four of the Dune series by Herbert. Oh, Saberhagen, too, all the Berserker books.

I think i read more books than anyone else my age in my hometown.

Chronicles of Narnia is the first I remember...at age 10 or so. Finished that and began reading David Eddings' Belgariad and Malloreon at age 12...the last book was being released just as I got to it.

Then my stupid, foolish ass jumped into Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time around 15. Damned series has consumed TWELVE YEARS of my life. I wish he'd finish it soon so I can go ahead and get the massive letdown I know the ending will be.

My father had ALL the original Robert Howard paperbacks for Conan.

Howard's writing style:
Spend 2-3 paragraphs describing what a badass Conan's opponent was.
Spend one sentence having Conan kill him.

By Robert E. Howard. Lied my way into the adult section of the library. That was around 1952? Still think Conan (not Ah-nald) is the greatest fantasy hero.

PS: sorry for leaving all the conan books scattered around, HH.

While it isn't great literature, it was powerfully written and moving.

And better than 'Dick And Jane Run Over Spot'.

It opened my mind to the idea of more than three dimensions and that things might not be as they appear.

After that, the first three books of the Chronicles of Narnia. Tried to read the Dragonriders of Pern, but it was over my head as a 10 year old.

before that, I'd read a book of my sisters' called something like "A Door into Space" or something like that, about a boy who has no memory, is found by a family, then everyone realizes that he is an alien of some sort. I was in, I think, fourth grade. I read the Earthsea books when I was in Junior High, and that was about the time they came out.

by Roger Zelazney. First was Nine Princes of Amber and they continue from there.

:hi: