Grimm's Fairy Tales To Read Aloud, a beginning reader's edition...along with Dr. Seuss and some Golden Books, the texts my parents taught me to read with, and the most elaborate and text-heavy (and even more fantasticated than Green Eggs and Ham and the Cat in the Hat books).
Children's Digest magazine, the first fiction/essay-heavy magazine I read, and another bounty of short fiction, comics (Tintin and others), etc. Set me on a path to being one of the rare sorts these days who still loves fiction magazines. Highlights for Children and Humpty Dumpty (the latter then CD's slightly younger-skewing stablemate) didn't hurt, but weren't as good to 5yo me.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories to be Read with the Door Locked, ghost-edited by Harold Q. Masur. Might not be the first of the anthologies edited by Robert Arthur and Harold Q. Masur in the various "Hitchcock" lines that I read, but it might be, and it was the first I owned a copy of. Eclectic and sophisticated range of all sorts of "dark" (including darkly comic) fiction, one of many volumes aimed at adults and a companion series aimed at YA readers...I inhaled them from about age 9 till I'd read them all...while also reading the series of anthologies taken from and associated with Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which always had other editors. AHMM, for its part, was the first adult fiction magazine I read regularly.
Living in Fear: A History of Horror in Mass Media, by Les Daniels...the mass media very much including literature...the first critical/historical pop-culture work I devoured, and assuredly not the last. Along with the pointers, as valuable as those on the Newbery Award shortlists to my young reading, it was also a fine anthology of short stories, alternating with the chapters of Daniels's text.
The better Time-Life Books, Science Service Books, and a galumphing big coffee-table book full of essays and great photography, Our Amazing World of Nature, definitely nudged me into a lifelong interest in the natural sciences...various encyclopedias and other multivolume sets didn't hurt.
The Year's Best Horror Stories, Series 5, edited by Gerald W. Page. The first evidence I had that the horror fiction anthologies I'd been finding in libraries (and from Scholastic and similar book sales in and through the schools) were part of a continuing tradition. Other best of the year annuals were also fascinating.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (to which I've contributed in the most slight way) and Fantastic Stories and Whispers, perhaps the most beloved by me of the first wave of adult fiction magazines I started buying and reading in earnest in 1978. These three were the best and most popular fantasy fiction magazines I'd find, all eclectic in their remit (they'd even run the occasional story that was fantasy only by association, presumably because the editors thought they had a good story by a writer who usually wrote fantasy)...while I'd read the likes of Short Story International and Galaxy and Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine assiduously as well. I transitioned in my periodicals consumption from reading comics and Mad (and any National Lampoons I could obtain...and Boy's Life and Dynamite) to reading fiction magazines over the years from ages 10 to 13...and discovered that magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly still carried short stories, as well as sometimes fascinating articles. I'd been reading the short stories in Playboy for a while...while not letting the rest of the magazine alone, of course...
Dissent magazine was my first regular leftist read, soon joined by others ranging from The Nation to Rolling Stone's relevant material, and so on to such books as Vivian Gornick's Essays in Feminism (and Women in Science), Emma Goldman's Living My Life, and the notable anthology The Essential Works of Anarchism.. But I think Joanna Russ's essays, and her novel The Female Man, were among the biggest even earlier nudges I had in that direction. I certainly didn't like the antifeminist flavor of the writing of R. Bretnor nor (Miss rather than Ms.?) Raylyn Moore from early on... Our Generation magazine probably spoke to me most directly, along with Social Anarchism (to which I would eventually contribute) and, in a more broadly focused way, Harper's Magazine in the 1980s...
The Futurians by Damon Knight convinced me that I wanted to be an editor even more than I did a writer. And the critical writing of Knight, Russ, Gornick, John Simon, Harlan Ellison, Algis Budrys, James Blish, Anthony Burgess, bell hooks, Avram Davidson, Fritz Leiber, and others spoke to me profoundly.
And if I have to make a default choice as to my favorite book so far...well, I couldn't. But Avram Davidson's magisterial The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy might be it. Or Jorge Luis Borges's The Aleph, and Other Stories 1933-1969, or too many others...
Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's books. I believe I'm set to host next week's selections...
5 comments:
Which reminds me, indirectly, that I need to read more Joanna Russ! Some wonderful looking volumes there Todd - lovely.
With me it was the Tarzan and Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs at the age of nine. By 11 and 12 I started picking up the Erskine Caldwell Signet paperbacks because of the great cover art by James Avati.
The I discovered SF and GALAXY at age 13. I still have the February 1956 GALAXY which I bought off the newsstand. Somehow it has led me to collect thousands of pulps, digests, and literary magazines.
Thanks, Sergio...you could do Much, much worse...
13 really is the golden age for obsessive magazine collectors, clearly! I still have my 1978 new-issue purchases of fiction magazines, too, even if they are deep in storage...that was my 13...
Your my favorite Patti Abbot substitute!
Too kind, George...you've done fine, and certainly Bonnie and Evan do excellent work...
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