I read a lot as a kid and read widely, sampling anything I could find. I always had books on my “want to read” list but also had a lot of chores and never had as much time to read as I wanted.

As a result, when I was a teenager and we were “assigned” readings for school, I resented it. I already knew a dozen books in the library I wanted to read as soon as I could get to them. And, too often, the assigned books were not nearly as colorful or interesting as the stuff I was already reading.

We were assigned The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck. A huge book about farmers, which my family was. I wanted to read of lost civilizations and swashbuckling warriors, not chores. We had to read Silas Marner; I hated it. We had to read The Metamorphosis by Kafka, and by then I’d read several books that did the “transformation” concept better than Kafka, particularly Andre Norton’s Judgment on Janus.

Then we had to read The Scarlett Letter by Hawthorne and I… liked it. It was a historical story, about a foreign time, and yet it connected to my world where religion and sin were major topics. Next we read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I liked it, too — a totally alien world to me and yet full of some of the glamour I found on Barsoom or in ancient worlds of swords & sorcery.

I was introduced to short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Jack London, and we even had one Ray Bradbury tale — though I was already a fan because of books like R is For Rocket and The Martian Chronicles. By the time I left high school I wasn’t quite so adverse to being “assigned” reading. I’d found there was potentially good reading everywhere, in all kinds of stories and by all sorts of authors.

Half a dozen years later, I even reread many books I’d disliked in high school. I found The Grapes of Wrath to be wonderful; it got me to read everything Steinbeck wrote. I still hated Silas Marner, though, and The Metamorphosis. That hasn’t changed yet. But by the end of high school I was ready to explore the more varied literature in college.

College lit classes introduced me to two works that had a profound influence on my own development as a writer. The first was the King James version of The Bible. My family was Catholic and I’d read the Catholic Bible in my teen years.

We didn’t read the whole Bible for my college class but read samples from King James, which is considered — by Catholics — to be a Protestant Bible. (It doesn’t include books that are part of the Catholic Bible, such as Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 & 2 Maccabees, and portions of Esther and Daniel.)

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Bantam Classic)

My college class did not read The Bible for religious reasons. We read it as literature, and the King James version is magnificent literature. I wasn’t even religious anymore myself but I loved the language. Rev, chap 6, verses 7-8:

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

I got goosebumps. The drama and power of such words engaged my emotions and imagination, and I realized such language had been an influence on some of my favorite writers, like Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Ray Bradbury.

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald (Doubleday Anchor)

The second book I read in literature class that influenced my writing — and my thinking about literature — was The Odyssey by Homer. The translation we read was by Robert Fitzgerald and I’m so grateful for that. It, too, was a magnificent effort. I even memorized sections:

The sun rose on the flawless brimming sea, into a sky all brazen—all one brightening, for gods immortal and for mortal men, on plowlands kind with grain.

Homer was an 8th century B.C. Greek poet, and his words in The Odyssey and The Iliad set the stage for the kind of heroic literature we celebrate on this page — tales of heroes and monsters, tales of exotic lands, of wild beasts and adventures, tales to be shouted with ale-soaked breaths, to be told around fires that burn against the forever darkness.

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Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for us was Part Five of his survey of the heroic fantasy of David C. Smith. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.