The Roots of Early Love Go Deep: Five Stories Which Affected Me Deeply in My Early Teens
One of the many minor consequences of having a child – in my case, anyway – is the extent to which you suddenly become nostalgic for the stories of your youth.
As such, and even though my shelves are overflowing with new and as-yet unread books, my thoughts keep straying to stories I loved in my early teens. And not just novels, but games, films, and TV shows, too. Revisiting these narratives as an adult, however, can be something of a mixed blessing: for every thrill experienced on finding that a particular story touches me just as deeply now as then, there’s often a corresponding moment of disappointment on identifying a hitherto unnoticed, winceworthy problem.
Even so, there’s an important difference between acknowledging that the things we love – and particularly the things we first loved as teens and children – are flawed, and throwing them out entirely. We cannot wholly excise our passions without removing something vital of ourselves; instead, we must learn to live with them.
What follows here, then, in no particular order, is a slightly different list to the sort of thing I might usually compile: five stories which affected me deeply in my early teens and which continue to influence me now, sometimes without my even consciously realizing it. The roots of our early loves go deep and even though I haven’t explored some of these stories in years, as I go about revisiting them, I’m consistently amazed to find echoes of them, not only in my own work, but in my expectations for the works of others.
Sprawl is my favorite virtue of the novel. Not just this novel, Mage’s Blood, but novels generally, in all their varied glories. I may be the only person on Earth who is not at all perturbed by the ever-increasing length of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books and I was probably the only reader of Harry Potter who wished J.K. Rowling had made her last volume about fifty pages longer, though this is not the time to say why. Sprawl may be a virtue in novels, but in blog posts, not so much. I picked up David Hair’s first volume of the new Moontide Quartet series because it promised a large ensemble cast arrayed in a family saga big enough to keep all those characters busy for years. The word “Quartet” in the title helps, too, with its suggestion that the author knows where he is going with the series. And if the first volume is anything to go by, I think he probably does.
