I got hooked on books at an early age. I blame my parents for this as they used to take me to the library on a regular basis and the habit stuck. As a child I worked through the collected works of Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton and FrankRichards: once I'd discovered an author I liked I tended to work my way through the collected works.
We also had shelves full of books in the house and so at a relatively early age I read such wartime classics, as The Great Escape, The Wooden Horse and The Naked Island as well as far too many Agatha Christie novels than were good for a young teenager.
The set books we read in school were either too young (The Wind in the Willows which in any case I had already read) or just plain wrong (David Copperfield). And then in the third year we had a new English Teacher who staggered into class at the beginning of the year with a pile of thick paperbacks by a writer called Tolkien. The first few chapters were slow going, but once I'd reached The Shadow of the Past I was hooked and finished all three volumes in two weeks.
After this I read The Hobbit (unconsciously setting a precedent for Peter Jackson many years later) and everything else that Tolkien had in print. From this point on I was hooked on fantasy and discovered Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast as well as Michael Moorcock., Ursula Le Guin and Angela Carter.
There were the inevitable gaps in my reading career for things such as university, work and life in general but I've done my best to keep up to date with fantasy. But somehow in all this Discworld slipped under my radar. As the years went by I became increasingly aware of Terry Pratchett as he published his latest novel, but realising that they were a sequence I'd never had a chance to make a start and as the years went by the mountain became even higher.
Then shortly after the sad news of Sir Terry's death in March 2015 I had a stroke of luck: having planned to resign from my job I was made redundant literally days before my intended resignation date. I'm now a consultant with the security of an unplanned severance payment and time on my hands to start all those projects that up to now had just existed in my dreams.
I'd already read Good Omens, the novel jointly written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I've also read just about everything else that Neil Gaiman has written after being hooked on the first short story I read (A Study in Emerald, collected in Fragile Things) which was a superb conflation of Conan Doyle and HP Lovecraft.
Now finally it is time for me to pack my luggage and set off to explore Discworld.
We also had shelves full of books in the house and so at a relatively early age I read such wartime classics, as The Great Escape, The Wooden Horse and The Naked Island as well as far too many Agatha Christie novels than were good for a young teenager.
The set books we read in school were either too young (The Wind in the Willows which in any case I had already read) or just plain wrong (David Copperfield). And then in the third year we had a new English Teacher who staggered into class at the beginning of the year with a pile of thick paperbacks by a writer called Tolkien. The first few chapters were slow going, but once I'd reached The Shadow of the Past I was hooked and finished all three volumes in two weeks.
After this I read The Hobbit (unconsciously setting a precedent for Peter Jackson many years later) and everything else that Tolkien had in print. From this point on I was hooked on fantasy and discovered Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast as well as Michael Moorcock., Ursula Le Guin and Angela Carter.
There were the inevitable gaps in my reading career for things such as university, work and life in general but I've done my best to keep up to date with fantasy. But somehow in all this Discworld slipped under my radar. As the years went by I became increasingly aware of Terry Pratchett as he published his latest novel, but realising that they were a sequence I'd never had a chance to make a start and as the years went by the mountain became even higher.
Then shortly after the sad news of Sir Terry's death in March 2015 I had a stroke of luck: having planned to resign from my job I was made redundant literally days before my intended resignation date. I'm now a consultant with the security of an unplanned severance payment and time on my hands to start all those projects that up to now had just existed in my dreams.
I'd already read Good Omens, the novel jointly written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I've also read just about everything else that Neil Gaiman has written after being hooked on the first short story I read (A Study in Emerald, collected in Fragile Things) which was a superb conflation of Conan Doyle and HP Lovecraft.
Now finally it is time for me to pack my luggage and set off to explore Discworld.
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