There is I think a formative period in the life of a young reader when certain ideas about what fiction 'should' do, or what good fiction looks like, become relatively fixed. I would locate this around the age of 9-11. This is the period at which one is beginning to develop taste. Prior to that, one basically has no discernment - just a vague sense that some things look boring and some things look appealing. Gradually, as one approaches adolescence, one gets a sense that one likes certain things, and these tend to crystallise into habits of mind. One begins to get an idea that X is good and Y is bad, as opposed to simply being attracted to whatever one is attracted to.
Alternatively, you could think of books read during that phase as being a little bit like heroin. They give you a high and you spend the rest of your life chasing it.
I would like to present myself as being much more interesting than I am, but I confess that I (and, I suspect, you) am an exceptionally conventional nerd and read The Lord of the Rings around that age and was indelibly affected by the experience. No work of fiction I have read since has been quite as important to me. But it is important to me in a slightly unconventional way.
The first reason for this is that I read The Two Towers first. This was for the simply reason that another boy in school (whose name I can still recall, though I won't publicly out the swine) had already got The Fellowship of the Ring out from the local library. I was eaten up with envy and decided to plough on ahead with The Two Towers, with the idea in mind I would come back to The Fellowship at a later date.
My experience of encountering The Lord of the Rings was therefore pretty unusual - it began for me in exactly the opposite to the way Tolkien intended it, in media res, with Legolas, Aragorn and Gimli charging around looking for orcs to kill and also trying to find Boromir. It was sink or swim for a 10 year old and it turned out I could swim. I pieced together what was going on and, although a huge amount remained a mystery (for a very long time I thought that the hobbits were old men, for some reason), knew that I loved what I was reading. It was a hundred times more grown-up and weighty than anything I had read before.
The result of this is that I developed a taste, which I still have, for stories which do not take the time to explain things. I like to be confused and to struggle a little to figure out what is going on. I like a narrative which doesn't take prisoners. And I despise exposition of any kind; I would rather not know what is going on than to be told. The funny thing about this is that it is most certainly not Tolkien's doing - if anything he spends an inordinate amount of time on setup at the start of The Lord of the Rings - and is purely an artefact of having read the books in the wrong order.
The second reason is that, having read The Two Towers, I then went back and read The Fellowship of the Ring. And I was completely enchanted by the smallness and innocence of its opening chapters. It is easy to overlook The Two Towers, but I would go out on a limb and call it the most exciting of the three books. It is full of grandeur and derring-do, and has the best (I think) battle sequences. To go from that to The Fellowship is to take a huge shift down to a much lower gear. But that, perhaps counter-intuitively, gave it great appeal. It felt warm and comfortable.
More importantly, it had an enchanting air of discovery about it. It was like encountering forgotten lore that explained what had come afterwards, allowing me to unlock many of the mysteries that had puzzled me in making my way through The Two Towers. This gave it a much more intoxicating atmosphere than I think it would if I had encountered it 'cold'. The feeling was presumably close to what it would have been like if the Star Wars prequels had been good films.
This instilled in me an abiding love for that mood of discovery, and it remains the case that the section of The Fellowship of the Ring before the arrival at Rivendell is not only my favourite portion of the books, but probably my favourite 200 pages or so of fiction in general. It is by no means perfect. But whenever I read it, I feel the same sense that I did more than thirty years ago, encountering it for the first time, and feeling though I was gaining access to privileged information that would make everything that I had previously read clear.
The sum of this is that I have a very strongly developed taste for books that do not explain themselves, and which one has to figure out as one goes along with minimal exposition, and also for beginnings which take their time building up to the 'plot' proper. Many of my other favourite fantasy series (The Book of the New Sun, Stone Dance of the Chameleon, and even A Song of Ice and Fire) have this kind of quality to them. No doubt it is partly Tolkien's influence on the genre that has resulted in these types of stories proliferating, and no doubt if you are reading this you have drunk from the same well. But I am curious as to whether readers of the blog have had other experiences in their 'formative fiction reading' years and what kind of tastes this endowed them with.
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