Adventures in Fiction

Many people around my age were first drawn into the world of literature by Harry Potter. Whilst I too enjoyed the boy wizard, my love for books had long since been cemented by the time I discovered the wizarding world. Once my reading ability reached a decent level I was exploring all sorts of incredible worlds. I was really lucky to become a teenager when fiction aimed at teenagers underwent a huge boom.


One of the earliest series I discovered was The Edge Chronicles. Written by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell with Riddell's gorgeous line drawings throughout, the series tells the stories of young adventurers exploring and surviving the fantasy world of The Edge. I can remember my Dad reading the first book Beyond the Deepwoods to me and being enthralled by the journey and the monstrous creatures young Twig encounters on the way. 

The Edge
I loved, and indeed still do, the way books can take you anywhere. I enjoyed Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer, the boy genius criminal mastermind whose plan to kidnap a fairy led him to a whole load of encounters with the fae as much as I enjoyed the missions of teenage MI6 agent Alex Rider by Anthony Horowitz. One day I could be in the Arctic watching Artemis facing evil pixie Opal Koboi, the next I could be seeing Alex break out of a criminal mastermind's secret base using acid disguised as zit cream.

Gradually, my tastes began to get a bit darker. I adored Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. This was partly because of the way Snicket writes, likes he is talking to you personally as he tells the story. But it's also because it's a dark story about three children trying to understand the tragic reality of the world and the evil within it. I distinctly remember being looked after my a family freidn whilst my brother was in hospital when I was about twelve and telling the horrified family friend about the flesh-devouring Lachrymose leeches with much joy.

Count Olaf
Then as I got older I could explore even more gruesome works. I dipped into Darren Shan's The Saga of Darren Shan about a teenage vampire but it was his Demonata series which I really loved. I have a real penchant for fantasy monsters and that series has loads of them. Though not aimed at adults the series depicts truly horrific scenes with plenty of characters being viciously savaged to death. Indeed, it even opens with the gruesome slaughter of one of the protagonist's parents.

Artery, a demon
When I was about sixteen I discovered that Darren Shan was signing books at a bookshop not too far away. I stood in line at a shopping centre for some time, myself filled with excitement and my rucksack filled with the first five Demonata books ready to be signed. The encounter with Shan was brief but I still have the five signed books and the sixth which was released on that day and has a proper handwritten dedication to me in it. I also have the other four in the series which I would still like to get signed one day.

Whilst other teenagers obsessed with pop stars, I obsessed with authors. Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell, Eoin Colfer, Anthony Horowitz, Lemony Snicket, Darren Shan and yes, J.K. Rowling, were the people I admired and wanted to be like.

My love of books remains. I read all sorts of things these days from gritty crime to epic science fiction to Victorian adventure and beyond. It's down to those few authors who gave me a love of reading. Brilliantly, I can still enjoy their work. Anthony Horowitz mainly writes adult fiction these days including crime stories and novels featuring Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. Darren Shan also writes adult books under the name Darren Dash and J.K. Rowling has a superb crime series under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

Some of the series I mentioned are still going too. Horowitz recently released a new Alex Rider book and Paul Stewart and Chris Ridell have continued to intermittently publish new Edge Chronicles books. Indeed, I'm currently reading the thirteenth and supposedly final book Edge Chronicles book called The Descenders. I first visited the Edge when I was about ten and some seventeen years later it feels like a place I know very well. It's so lovely to be able to return one final time and relive the epic adventures I feel like I was part of.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventure of the Great Reset

Image
In which I reflect and regroup... I am not going to lie, 2024 has been tough so far. You begin a year with such high hopes and sometimes the year decides to take those high hopes and crush them in the most brutal way.  I'm currently enjoying the tranquility of the summer holidays and a rest that has perhaps never felt quite so well-earned. Perhaps the best piece of advice I was given during the many training sessions I have had over the last few years is to make the most of the resets in your life. That might be small resets, as small as a few seconds in the middle of the day or they might be bigger resets like six weeks off work.  Part of this reset has been getting outside. The year so far has not been helped by the endless miserable weather. We always like to joke in the UK that it rains a lot but this year has taken that to the next level. We often think of climate change as meaning we will get hotter weather but it just means that the weather will change and will get more...
Read more

Best Picture 2024

Image
The 2024 Oscars ceremony is mere hours away and I've finally finished writing my annual post about this year's Best Picture nominees. This is my sixth year doing this and once again I've seen all the nominees. Let's take a look! American Fiction Thelonius 'Monk' Ellison, played by Jeffrey Wright who is perhaps best known as Felix Leiter in the Daniel Craig Bond films, is an intelligent African-American professor and writer whose high-brow books sell poorly. Frustrated, he writes a satire of "black" books which is unexpectedly taken by the publishing world to be a serious piece of literature. It's a hilarious film with Wright having lots of fun taking on Monk's alter-ego. At the same time though it's also a clever critique of the sort of media that is consumed by white people to make them feel better about racial issues and the film points out that black people can have normal lives beyond ghettos and gangs- the film itself also tells an ord...
Read more

1000 Miles

Image
Famous Scottish duo The Proclaimers once sang the words "I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more just to be the man who walks a thousand miles to fall down at your door". These lyrics are now part of my plan for 2019. Well, the falling down bit isn't part of the plan but with dyspraxia the likelihood of falling down at someone's door during the next twelve months is not out of the question. I have never tended to set traditional resolutions but I do love a challenge. # walk1000miles is a big challenge run by Country Walking  magazine. The rules are fairly flexible but the idea is simply to walk 1000 miles in a calendar year. 1000 miles is about the distance between the UK and Poland. Now I actually do a fair amount of walking and have hit my 10,000 daily step target every day for nearly three years now. Walking a total of 1000 miles would probably not be a huge challenge if I counted every bit of walking I did, including the many miles of chasing chi...
Read more