This meme is just too interesting to pass by

[indri]

I don't recall very much about what I read before I was eight. I know I loved 101 Dalmations, Elisabeth Beresford's Womble books and Enid Blyton's The Wishing Chair but I could no longer tell you why. So I'll only write about what came after. In retrospect, I'm amazed at how clearly I remember some of this and how I much I must have understood at the time: remind me never to underestimate eight-year-olds.

Bunty. Not the first comic I read, but the one that I remember most clearly, a weekly that contained episodes of long, serialised stories, all of which featured young heroines struggling against the odds. I'm surprised to learn that modern critical scholarship (warning: this is a pdf file) thinks of Bunty as a comic preparing working-class British girls for the passive consumption of romance mags like Jackie; I only remember the stories in which girls Did Stuff. My all-time favourite was "The Black Cat" in which a fourteen-year-old gymnast slipped out of her house every night to fight for the French Resistance. They also had one in which Maid Marian was running things while Robin Hood was off at the Crusades. I also recall interminable stories involving Victorian waifs who always turned out to have wealthy relatives and "The Four Marys", wanky boarding school girls who had precisely one interesting adventure, when a cursed statue of Thoth caused them to be attacked by flocks of angry birds. It was years before I realised that the sources there were Conan Doyle and Hitchcock. I remember that story mostly because it gave me nightmares.

That blue book about scientists' lives. I have no idea of the title or who wrote it, only that my dad won it as a school prize. It recounted, in what I now recognise to be an appallingly teleological fashion, great success stories of science and technology, such as the discovery of vaccination. For the next couple of decades, I fondly imagined that science was a neat and orderly thing, not the messy and rambunctious activity that it is. I don't think this book alone persuaded me to become a scientist, but it helped.

Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman by Dorothy Sterling. Tubman was born a slave in the American South but escaped to the North in the years before the US Civil War. She repeatedly returned to the South in order to help others onto the "Freedom Train" escape route. I cried over this book; even now, more than two decades since I last read it, I'm tearing up, my emotional memory of it is that strong. She seemed to me to be brave and smart and yet an ordinary person. She was also illiterate and on one occasion (no doubt mythologised) soldiers searched for her on a train as she sat petrified, clutching a book and praying that she had it the right way up.

Cosmos by Carl Sagan. God, I loved this book, and the TV series. I was certain by then that I wanted to be a scientist and writer, so Sagan's work spoke to me. Its mix of science and history, its lyricism and passion, its liberal humanism and fears for the future -- it was all heady, heady stuff for a nine-year-old. I think that for some time I wanted to grow up to be Carl Sagan. Still wouldn't mind working for the Jet Propulsion Lab, actually. Hey, they found evidence of water on Mars! Clearly they need me to do their groundwater simulations for them. Then I too could say, "Billions and billions..." only with a rather different accent.

Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. I don't think I've ever really escaped from the lure of the hansom cab, those pea-soupers and the power of pure deduction. Never mind that the plots didn't always make sense or that he was writing about a world that had already slipped into the past when he wrote these. These inspired my devotion to nineteenth and early twentieth century science fiction and weird tales. In fact, this possibly ties with HG Well's War of the Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau as well as another favourite, Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. If I mention that I also loved (but was less influenced by) Dracula, my fondness for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen should be apparent (um, the comic not the execrable film).

New Scientist. My siblings and I fought over fresh issues of this magazine. My dad (the actual subscriber) had to bribe us with copies of The Beano comic to prise it from our hands (my God, we must have been weird little kids). I still read this British-based news mag, which has never been afraid to discuss the political implications of science and engineering. It's also much more breezy and populist than the stuffier Scientific American. I still have yellowed snipped-out copies of its now-defunct comic strip, "Albert the Experimental Rat".

Some book about Hiroshima. This included lengthy eyewitness descriptions of the immediate aftermath. Led me to freeze in terror whenever I heard an aircraft overhead. Also prompted a regrettable saturation in post-apocalyptic novels by John Christopher, John Wyndham and others. I was soon fearing so many possible futures that I had to give up on the entire genre for my sanity's sake.

Judge Dredd collected editions. Violence, horror and savage political satire depicted in technicolor-drenched detail: no wonder my mum was horrified when she found these under my bed. Some of the imagery from these still turns my stomach and no wonder, as these stories were written by some very angry and talented people. I stopped reading when Dredd destroyed MegaCity Two by nuclear bomb; even recognising it as satire, I couldn't stomach it. I feel much the same way now about Warren Ellis's equally vicious and worthwhile Transmetropolitan.

Some collection of short stories by Anton Chekhov. After reading "The Lady with the Lapdog", Gorky wrote to Chekhov that everything he himself wrote seemed 'coarse and written not with a pen but with a log'. Hell, yeah. (I suspect that what I aim for with my fiction prose style is some strange mishmash of Chekhov, Wells and Bradbury.)

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice. Can't read her later work without vomiting over my shoes but this hit me hard in my teens. Belatedly persuaded me that sexual attraction was worth paying attention to, despite the fact that no actual sex happens in the book. It's all slashy UST, not that I knew what slash was back then. I also took to heart Armand's speech on the paradoxical preciousness of life (a bit like Angel's Epiphany).

Others: short stories by Bradbury and LeGuin, Arthur Lobel's Frog and Toad books, an anthology of Greek myths, Lewis' Narnia Chronicles, Robert Westall's The Machine Gunners, the first edition of The Advanced Dungeon and Dragons Dungeonmaster's Guide, a book of feminist psychology, the sf of Monica Hughes, Adam's Hitch-hikers' Guide to the Galaxy, a book on geological processes, the compiled Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, a remarkable number of anthologies compiled by Peter Haining and the cumulative effect of far too many Dr Who novelisations. And now I want to write about audiovisual works as well, like the TV series Monkey and the problematic nature of Miss Piggy as feminist icon; but it's late now and I have work tomorrow and this is quite long enough.

G'night, all.

Update: I just put "Miss Piggy feminist icon" into Google and found this:

As a way of introduction, let us compare Star Trek: The Next Generation's beautiful Counselor Troi to SwineTrek's equally stunning First Mate Piggy. Both shows are now in reruns, had male captains with problem- hair, and featured "space age" uniforms.

Miss Piggy was first mate in 1981. Yet on the 1990s Starship Enterprise, the highest ranking women are only caretakers. Troi is subordinate to two men, one of them a former lover. On the other hand, Piggy is only technically a first mate; it's clear from her behavior that she is the one who runs the show; Captain Link is simply a buffoon. Which of these two seemingly similiar women is the true feminist? Besides, Piggy would never be forced into a v-neck polyester body stocking; too utterly tacky for her!

There must be more surely.

Really going to bed now.