First Fantasy Book Poll

[cgw]

Curious about a generational question:

[Randy M.]

Curious about a generational question:

Lost the question there somewhere.

Anyway ... I was born before 1972, and before I got around to Tolkein in about 1975 or '76, I was reading Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson. And I think you'll find there's a subset of people born pre-1972 whose entry to fantasy was through magazine fantasy/horror: Weird Tales (Lovecraft, C. A. Smith, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, early Bradbury, etc.), Unknown (Anthony Boucher, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Leiber, Fred Brown, Fritz Leiber, etc.), or The Magazine of Fantasy and S.F. (Poul Anderson, Leiber, Sturgeon, Avram Davidson, etc.). Admittedly the crowd who read WT and Unknown on initial publication is thinning rapidly, still a lot of the work from those magazines was being republished in mass market paperbacks from the 1950s into the 1980s: Conjure Wife, Darker than You Think, and collections of stories drawn exclusively from each magazine.

Then there was the mid-1960s surge of popularity for Sword & Sorcery when the Robert E. Howard collections with the FrankFrazetta (sp?) covers started showing up.


Randy M.

[Obtuse]

I was born in 1972 and thus am apparently excluded from this poll.

Screw it, I'm voting anyway. First fantasy was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

[End Of Disc One]

After 72 and my first was also The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But if we're talking adult sized novels, it was The Eye of the World followed closely by The Hobbit.

[Rulkez]

Born 82 and only just attempting my first LOTR read through now.

[Agassizii]

Born in 93 and first fantasy book was Wizard's First Rule.

[cgw]

My theory is that a greater percentage of over 40 will have read The Hobbit first because starting in the 80's there seems to be a larger selection that people may start with (e.g. Belgariad, Wheel of Time, etc). Just a theory. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe may upset my theory a little (if YA counts, assuming it is YA, I never read it)

[Santaria]

My first that I can remember was the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe as an adolescent, though I think I read some fantasy as a kid, time travel, the indian in the cupboard. In any case, I didn't read anything as a teenager/ young adult unless you count horror and Anne Rice. And then one day my husband came home with The Eye of The World. Been hooked ever since.

[flickwizard]

Born before '72. Hmmm....first fantasy was probably The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster (does that count? At the time, I thought it was the best book ever written. Now that I think on it, it still is pretty great.).

Let's see. Then came The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe(followed by the rest of the series), The Last Unicornby Peter Beagle, and then The Hobbitand LOTR. After, I started on the Deryni books by Katherine Kurtz, and kept going from there.

[PeterWilliam]

'71 and The Hobbit during reading time in the third grade with Mrs. Barruzzi. Somewhere around the same time, my uncle gave me a box-set of The Chronicles of Narnia. Later, in the fifth grade, read the various Prydain Chronicles.

[gljones]

Hobbit, absolutely was the first.I want to say it was 75 or 76

[oceanworld]

Ok born after 1972 and the first fantasy book I've read, you know I really can't remember, I didn't start reading fantasy until after high school.

[imaster]

Born after 72 and I can't quite recall if I read "The Magician's Nephew" or Susan Cooper's "Over Sea, Under Stone" first. It was somewhere when I was 8-10 years old anyway. Then I mostly read YA horror for a couple of years before LoTR entered around when I was 12-13 and changed what I looked for at the library.

[JasonLee]

Born in 1966 and I'm pretty dang sure The Hobbit was the first fantasy book I ever read. I think it was in 8th grade. Robert Heinlein was the very first author I ever read, though.

[DurzoBlint]

Born in 1975, as best I can recall my first book was A Wrinkle In Time (maybe third or fourth grade). Shortly there after was Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Then lost interest in the genre until high school when I was introduced to the Dragonlance Chronicles. Been building on it since then.