I've always read, or had read to me as a child, fantasy and fairy tales because that was what my mother had enjoyed when she was young. Like many people I really became a fantasy fan when I read LOTR, aged ten or elven, and it took me nearly three months but it was an amazing experience and I still rememeber the feeling when I finished that book which pretty much blew my young mind. I had read The Hobbit before and that had really got me into the whole reading thing, my parents would read the start of a chapter and then leave me to finish it myself (although I do rememebr reading a bit further each night to see what happened!). I was a rather late developer because the books at school never really caught my imagination enough for me to want to read them.
I was pretty lucky because my mother used to work in the local library and she knew all the staff so I could get my hands on all of the new books and borrow whatever I wanted for the adult section. I must have read their whole stock of fantasy in a couple of years and I developed quite a sophisticated taste for it! My mum was a very good guide and I manged to dig out the good stuff, all the children's classics and a lot of the stuff from the sixties and seventies too (Narnia, Five Children and It, Once and Future King, Alan Garner, Joan Aiken and so on).
Then I had a period of reading books about teenage girls but I was soon over that and back into fantasy. I was a big fan of the Redwall series around that time (having somehow missed them out in my early reading, probably because they were written more recently than the books my mum recomended). I was very into animal fantasies for a while (try William Horwood's Duncton books, a more adult version of the genre) and it was the time I satrted writing my own stories. Then I discovered humourous fantasy and more recently I've been onto SF classics. I'm trying to find some quality authors who are still alive and writing fantasy.
I read LOTR every couple of years and it still knocks me out!
