The Fantasy book that hooked you in.

[bikersquirrel83]

Mine was Ursula Le Guins 'A wizard of earth sea'. What an utterly amazing story. I read it first when I was 12 and have loved it ever since!

 

[Heather Myst]

It was either The Lord of the Rings, Terry Brooks Sword of Shannara, or Piers Anthony's A Spell for Chameleon.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

The first that hooked me in, at a very young age, was The Wizard of Oz. I was permanently hooked, years later, by The Lord of the Rings.

I do love A Wizard of Earthsea, more and more as the years go on, although it was The Tombs of Atuan that really drew me into that series.

 

[Mouse]

I couldn't get into Earthsea!

I really really can't remember what the first fantasy book was. Must've been something I got from the library because I hope I'd remember if it was still on my shelf. I think it was a young adult fantasy though.

 

[Connavar]

My second fantasy book and the one that hooked me in was The Sword in the Storm by David Gemmell. As you can see by my nick Connavar the name of the hero in that book, newbie that i was i read that book the same month i joined these forums.

I dont have decades of nostalgia that makes the book holy in my eyes but it is still one of the most enjoyable fantasy books i have read in the hole field.

 

[chrispenycate]

I've worked it out. It was the sword in the stone by T. H. White. I must have been five or six, and it was a hardcover book; I remember it very heavy.

That is, of course, if you don't count the house at Pooh corner as fantasy. I already officially owned this when I first went to school at four, although I needed help on long words like heffalump.

Narnia came slightly later.

Oh, and Alice? No, Alice came from the library, while the sword was a family book, that just sort of gravitated into my shelf…

 

[Ursa major]

*cough*Mary Mouse*cough*

Okay, that's not really fantasy as such. (Nor is, say, Gulliver Guineapig from Playhour.)

What might be considered so was some of the content of a book (old even when I read from it in the early '60s) called, I think, The Golden Treasury**. It, and another book of similar vintage whose title I can't recall, contained stories about, for instance, the Greek and Norse gods, and various tales of naughty boys*** living in the Middle Ages and a collection of fairy tales.

This all may explain why I'm more into SF than Fantasy.



** - Not Palgrave's Golden Treasury.

*** - In my memory, they are always called Dicken.

 

[nj1]

When I was young, early teens, I loved the DRAGON LANCE books, fell out of reading for a while (I personally blame a keen interest in the opposite sex), then in my twenties a friend gave me LEGEND by David Gemmell and the rest as they say was history.

 

[dwndrgn]

A dig through dad's box of paperbacks when I was out of reading material (mysteries mostly back then) uncovered Nor Crystal Tears by Alan Dean Foster and that was it. I was hooked on lands and people that were not like me. I never read a whole lot of scifi even though it was my in, but it was my lead in to fantasy because it wasn't really about space and technology, it was about how people could be different but the same. After that I read his Spellsinger series and the rest is history.

 

[Ursa major]

It's funny you should mention that....

The first time I saw a scene from Star Trek, I knew it was for me: it had an alien in the crew. (Okay, Mr Spock wasn't that alien, but in those far-off days, it was the thought that counted.)

 

[Arentil]

The first would be Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks and the rest of what was then a trillogy. Also Dragonflight by Anne Mcaffrey (in an omnibus edition with Dragonquest and White Dragon). I had moved from my home town and they were gifts from my best friend at the time to keep me company in a new place.

 

[Talysia]

I think the Narnia books were the first fantasy books that I remember being fascinated by, but the actual book that drew me into the genre was Anne McCaffrey's The White Dragon. I still love that book.

Oddly enough, I didn't read Earthsea until quite recently, but I love it nonetheless.

 

[biodroid]

I used to hate fantasy coz it just did not make sense to me but then I read Winter Warriors by the legend himself You know who Conn I was pretty much hooked and then jumped around from horror to fantasy still more focused on horror. Then came Brent Weeks and for me that was my second hook.

 

[elfdragonlord]

The first fantasy book I got was actually a Fighting Fantasy book, so it wasn't a conventional story but one where you make your own choices (it was Trial of the Champions, I think).

But around the same time I remember reading Tolkien's The Hobbit, so I guess that was the first fantasy novel to 'hook me in' to the genre.

I was about 12 at the time

 

[elvet]

Do you mean hooked into the book, or hooked into Fantasy?
My first fantasy read was Lord of the Rings, way back when I was a teenager. I certainly got hooked into the story, and eventually read Hobbit, Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and some of The History of Middle earth.
The reason I started reading other fantasy was Fionavar Tapestry. To be honest, I really didn't think that anything could compare to LotR, and was more than pleasently surprised when I found other epics that captured my imagination.

 

[Jon Sprunk]

Kothar and the Wizard Slayer was the first fantasy book I read (not counting fairy tales read to me as a child), followed by The Hobbit. But it was, I think, the Conan series that really propelled me down the path of the dark side...

 

[Clansman]

A book called My Father's Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannet, when I was about 8. A short little thing, but a sweet story about a boy who goes on a quest to rescue a dragon that is being used by evil men to run a ferry between two very dangerous shores.

Later, when I was about 13, I read a pulp fantasy called The Sword and the Satchel, by Elizabeth Boyer. Apparently it was the first of a series, but I never read any more of it, because then I discovered....

JRRT.

 

[Daisy-Boo]

I first read The Hobbit and LoTR when I was in my teens but for some reason, never thought of those books as Fantasy. I was a hard-core Science Fiction fan and was adamantly against Fantasy until a few years ago.

I read the first Anita Blake book and thought, "hey, this is pretty good". Even though I lost interest in the Anita Blake books by about book 4, I still had an interest in Urban Fantasy, which lead me to the first Joe Pitt and Harper Blaine books. I was hooked.

Now I'm a very enthusiastic fan of Dark and Urban Fantasy and am making tentative forays into sword and sorcery books.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Hobbit/LotR for me too...

 

[Liese]

Charmed Life and Power of Three by Diana Wynne Jones. At that time I didn't realise they were by the same author.