The Fantasy book that hooked you in.

[thepaladin]

I'd have to say The Wizard of Oz hooked me when I was a kid...but there was a long famine of fantasy after that. Our school had virtually none, I read mythology, mostly Norse when I could find it. I had a Tom Swift and a found one in a later school library...looked up things like "Fairy" and "Elf" in the encyclopedia. Finally in the late 60s I got hold of a few pbs of Science Fiction and Fantasy, there was a collection among them with some Conan in it. Then (of course) I found The Lord of the Rings... the rest "as they say" (and who are "they" anyway?)...is history.

 

[K. Riehl]

My parents got me into Science Fiction at around 8 years old. My father didn't/doesn't like Fantasy but my Mom came home from the library with my first three. Hobbit, Wrinkle in Time, Wizard of Earthsea. It was quite a change from Asimov, Clarke etc.. "you mean there are girl characters?". "wow, the characters are three dimensional." and of course " magic is cool, you can do anything!"

 

[GOLLUM]

I think we've had something similar to this in the past but for the record it was Wizard Of Earthsea that got me hooked. At that stage I hadn't read the Hobbit or LOTR (discovered by me at about age 12). I think I was probably around the age of 7 or 8 at the time. Allan Garner's Weird Stone of Brisingamen was also around that same time.

 

[nixie]

As an adult the book that got me hooked on fantasy was Feist's Magician.

I'd read Enid Blyton's faraway tree, Lewis' Narnia books and a number of others as a child but drifted away when I reached my teens.

 

[Rosemary]

Narnia was mine!

'Waves to Nixie'

 

[The Judge]

I don't read much fantasy, so I'm definitely not hooked, so this probably isn't relevant, but I'm surprised no one has mentioned anything like the Arabian Nights. We didn't have the book ourselves, but we had a Children's Encyclopedia (all 10 volumes - my dad was suckered by a door-to-door salesman) and that contained snippets of different stories including Ali Baba and the like, as well as bowdlerised versions of myths from all over the world. I loved them. The more exotic, the better.

I also had a book which I think may have been similar to Ursa's Golden Treasury, with lots of different stories (though I don't recall myths in that one), my favourite story being how a rabbit turned the tables on a hungry lion who was about to eat him, persuading him to eat carrot stew instead. (And the lion became sleek -- a word that conjures up an image of the story to this day.)

 

[Perpetual Man]

A bit of a tricky one this for me - the obvious answer would be Tolkien. Before that I was mainly science fiction; but I had read The Lion, Te Witch and the Wardrobe.

But to be completely honest I think the actual love of fantasy had been stuck in my mind a long time before that. For reasons that don't need going into here, when I was really young I had problems reading, and in an attempt to help me, a family friend gave me some books to read. They were the Pirate books by Shelia McCullagh, simple adventure stories for children, early readers telling the adventures of pirates, filled with magic and adventure, dragons, treasure and griffins!

They sorted out my reading problems, pushing me ahead of the curve in a few years, moving me onto the Doctor Who novelizations, that led me into SF - but the blueprint was there inside of me waiting to be released, so the question I ask myself, is would I have been drawn to LOtR so much if I had not been primed by the Pirate books many years earlier?

 

[soulsinging]

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.

Started with Dragonlance for me too. I read the chronicles and legends repeatedly when I was young. Later I moved on to Tolkein and Robert Jordan. Unfortunately, Jordan killed it for me for a while and I wandered away from the genre for a long time up until I stumbled upon this place over a year ago.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

The first fantasy book I ever read (also the first grown-up book I ever read) was The Fellowship Of The Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien. I spent the next couple of years reading my way through the whole trilogy.

My first sf was a collection of Asimov's short stories.

I was hooked from the first with both, although my enthusiasm for the genres they introduced me to tends to wax and wane.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

Like Teresa, I will cite a difference in the first books(s) that got me hooked, and the ones that got me in it for the long haul.

The first ones were (SURPRISE!) The Lord of the Rings, at the oh-so-tender age of nineteen. But since I got the books largely because of how much I loved Fellowship - the movie, I wasn't necessarily a fantasy reader, as such, and the large majority of my novel purchases continued to be the thriller-like writers I was reading before (Grisham, Crichton, Koontz etc.).

Then I got into the Harry Potter series, but still, remained in the 'not really a fantasy reader' zone. It was only about two years ago when I started reading The Dark Tower and The Wheel of Time series that I reached a stage that I finally recognised this was the genre I wanted to stick with.

 

[Toby Frost]

I read The Hobbit when quite 10ish and quite enjoyed it, although it didn't suck me into fantasy any more than, say, Narnia or Pooh. Likewise LOTR several years later: I didn't have much urge to go out and find other books like it. What really gripped me was The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights by John Steinbeck, which seems to be a greatly under-appreciated fantasy novel. Not only was it set in a magical land, it had really strong characters grappling with all sorts of events, and great writing.

 

[Quick Ben]

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn by Tad Williams

 

[Cayleb]

** - Not Palgrave's Golden Treasury.

I still have my father's copy of Palgrave on my bookshelf and I still dip into it. It's about ninety years old and tells of him being in Form VI of Aylesbury Grammar School, and is lovely to handle with that thin, rather stiff paper they used to use.

Sorry, totally irrelevant to this thread.

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

This one is easy for me.

The one fantasy book that hooked me in was The Ruby Knight, second of the Elenium trilogy by David Eddings. I then turned to Terry Brooks, and eventually to Piers Anthony, but it was Eddings that got me hooked on fantasy. RIP, Mr. Eddings, RIP.

 

[CadleyX]

The first fantasy I read was Krondor: The Betrayal by Raymond Feist, I enjoyed it but it was and is quite simplistic. It led me to reading Magician which absolutely blew me away, and the left of the Riftwar Saga, and I didn't really move away from that to other stuff before I'd read the 11th or 12th book and got bored.

 

[thatollie]

The Dying Earth - Jack Vance
I picked up the Masterworks edition at the library and was hooked.

 

[Thadlerian]

Could have been Watership Down by Richard Adams, except that there's a whole lot of years between reading that and getting into Fantasy in general.

Maybe Dune.

 

[Tansy]

I guess the Faraway Tree and Wishing Chair by Enid Blyton got me hooked initially, Rudyard Kipling, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz and Grimm Brothers as well when very young

Then read a lot of Tolkein, Piers Anthony,Stephen Donaldson, some Anne Macaffrey etc always loves a weird tale from a very young age, anything that cpatured my imagination and allowed me to escape

 

[Orion]

A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin.

I almost wish he wasnt my first read(as far as fantasy goes), cuz that set the bar pretty damn high. (He's still my favorite.)

 

[Chel]

This isn't an easy question!

The first time I knew what I was reading was Fantasy was LotR - mother read it for my brother and me. Then my brother snitched the books and read on ahead in secret, mother got annoyed, and I hated my brother for not reading fast enough so I could get the books. I think I was around 9 or 10 at the time.

I'm fairly certain I read a lot of other fantasy before that though. Are the Moomin troll-books considered fantasy? And of course, Narnia - I don't know when I started reading them, but it was early in life (and now I'm reading them for the kids at work, they love it!).

...I think I need to call Mum and check if she knows.