#madeleine l'engle was the closest experience but even that did not light up my brain in the same way

[anghraine]

This has nothing to do with SW, I just felt like saying it:

I feel like a lot of us on this site probably could identify a specific book or series we read as children or teenagers that impacted us more than any other. It's the book/series that disproportionately shaped our senses of what a book or a genre could be and changed us in some fundamental way beyond the reach of every other book we were reading at the time. People joke these days about books or other media that "alter your brain chemistry," but this book honestly did feel like that.

Maybe this isn't everyone, but it was definitely something that happened to me as a kid. I still own the same copy of the book that did this for me. I've hung onto it for over 20 years, partly because I still love the story, and partly because I have such a strong sentimental attachment to my particular paperback copy of a book that blew open my sense of what a fantasy story could be and what ideas it could engage with.

It not only made me want to read the next book in its series, it made me want to write books myself and imagine my own worlds beyond my hobby of writing little sketches and stories for myself. I previously had no intention of showing those scraps to anyone else, but this book made me want to write fantasy seriously, to write things I might some day show other people without being embarrassed about it. And the book not only inspired me to want this, but convinced me I could do it. I started writing creatively in earnest and I never stopped.

It wasn't any of the books I usually talk about, either. Here's what it was for me:

[Photographs of a paperback copy of Diane Duane's High Wizardry from around 2001]

I've been thinking of what fantasy favorites I'll re-read after I drag myself through what remains of my dissertation and ... honestly, it will probably be High Wizardry.