Frank Kogan

The number-one most influential books on me as a young person (and probably still to this day) were the Narnia books, followed closely by Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series. Beyond that, I have a lot of affectionate memories but not a lot that's stuck with me to the extent that I've regularly returned to it in adulthood. L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series, I guess, and Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain; but by the time I was fourteen, I was more or less done with anything that couldn't be found in the regular Fiction shelves of libraries and bookstores.

I was a kid in the 80s, but I wasn't a kid of the 80s -- and in fact I still think it's kind of weird when kids are into current, ongoing series. But I never understood reading as a social thing (I actually rarely understood anything as a social thing -- intense, personal, and incommunicable experiences were my default setting, so of course I became a writer to try to communicate them), and I don't even know how I would have gone about finding out about new stuff. I never knew anyone outside my family who was interested in books before I reached high school. And by then I was into Tolkien and followed standard adolescent-nerd paths until they too fed me up and I escaped into the less well-traveled wilds of Wodehouse and Sayers and learned how to follow my muse.