5 Books That Left an Impression

5 Books That Left an Impression

I did not really become an 'avid' reader until my Middle School years. I'm not sure if you could call it avid since I really did not read much extracurricular material that was outside what was required in school. In Elementary school, they had a reading program that was designed to get us into the habit of reading. It was a large list of books, and the goal was to see how many of those books that we could read in a school year. I wasn’t a very good student in Elementary school (or Middle or High school for that matter) mainly because I had a large imagination and a small attention span! And the idea of somebody giving me a list of books and telling me to read only the books on that list did not appeal to me as there were no real genres that appealed to me at that age.

Things changed when I hit Middle school, and it had nothing to do with any reading program in school. Where I lived, if we were within 2 miles of school, we had to walk to school. No bus rides for us. My, have times changed! We even had to cross a 4-lane split highway to get there! We rode our bikes to school most days. There was a short cut to school which went through a strip mall. In this strip mall was a bookstore and one day, on the way home from school, I decided to stop in and take a look around. By this time in my life I was mowing yards for a little bit of spending money since we never received an allowance as kids. It was on this very day that I discovered something that completely changed my attitude towards reading. I discovered the revived and continuation series of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter and illustrated by Frank Frazetta.

I knew about Conan because I had seen the Conan the Barbarian movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan (the edited public tv version of course!). I cannot remember the first Conan book I bought; however, I am sure it was in the Conan the Adventurer series. I read the book in one afternoon and was hooked! They only had one book in the series and a new book showed up once a month. I would stop by the bookstore every day in the week that the new book was supposed to show up and buy the next in the series as soon as it hit the shelf. And I would read each one all the way through on the day that I bought them (probably at the neglect of any school work for that day!). It was with this series of books that I learned that you could travel to far flung areas and be completely immersed in exciting adventures. While I was reading, the world around me melted away and I was totally engrossed in the story and it seemed like I was right there, with Conan, taking on whatever the fantasy world could throw at him!

After that my reading career took off in starts and stops depending on how busy my life and career were. Throughout the years, I have read numerous books that have left an impression on me and some that revived the passion that I had while reading those Conan books so long ago. In the next few blog posts, I am going to share 5 books that made a lasting impression on me and why. And strangely enough, this list of 5 books does not include any Conan. Mainly because I no longer have any of those L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter books in my library having sold or disposed of them long ago. At the time, they were well read and worn trade paperbacks and I was only keeping hard backs in my 'library'. I miss them and wish I still had them, especially with Frank Frazetta's amazing cover artwork. I just recently learned that Kirk Hammett, lead guitarist of the heavy metal band Metallica, is a collector of Frank Frazetta's original artwork and even purchased the original artwork for Robert E. Howard's Conan the Conqueror for $1 million! A little bit out of this author's price range! You will find that my reading interests span entirely different genres, much like my music playlist. I would recommend any of these 5 books (and the series that they may be in) for your reading, no matter what genre you typically read. I hope you enjoy my impressions of these books and look forward to your comments regarding them if you have read any that I list.

Check back next week as I share the first book with you that made a lasting impression on me and why.