What I Read As A "Young Adult"

First of all, the biggest influence was not a book, but a film: Star Wars. Of course. From very young onwards. I read the UK Star Wars comics in all their guises, through to Return Of The Jedi. 

The first books I really remember reading are The Lord Of The Rings. I must have been nine or ten. I'm not sure whether I read the Hobbit first, I think I might have. There must have been other books before that but I can't really remember any of them. There are vague recollections of reading some books in the school library that had a space hero of some kind, but it's all too blurry. I think it took me about six months to read TLOTR, most of that was probably spent on the tedious second half of The Two Towers...slowly traipsing towards Mount Doom....

Somewhere I read The Famous Five, The Secret Seven and Swallows And Amazons, this could well have been before LOTR. Not sure.

Niall mentioned reading the Tripods novels and I think I read them too. I definitely saw the TV series, and I seem to remember that I read the books when the TV series fell short of the end of the story. I have no idea when that was though.

There was a huge chunk of 2000AD interwoven with these books, which I started reading quite young but got serious about as a teenager, started reading the Judge Dredd Megazine and even moved onto Crisis. You can't beat a bit of Judge Dredd.

The next set of books I really remember reading were Robert Ludlum and Frederick Forsythe novels. I might have been fourteen? Maybe older, not sure. I do however remember loving The Bourne Identity. Thrillers, spies and espionage. Loved it. Eventually I moved away from the heavier action based novels of Ludlum to the slow burn of Len Deighton.

Things start becoming less blurry after that: I discovered Terry Pratchett and read all of his books up to around Men At Arms, the Star Wars machine was waking from deep sleep and I read Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy and dreamt of actual film sequels. I then read all the Star Wars books. Unfortunately none of them lived up to the initial thrill of reading a new Star Wars story.

Then I was onto William Gibson: the Sprawl trilogy suddenly lighting a fire in my head. Then Snow Crash, then a smooth trajectory to the SF I'm reading now. Only (fairly) recently have I dipped backwards to read the SF classics I missed.

So I'm not sure that there is much YA in that readin history at all. Perhaps some of the filler I read between these big milestones were, I can't be sure. Which is why I can't quite get a grasp of what YA is, because to me there were kids books, then adult books and I seemed to go from one to the other.