Teen Fiction What Did You Read As A Teen

I read a lot of Fantasy like Tolkien but a lot of that is aimed at a teen market like Eddings and Feist etc. I also read (and still do read) Jack Vance, Julian May, Harry Harrison and a bunch of more adult orientated stuff. In my later teens I got into HP Lovecraft and was mad about a sci-fi series by Patrick Tilley called The Amtrak Wars. I tried re-reading them again a couple of years ago but found them unbearable. I still love Lovecraft btw.

I don't think my reading habits have really changed all that much since i was a teen. I read all sorts of books and still do Fantasy, Science Fiction, fiction, non-fiction, crime, thriller, horror, political intrigue, biographies, books about physics, biology, music, classics.

I probably found most of the books and authors that i love when i was a teen. Pratchett, Clarke, Dick, Banks, Gemmell (simplistic fantasy but great characters), Gibson, Eddings, Greene etc...people whose stuff i still read today religiously.

Basically if it has words in a language i can understand i'll read it, I've always been that way.

2ndcoming wrote: »

Used to read a fair few by Christopher Pike, they were a lot like the Point Horrors but in my head they were a little cooler.

Used to read the Lone Wolf and Fighting Fantasy game books as well.

I read a few of his books as well. I presumed they'd be like Point Horror, but they were much more grisly and serious, and tended to have actual monsters and such.

I remember I got one of his books for my birthday and I read it all that day. It was about the teachers in a school, then a whole town, being taken over by these lizard-like creatures who'd live inside their bodies, very Invasion of the Bodysnatchersesque.

Of course, a few kids saw what was going on but no-one believed them. I think they never managed to properly stop the invasion and at the end of the book they were on the run in Mexico, still being chased by the monsters.

Edz87 wrote: »

I was obsessed with Dickens and Terry Pratchett.

Quite a few thematic similarities between the two in fairness.

slippy wicket wrote: »

Sven Hassel..

Oh yeah. Good call.

My father's P.G Wodehouse collection springs to mind. I became obsessed with the English aristocracy as a result and came to see myself as a modern day Bertie Wooster.:o

I tried to read and re read everything Enid Blyton ever wrote, from The Magic Faraway Tree and those fantasy type ones to The Famous Five which were my favourite. Such happy memories of rowing out to Kirrin Island and exploring Smuggler's cove and getting big baskets of food pushed into my hands by fat jolly farmer's wives:D The Adventure Series, The Mystery Series, The Five Find-Outers. The list goes on, when you look at how many stories she wrote it's mind blowing.

I also read the Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators which were brilliant at the time but are fading a bit from memory, as are most books I read back then unfortunately.

One of my real favourites was the Adventure series by Willard Price about two brothers Hal and Roger Hunt who were zoologists and traveled all over the world studying and collecting animals. Fiction based on fact. It was amazing and I learned so much from them.

Nostalgia overload...

Douglas Adam's Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy of 5 - Arthur Dent is a legend!

Karen112 wrote: »

Very true, I still have the whole series at home. May need to dig them out again. What was the old blond fox called? Was it Old Sage?

Old Sage Brush, if I remember correctly. I think "brush" is the word for a fox's tail.

The only other name I remember Needlenine, who was a bit crazy and I think spent a lot of time caught in a trap in one of the books, which freaked me out a bit because of the graphic descriptions of it.

Sweet valley high totally loved them as a teen. (ah the shame)