5 Books That Shaped Me: Childhood Memories

I am going to start a small series of posts about books that changed, shaped or otherwise have had a big impact on me as a writer or as a person. Each of these posts will feature five books that played a role in a certain period of my life.

The first post is about five books that I read as a child. Here they are:

I could easily include a lot more books because I loved being read to and (when I was old enough) reading as a child, but I’m limiting myself to five, and I think these were the ones that had the greatest impact on me.

• Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones is one of those books that I’ve read first (a couple of times) in Danish and later in English. I clearly recall the magical feeling of entering this wonderful fantasy world. And I had such a crush on the wizard Howl.
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is, of course, a classic. It’s also a book that can be enjoyed on several levels, so when I read it again later (at the university), it showed me new depths. The Danish translation did a wonderful job with the puns, as far as I can remember from back then.
• Mio, Min Mio (Mio, My Son in English) by the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren was one of my absolute favourites as a young child. It was sweet, scary, sad and funny. I could have picked a number of Astrid Lindgren books for this, but Mio was the one I loved the most overall.
• I had to include the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. They probably need no further introduction. I remember having them read to me in Danish when I was really small and then later reading them on my own on a vacation in Sweden in a cottage in a forest that had just one wrought iron lamppost outside. If I had to pick one favourite, it would probably be Prince Caspian, but it’s a close one.
• Michael Ende’s Die undendliche Geschichte (here in the Danish version, Den uendelige historie, probably better known in English as The Neverending Story) may be better known in its film version (all of these books have been turned into films, come to think of it), but the book is lovely too. I would actually have put one of Ende’s other works, Momo, on the list instead because it had an even greater impact on me and inspired a subplot in a story I wrote years ago, but for some reason I don’t own it (I need to do something about that).

So four out of five of these books are about someone going from the regular, mundane world and into a fantasy world (in a way, the last one is too, but I’m not going to spoil how). I wonder why I grew up to be a writer … Or not.

Which books have changed you, helped you or shaped you? Please feel free to join me in the comment section or on your own blog (or other social media) using #5booksthatshapedme – I would love to hear which books mean something special to you!