Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
comic strip overdue media

Sunday, January 25, 2004

What book changed your life?

That's the question posed on today's Unshelved comic. Oddly enough, mine was The Grey King by Susan Cooper. It touched off...

  • a lifelong love of the fantasy genre,
  • a love of all things Welsh,
  • a love of folklore and British/Celtic mythology,
  • a sense of good vs. evil,
  • the idea that ordinary lives can have immense consequences in the grand scheme of things,
  • the idea that evil can masque itself as beautiful, and therefore beauty should not be equated with good,
  • a sense of ancient knowlege,
  • and it, along with the series Robin Hood: the Hooded Man and Mary Renault's books of ancient Greece--and all the mythology that these made me want to learn more about--probably did a lot to bring me to Paganism as an alternative faith, my devotion to the Light (so to speak), and my concept of the Divine.

Mind you, I don't believe those works of fiction made me Pagan, as some conservatives might claim. Rather, they touched a part of me that yearned for something different than what I'd experienced, that felt spirtuality in nature, and in magic. So, you could argue I was a Pagan in search of Paganism. My studies since--of Paganism, Christianity, Judaism, and other religions, have only served to underscore my own beliefs. But reading that book, back at the age of 13, was the start of it all.

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