The books are fantasy. The post is non-fiction.
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Narnia
The story I tell is that my mother lured me into reading on my own by reading aloud the first two books of the Narnia series. When I wanted to know what happened next, she handed me The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and told me to find out for myself.
Which makes Dawn Treader one of the first books – if not the first book – I read.
That’s how I remember it.
But we already know about the reliability of my memory. [Pondering The Past, Wondering If It Ever Even Happened]
Looking back, I start to wonder.
Was there a devious plan or did it just work out that way? Maybe a busy single mom doesn’t have time to entertain an inquisitive child. Maybe I picked up the book because I didn’t want to wait.
Maybe it didn’t happen that way at all.
I remember the apartment we were in, so I was around 8. Is that late to start reading chapter books by oneself? Are there other, earlier books that didn’t have the same impact and therefore don’t get a foundational moment?
I don’t know. It’s a good story. I’m sticking with it.
Wizard of Earthsea
Back in the age of the dinosaurs, I was in sixth grade. Our teacher started reading aloud The Wizard of Earthsea, the first of the Earthsea trilogy. Halfway thru the book, our teacher stopped coming to class.
It was a convent school. A disappearance was more problematic than the norm. The head of the order came to our class and gave a disjointed speech, which boiled down to Never think about her again.
The new teacher did not continue where our teacher left off. They decided to read No Kiss For Mother. An uplifting tale about a child who didn’t want to kiss his mother good-bye.
To sixth graders!
Who had been hearing LeGuin!
I was furious.
I immediate found and read the rest of the trilogy. So much for stifling our curiosity.
I often wonder if her choice of book was an indicator of the issues that lead to her separation from the convent.
Books and Their Movies, The Lord of the Rings
If I see the movie soon after reading the book, I might conflate the two. Harry Potter has totally become the movie visuals.
It depends on the time between.
The Lord of the Rings had been in my head for so long that I was not affected by the Peter Jackson movies.
In fact, I didn’t really see much of the first movie. I spend the entire time thinking, Yes. No. Yes, but in a different place.
Also, it’s not just movies. Illustrations can have the same effect. Tenniel is Alice. Baynes is Narnia.
Onwards!
Katherine
Virtual Brush Box 
Lucky you for having really cool books for young readers. I guess I learned to read in the Ice Age. Well, pre-Renaissance, it seems.
We had (public school, NJ) “Dick, Jane, and Sally” reading books that I thought were really boring story books with a fictionalized life — such as farm animals without fenced pastures who just wandered around (a big no-no to this farm kid). I was critical of D-J-S and argued with a teacher about how wrong things were in the photos — in the first grade! So I drew pasture fences in my book, and was told not to draw in the books. (Kids take everything literally.)
Fortunately, my grandmother gave her three adult children’s families the re-printed editions of McGuffey Primer readers, which I read on my own, at home, and thus, teachers thought I was an advanced reader or something smart. McGuffey Primers were Horatio Alger stories with good-bad-kids, and bigger vocabularies! The children in those books rode real horses! and ponies! sometimes they drove a cart! Looked after goats! Played real games! Had friends! Got sick! Did household chores! The illustrations were very old, detailed, engraved art, which also held my attention.
Today – Call me a snob, but I can’t believe people get sentimental over the D-J-S books, tea towels, posters, and snap them up at flea markets and antique malls.
As for a teacher reading to any of my classes, the only one I remember was in the fourth grade, and it held my attention — “Dickon Among the Lenape Indians of New Jersey.” Probably a very fictionalized version of life among Native Americans, but to a kid — it was really interesting.
This turned into a rant. Thank you for reading this far.
MM
Amazing what stays with us over the years.