#anyway camlann dug a lot of this stuff up out of the memory banks time for hot arthuriana summer

[utilitycaster]

Reverse Hot Take ask game: a weird book you read as a child that many people don’t seem to know about?

Okay so I don't actually know what other people were into, reading-wise, as children; I was a child in the era of Peak Harry Potter who happened to also really love other fantasy, and for some reason I ended up reading a lot of other British fantasy which means sometimes I'm like "man I didn't know anyone else other than my siblings who was into this" and it's because it was a book series that was very popular in the UK and not the US.

ANYWAY I am on my way back from my childhood home where I was visiting family, and I was struck with a powerful desire to reread The Dark Is Rising series by Susan Cooper, which is influenced heavily by the folklore of the British Isles, especially but not limited to Arthuriana, and I feel like I haven't seen it talked about a lot and I don't recall much about it other than it was GREAT. Unfortunately I couldn't find it so I'll have to purchase or take it out of the library or something.

I read a lot of Arthuriana as a child, actually and didn't continue it into adulthood nor did I watch the BBC Merlin series, and I truly don't know why; I think I probably gave it up for Tolkien in my early teens and then I was in my asshole Only Sci Fi era for quite a while. Anyway, as a kid, I read most of a series called the Lost Years of Merlin but there was a really long period between two of the books during which I sort of aged out. I also read a bunch of books by Gerrald Morris, which were humorous retellings, and I feel like that neither of these series were something my classmates were reading nor that I've seen people talk about much online. I loved them both a lot and they very much influenced my fantasy tastes and aesthetic. Love a weird cursed forest.