And autumn is his bridle

[sovay]

"So all through that winter he came to me. And he came at night. I was never alone in my chamber, but he came through doors and windows and walls, and lay with me. I never saw him again, but heard his voice and felt his body. Then, in the summer, when I was heavy with child, he left me . . . They will tell you how my father beat me and shut me up, and how when the child was born he would not give him a name fit for a Christian prince, but, because he was born in September, named him for the sky-god, the wanderer, who has no house but the woven air. But I called him Merlin always, because on the day of his birth a wild falcon flew in through the window and perched above the bed, and looked at me with my lover's eyes."
—Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave (1970)

Comments

[sovay]

This is easily one of the books that has been most influential on me, my taste in fiction, my taste in stories, and the way I think about myth and history.

What are the others?

[seishonagon.livejournal.com]

Edith Hamilton's Mythology. Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Michael Ende's The Neverending Story. Various works by Tolkien. T.H. White's The Once And Future King, though that was mostly because I really didn't care for most of the book; the same goes for Bradley's Mists of Avalon. The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara. Moon Shot, by Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton (which also remains the book that has caused me to cry the most at one time). Hugo's Les Miserables. St.-Exupery's Le Petit Prince. Vergil's Aeneid, both the Latin and Dryden's translation of it, which I still read bits of sometimes when I need something numinous in my life. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. And Harlan Ellison's short story "The Deathbird." Inherit The Wind and Farenheit 451, which I read one after the other in sixth grade. And in the not-a-book category, Ken Burns' Civil War documentary film, which remains one of the best examples I have seen of a telling of history with a real eye for the people who lived through it - it was this, really, which made me first understand what I love about the study of history: the fact that it happened to real people.
To name a few. Most of them were books I loved, the major exceptions being Once and Future King and Mists of Avalon, which I fortunately encountered after already becoming totally obsessed with Arthurian literature.