A literary journey

I was thinking the other day about Watchmen comic that I'd read recently. I registered on the scottish fitba website pie and bovril and wanted a username different from my usual one, so I chose one of the characters from the series.

It got me thinking as to how I ended up reading something that I had enjoyed that much. I traced the journey thusly. Once upon a time back when I was a nipper someone purchased the book of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I believe it was my sisters copy, although she has never shown any such good taste in choice of books since. Indeed I believe she had the first 4 books, or all of them at the time of printing, and they lay around our house for many years. The distinctive cover of the first book caught my eye on many occaisons but never did I pay it any greater heed for a long time.

Eventually I took more of a liking to reading books in general and at this point the details get hazy. I may have read some discworld books first, and amused and entertained it triggered knowledge of another series of funny books that should be lying around our very own house. Or having read Hitchhikers I may then have been likewise inspired to go and read other books of great repute. I suspect it is the latter although I shall never be sure. What I do remember is that I could find the second, third and fourth volumes but not the first and I had to ask my mum to purchase another copy of the original which once gotten I read through in a single evening and is still the funniest book I have ever read. Indeed I have read it so much that I now purposely avoid reading it as I almost knew it almostword for word and no book can stand such sustained scrutiny without losing its magic. I look forward to reading them again some years from now still.

I then read Restaurent at the end of the Universe which was every bit as good, Life the Universe and Everything which was still very good but not as good as the first two and So Long and Thanks for all the Fish which I enjoyed but was quite different in style and then Mostly Harmless which was not awful or anything but very disappointing and really rather sad. I don't think I have read that one since first I read it. Anyway I also read the Dirk Gently novels as anything associated with Douglas Adams was of great interest and this lead me to a biography of him written by Neil Gaiman. A man who was something of a link between Adams and Pratchett as he wrote a book about Adams and co wrote one with Pratchett, Good Omens which I also greatly enjoyed. A slightly darker humour but very much in Pratchett style.

All this reading was being done towards the end of my schooldays and heading into first year of university. At which point a BBC commisioned drama called Neverwhere written by Neil Gaiman was coming out accompanied by a novelisation written by the same man. I watched it and loved it despite the BBC budget letting down some aspects of the production and duly bought the book which I think I had finished between buying it after watching the 3rd episode and the final 6th(i think) one a few weeks later. So this then made almost as interested in the works of Neil Gaiman as that of Adams and Pratchett. Very sadly Douglas Adams died whilst I was as university and beyond the half finished Salmon of Doubt no more literary work was to come. Indeed Terry Pratchett has recently been diagnosed with a form Alzheimers which will surely sooner rather than later curtail his own work, I have all but one Discworld novel in my collection.

Anyway I discovered he wrote a comic series known as Sandman, I resisted this as I was dubious about the genre. I mean wasn't it all just Superman, Batman type stuff etc? So I read his following books, Stardust, American Gods, Anansi Boys and a short story collection. I also went to see the film Mirromask. Eventually though having decided it was given enough critical acclaim to be impossible to ignore I decided I'd have a look. At ten volumes of varying sizes each costing between about 12-15 pounds it was always something I wondered was it value for money? Obviously you only need to buy one and if you don't like it you can forget the rest but anyway I eventually plunged in and bought the first one. It was different, it was interesting and I enjoyed it and certainly enough to to get the next. It was if anything better and that more or less continued throught out the series, volume 3 was perhaps a little unsatisfying compared to some others but by and large the series went from strength to strength. I not even going to try and desribe it I don't think I could do it without reading through it all again and writing a minimum of a couple of thousand words and that would but scratch the surface.

Well the end result was I was a huge fan of the Sandman series in paerticular and hungry to read more comics/graphic novels in general. Without thinking of any obvious direct links off the top of my head another name often came up working in the genre, indeed the name Gaiman credited with teaching him how to write a graphic novel, now that I think about it, Alan Moore. A film version of V for Vendetta was recently out which kept his name in the foreground so I ended up buying that and eventually watching the film which was also really quite good. Faithful to the spirit if not to every detail of the work I'd say. Only a short stop away was his arguably his most critically acclaimed work Watchmen which I just recently read.

All because my sister once enjoyed Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy?