Homer: Yeah, I'm going to go super old school with this one. It might seem like a choice that somewhat out of left field, but I can honestly say that nothing has had a greater impact on developing my love of reading than the translation of The Illiad we had kicking around the bookshelves as a kid. Yes, I requested that Mother Cigar read it to me when I was five years old and, together with The Odyssey, I think they form the touchstone of the foundation of classic literature.
I can't remember the exact translation of The Illiad we had- it wasn't in poem form, I know that. Instead it was in literary form- with characters and narrative and sweeping, epic battles and action. My favorite chapter was when the Gods and Goddesses came down to the battlefield and took sides, fighting with each other and by the end, when Priam goes to retrieve the body of his son Hector, I was pretty much hooked on Greek mythology.
The Odyssey was a natural book to read after that (my favorite part was when Odysseus shoots the arrow through the axe handles and then is all like "BOOM, I'm back and I know you've been trying to get on my wife!") and then I devoured all kinds of Greek mythology.
I got mildly obsessed with it. To this day I can't watch the Disney atrocity that was Hercules without getting very very annoyed about it all. I mean, first of all, the Greek pronunciation was Heracles, not Hercules and for crying out loud: Hades was never the bad guy- if anyone was it was Hera- but given her philandering, douchey husband, she had a right to be majorly pissed off about it.
Brian Jacques: If The Illiad got me into Greek mythology in a major way, the original Redwall trilogy (Mossflower, Redwall and Mattimeo) probably marked my introduction to fantasy and science fiction. Jacques was to my childhood what Veronica Roth, Suzanne Collins and J.K. Rowling were to the kids of today. New books in the series were events and one trilogy turned into another trilogy (Mariel of Redwall, Joseph The Bellmaker and Salamandastron) but eventually, sometime after Martin The Warrior, I lost interest and moved on to other stuff, but the original trilogy remains amazing- Mossflower especially is a standout novel that if I stumbled across it on a bookshelf somewhere, I might be inclined to sit down and read, just for the hell of it.
Brian Jacques actually came to town when I was young and we all gathered to hear him do a reading at Hoover Elementary and when it came to question time, I was so star-struck, I flubbed my question: a hallmark of Jacques' books are the sumptuous feasts that his characters always seem to have and the descriptions of the food were always amazingly detailed and mouth-watering. I meant to ask if he had any culinary background and that was why his descriptions of food were so good. Instead, it came out as: 'Do you like to eat?'
Yeah. Not my finest hour.
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