“His bizarre dress was tasteless and gaudy, and did not match his sensitive face and long-fingered, almost delicate hands, yet he flaunted it since it emphasized the fact that he did not belong in any company - that he was an outsider and an outcast. Moorcock is a master, and though he’s written more carefully, and more beautifully, and with much more high-minded purpose (in “Gloriana” and “Mother London” for instance, or the dazzling quartet of books concerning the dandy Jerry Cornelius), he’s never quite slammed home runs as outrageous as these. I didn’t even know, back then, that Moorcock was already becoming one of the greatest British fantasy writers, the heir to Mervyn Peake, nor that his “Elric” books belonged to the “sword and sorcery” genre and only later, as sword and sorcery swept like a virus through movies and games and into the digital universal, did I understand that I’d read works whose influence would prove to be immense - strange and exhilarating stories from someone at the top of his game.

I also read, with mounting glee, and seized from different corners of the bookstore when my mother wasn’t watching, the paperbacks of Michael Moorcock, especially those concerning the doomed prince Elric. A predictably unstructured and non-academic bag, I guess. As a teenager I read (wallowed in and feasted upon, really) Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh, Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, “Great Expectations” and “David Copperfield,” “Crime and Punishment,” “The Great Gatsby,” P.G. That’s the time when books not only excite us, but seem to tell us about ourselves and our futures.

Maybe it’s the books we read when we’re young that stick with us the longest.

The sleeping sorceress