As you may know, us Robots are (mostly) based in the UK rather than the US, so we don’t get a day off for Thanksgiving today. However, I always liked the idea of taking time out to count one’s blessings and give thanks for the positives in life. So today I want to give thanks to a nameless individual who… well, whose fault this all is.

I grew up in Cliftonville, a decaying Edwardian seaside resort down on the pointiest bit of the pointy end of Kent. Nearest big town was Margate, our less gentile slum-on-sea neighbour, home to Kiss Me Quick Hats, tooth-glomping rock, and the occasional discreet stabbing in the penny arcade. In summer it’s full of sunburnt scumbags, in winter it’s shut. (TS Eliott wrote large sections of The Waste Land sitting in a seaside shelter there. That title says it all.) Thank whomever you pray to, therefore, for the local library.

I was always a reader, and by the time I hit eleven and Big School I had already found and devoured Tolkien. For some reason, having only found The Two Towers in stock I’d started the trilogy with book two and read to the end, and only later read all three in order. I’d been blown away by Helm’s Deep – to such an extent that to this day I still have immense problems not ripping that whole buns-and-fireworks debacle out of the front of The Fellowship.

When I hit twelve, I’d finally finished ploughing through all of that and had started looking around for more. Just then, the library gave out a series of handy free bookmarks. Simple things they were, befitting the pre-computer age, just typed and duplicated lists of interesting books in different categories cut from larger sheets of thin white card. I nabbed the SF & Fantasy one, and started investigating. On one side, there were some genuine classics. Tolkien was there, with both The Hobbit and LOTR, and that was probably why I picked the thing up in the first place. Also listed there were Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Wells, James Blish, Edmund Cooper, Pohl & Kornbluth.

But on the back, under the heading “Further Out”… Ballard, Dick, Angela Carter, Vonnegut, Moorcock, Anthony Burgess, William Burroughs. Holy fuck. I still can’t believe they did that, but I’m so glad they did. The list looked more inviting, somehow, than that on the front. So I checked out High Rise and the short story anthology Low-Flying Aircraft. Devoured them. Came back in a couple of days for Cat’s Cradle, which I must have read in some kind of trance, because I’d dreamt details of it for fifteen years without ever recalling its title, till I finally rediscovered it in my late 20s. And then Angela Carter’s very erotically tinged Passion of the New Eve, which earned me a raised eyebrow from the woman behind the counter I still remember today. I read everything they had of those other authors, and when I finished Behold the Man, there on page 2 of that fine novel was another list, this time of all of the interconnected Eternal Champion books, from Corum to Cornelius, and I was off again…

It took me most of a decade to finally get around to checking out more of the books on the other, traditional side of that bookmark. Still never read much Asimov to this day. That’s not the point though. For me, all it took was a list saying, in essence, “You liked that one? You like cool stuff, huh, kid? Well lookee here, there’s more. Why not try these…”

On the back of every Angry Robot book (almost), there’s a panel that says just that. This week, Keith over at Adventures Fantastic blog commented on this, saying:

“The thing that impresses me about Angry Robot providing these lists is that the books aren’t just by them. To recommend your competitor’s books takes a lot of class.”

That’s very kind, but we don’t do it for that reason. We do it because, well, how can we not? We’ve all recommended books to each other, given a tiny portion of the passion a book engendered in us to someone else as a gift. This is just an extension of what you’d get if we saw you for a beer and the conversation turned to that wonderful exchange of Cool Stuff We’ve Been Digging that results.

So anyway, because it’s Thanksgiving and Keith had me thinking about it again this week, I just wanted to say Thank you! to That Nameless Librarian way back then. You set me off on a wild adventure that continues to this day.