Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish and is now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. Each week a new theme is suggested for bloggers to participate in. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want. Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to The Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is Authors I’ve Met, which presents something of a problem: I haven’t met ten authors.

I could probably come up with increasingly tenuous interpretations of the word met, but instead I’m taking a fairly substantial sideways step from the prompt and looking at authors who have shaped my reading life.

These aren’t necessarily my ten favourite authors, nor are they necessarily the authors I’ve read the most. They’re the people whose books changed something about the way I read. Some were there right at the beginning, helping turn small!Cassie into someone who would grow up permanently surrounded by books. Others introduced me to genres that became favourites, shaped my taste in horror, made me buy a Kindle, or simply made me realise that my reading tastes were broader than I thought they were.

And, importantly, apparently authors can still come along in my forties and completely derail my established reading habits.

Janet & Allan Ahlberg
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where a lifelong love of reading begins, because by the time you’re old enough to think about it, books are often just there. Janet and Allan Ahlberg are part of that earliest layer of reading for me: books before I really understood that I was becoming A Reader.

Their books belong to that hazy childhood period when being read to, looking at pictures and eventually reading for yourself all blur together. You have to start somewhere, and the Ahlbergs were part of my somewhere.

Enid Blyton
If the Ahlbergs belong to the beginning, Enid Blyton belongs to the point where I started devouring books.

There was always another adventure, another mystery, another group of children disappearing off somewhere without anything resembling adequate adult supervision. More importantly, there was always another book. Series reading meant finishing one story didn’t have to mean leaving that world behind, and young!Cassie was very much here for that.

Whatever I might think about aspects of the books looking back at them as an adult, there’s no separating Blyton from the story of how I became a voracious reader.

C.S. Lewis
Some childhood authors stay in childhood. C.S. Lewis didn’t.

Narnia was part of my early reading, but The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in particular became one of those books I would continue returning to long after I was supposedly too old for it. I still reread it now.

I think there’s something important in discovering that books don’t have an expiry date. You don’t have to leave the stories you loved behind simply because you’ve grown up; sometimes they grow into comfort reads instead.

Anne Rice
And then we get to horror.

Anne Rice is one of a handful of authors who had an enormous influence on what I would eventually want from the genre. Interview with the Vampire gave me horror that was gothic, atmospheric, messy and intensely character-driven – monsters who were allowed to be fascinating rather than simply frightening.

Decades later, it’s another book I still reread, which probably says everything about how thoroughly it lodged itself in my brain.

Stephen King
Stephen King shaped a different side of my horror reading: the idea that the frightening thing doesn’t necessarily live in some distant gothic castle. It can be waiting in an ordinary house, an ordinary town or inside an apparently ordinary person.

I’ve read King across a lot of years and a lot of pages – sometimes an awful lot of pages – and books like Firestarter and The Stand remain part of my reading landscape.

Between King, Rice and the next author on this list, you can probably trace quite a lot of the DNA of my taste in horror.

Poppy Z. Brite
If Anne Rice gave me gothic vampires and Stephen King gave me horror lurking beneath ordinary life, Poppy Z. Brite brought something stranger, darker and more transgressive into the mix.

Lost Souls is another of those books that has somehow survived all the different versions of me as a reader and remains something I return to.

Those three authors are very different from one another, but collectively they did a lot to establish what I love about horror — atmosphere, outsiders, complicated characters, darkness, and books that aren’t particularly interested in being comfortable.

Kelley Armstrong
Kelley Armstrong gets one of the easiest places on this list to justify: she introduced me to urban fantasy.

Discovering the Women of the Otherworld books opened up an entire genre that I hadn’t really known was there – contemporary worlds where werewolves, witches, vampires and other supernatural creatures existed alongside everything recognisably ordinary.

Urban fantasy remains one of my favourite genres, so that’s not just an author I enjoyed reading. That’s an author who opened a door to a whole section of the bookshop that I’ve happily been wandering around in ever since.

Marian Keyes
There was a point in the late ’90s and early ’00s when my reading life acquired a whole new branch, and Marian Keyes had a lot to do with it.

She introduced me to the world we generally called chick lit at the time: contemporary stories about women, relationships, families, careers and lives that were allowed to be funny and messy while still dealing with some genuinely serious subjects.

It became another genre I could move happily between, because apparently even then I was refusing to specialise.

Jaimie Admans
Jaimie is a slightly different entry because I’ve actually known her online for years – although somehow we have still never met in person – and she ended up changing not only what I read, but how I read.

She’s the reason I got a Kindle.

Through her books, I also found my way into the late-2010s world of contemporary romance, which felt related to the books I’d loved during the chick-lit era but also distinctly its own thing. That opened up another enormous rabbit hole of authors and books, and the Kindle… well. We all know what happens once you can acquire another book without even getting off the sofa.

Financially irresponsible levels of convenience.

Matthew Reilly
Matthew Reilly is the outlier here because, compared with almost everyone else on this list, he’s a very recent addition to my reading life.

He’s also here precisely because his books are so different from what I would normally have considered my sort of thing.

Huge, ridiculous, breakneck action adventures? Elaborate set pieces? Ancient mysteries? Explosions? More explosions? Characters who apparently regard the laws of physics as polite suggestions?

And yet here we are.

Books like Temple and Ice Station reminded me that even after decades of reading across all sorts of genres, I can still stumble across something completely outside my established habits and discover a new thing I love. My reading life isn’t finished being shaped yet.

*****

Looking at these ten authors, what strikes me most is that there isn’t really a point where I became the reader I am now.

The Ahlbergs helped make books part of my world. Enid Blyton made me want to consume them in vast quantities. C.S. Lewis gave me stories I could carry out of childhood. Anne Rice, Stephen King and Poppy Z. Brite helped shape my love of horror. Kelley Armstrong opened up urban fantasy. Marian Keyes led me into chick lit, and years later Jaimie Admans helped lead me into contemporary romance — and, perhaps just as significantly, onto a Kindle.

And then Matthew Reilly turned up comparatively recently and went, essentially, “Have you considered explosions?”

Apparently I had not.

So this isn’t really a list of my favourite authors, and it definitely isn’t a list of authors I’ve met. It’s more like a very abbreviated map of my life as a reader: the people who opened doors, changed directions or left something behind that became part of what I looked for in the next book.

And I rather like the fact that, after more than four decades of reading, that map apparently still isn’t finished.