Here's another First, Last, Everything. And this time it's blogger, podcaster and reviewer, Calvin Park.

Calvin is an avid reader of all sorts of fantasy and science fiction. He reviews for Fantasy Book Review (https://www.fantasybookreview.co.uk) and hosts the Under a Pile of Books Podcast (https://anchor.fm/pile-of-books). You can normally find him waxing eloquent on all things SFF over on Twitter (@cpark2005). 

The first fantasy book that I read was The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. A classic, right? But for me, it’s more than that. I read The Hobbit when I was around eleven. Before reading it, I wasn’t much of a reader at all. In fact, I actively despised reading. My mom worked tirelessly to get me to read but I never wanted much to do with it. I was a slow reader which just discouraged me from reading larger books. But by my tweens I was far past board books or simple chapter books. I’m pretty sure my mom had given up hope of me ever becoming a reader. Then again, knowing her, perhaps not. But in any case, a friend lent me a copy of The Hobbit and I fell in love.

In the novel, Tolkien reminds us that “there is nothing like looking, if you want to find something…you certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.” When I began reading The Hobbit I was looking for something to occupy some time, a chance to satisfy a friend who’d been telling me about it for ages, and maybe something to satisfy a requirement to read X number of minutes. What I found was an entire world. A mythos built from the ground up by Tolkien’s brilliance. There were beautiful meadows and forests, elves in their homely houses, nasty goblins in their dank caves, riddles, and spiders. Of course, there was also a dragon. But what was so engaging about this story was that the hero wasn’t He-man or Optimus Prime. He wasn’t one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He was just a guy. He was kind of like me. And he used his mind and his morals more than his brawn to win. In fact, he gets knocked out for most of the climactic battle and has to hear about it after! Bilbo Baggins was my kind of hero—though let’s be honest, Thorin was also pretty awesome.

In the end, The Hobbit opened up a whole world of adventure for me. Not only in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but in all the fantasy novels I’ve read since I finished it. Today I read because as a boy a friend told me to read The Hobbit, and I did, and I found something that was not quite the something I was after.

The most recent read I’ve finished is The Half Killed by Quenby Olson. This one had been on my TBR for a while, and I just hadn’t gotten around to reading it. I don’t know what took me so long! It’s a great read. Set in Victorian-era London, it follows Dorothea Hawes as she works to solve mystery killings while keeping a dark part of herself under control. I don’t often read paranormal fantasy, but this one was a lot of fun.

It actually put me in mind of one of the things I love about the fantasy genre: you can tell a fantasy story in almost any setting. You can find fantasy stories set in Victorian England, Napoleonic France, ancient Rome, any of it. You can also find stories set in our own time period. You can find fantasy tales that take place in secondary worlds with technology from the bronze age on through to our own time. You can find alternative histories, or post-apocalyptic dystopias. The possibilities are nearly limitless. It’s one of the things I absolutely adore about fantasy. There is literally no limit to the worlds people can create and the adventures one can have in those worlds. Olson’s The Half Killed is just the latest example—for me—of the truth that fantasy has something for everyone.

This has been the most difficult category for me to pick a single book, or even a series. I’m tempted to choose The Lord of the Rings, because I’ve probably reread that more than any other book or series. Particularly when I was younger, it did a lot to shape my reading of fantasy. I was also tempted to choose The Obsidian Mountain Trilogy by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory. This is another one I’ve reread often. But in the end, I’m choosing The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson, and particularly Words of Radiance the second book in the series. After all, I have prints of Michael Whelan’s amazing cover art for The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance hanging in my living room. There is a lot I could share that makes this series, and particularly this book, special to me. Sanderson is one of my favorite authors. The Knights Radiant must be one of the coolest orders of magic users ever conceived. The magic itself in this series is just out of this world, and in Words of Radiance we begin to understand how the magic works and the history of it.

In the end, though, what makes this series—and especially Words of Radiance—so special to me is the character of Kaladin and the very way the magic works. See, in the world of Roshar in order to gain the ability to use magic you have to have cracks in your soul. You need areas of weakness or pain or trauma where the ability to use Stormlight can sort of insert itself. This means that a major plot point for the series, and for the development of individual characters, becomes their mental health.

Enter Kaladin, one of the main characters, he has significant trauma in his life, blaming himself for the deaths of several people in his past. In addition to this he struggles with seasonal depression, a fear of failure, and constantly feeling that he isn’t good enough, that anything less than perfection is a deep personal failure. Kaladin is special to me because I see myself reflected in his struggles. While I’ve never been officially diagnosed with any mental health disorder, I often find myself struggling with feeling like a complete failure because I did “well” instead of “perfect.” Depression is a powerful force, and there are moments when I find myself pressed up against it. Kaladin, more than any other character I’ve ever read about, reflects me and my struggles. Somehow Sanderson has managed to give voice to my cracks in a way I’m not sure I could even fully articulate. It’s a powerful thing.

In the book, Knights Radiant speak ideals as they gain power. The first ideal, shared by all the orders of Knights Radiant, is “life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination.” I’m certainly not the first person to notice this, but that first ideal, combined with the characters we encounter in Sanderson’s series, combine to basically drive home the point that broken people can be heroes. Or, perhaps put better: heroes are broken people. That’s why Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive is my everything.  

Thanks, Calvin. Awesome entries.

Remember, if you want to take part I’ll post your entry. It's open to all. Just drop me a line on Twitter or via email to dave@dpwoolliscroft.com and I’ll send you some simple instructions.