Early Reading, This Means War! 

Another insight into my early reading... My fiction was still definitely focused on Science-Fiction with Moorcock, Heinlein and Anderson being heavily read at that point. I was also still dipping my toes into SF short story collections to seek out new authors and new subgenres, to read where I’d never read before.  That was one of my ‘problems’ around then – I really didn’t know what I ‘should’ be reading, having no one in the immediate family to mimic or borrow books from. I was, in many ways, on my own out there. One of the ways I dealt with the dearth of information is to look to TV shows or movies I liked and read the book(s) it/they were based on – hence Serpico.     

The Shores of Death by Michael Moorcock
The Corridors of Time by Poul Anderson
Bombers 1939-1945 edited by Bernard Fitzsimons (Non-Fiction)
Science-Fiction: The Great Years edited by Carol & Frederik Pohl
World War II Warships by David & Hugh Lyon (Non-Fiction)
Air Power at Sea 1939-1945 by John Winton (Non-Fiction)
Double Star by Robert Heinlein
Serpico by Peter Maas
The High Frontier by Gerard K O’Neil (Non-Fiction)
Machines by Robert O’Brian (Non-Fiction)

Of course, the thing that really sticks out from this list – every 10th book remember – is the number of WW2 generic histories. Back then, being a teenager, I was less interested in the political intricacies of the conflict and much more in the technology and weaponry involved. This persisted for a while but eventually died down to a more reasonable background level. The various books I was reading on the subject (both the cheap generic stuff I was buying and the heavier – in both senses – library books) also helped me build the numerous models of tanks, warships and aircraft that increasingly cluttered up my bedroom.