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I don't know if they're particularly well-written, but the stories are strong and well-paced and I enjoyed them immensely when I was eleven or twelve. Unlike Tolkein they are often very funny, and there's a GIRL in them.

The Land of Froud

Not a story but a collection of paintings by the illustrator Brian Froud. He went on to design the Jim Henson films Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, and he has a very slick website called worldoffroud.com, but the paintings he does nowadays, mostly of fairies (sorry, 'faeries') floating in abstract spaces, aren't my cup of tea at all. (Rather worryingly they seem to be aimed at people who actually believe in fairies.) In his earlier work from the 1970's, which was collected in this book, Froud sets his characters in richly detailed landscapes, like visions of Dartmoor glimpsed in a dream; all writhing trees, lichenous boulders and grainy, brownish skies. There is a lot of humour in his gnarly goblins and his patchwork-clad, lop-eared trolls, but there's a sense of real magic, too; the true atmosphere of British folklore, where mysterious elfin creatures lurk among tree-roots and on the other side of stiles, giants try to conceal themselves in the crowns of wintry woods, and every hill and stream has its own guardian spirit. The natural world never looked the same to me again once I'd seen this glorious book.

Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle.

I was reading Andy Stanton's Mr Gum books to my son recently and we were both reduced to fits of helpless laughter. The last time a book had that effect on me was when I read the four Molesworth volumes; Down With Skool, How to be Topp, Whizz for Attoms and Back in the Jug Agane. They purport to be written by one Nigel Molesworth, a schoolboy at a crumbling English public school in the 1950s. His speling is atroshus, but his insights into school life and the various cads, sots and bullies who infest it applied just as much to my old junior school as to the posh boarding school which Molesworth describes, and they are illustrated with the fabulous, spidery drawings of the great illustrator and cartoonist Ronald Searle. Magnificently silly.

The Mabinogion (Translated by Gwyn Jones and Robert Jones, Illustrated by Alan Lee)

The Mabinogion is a collection of early Welsh myths, written down some time in the Middle Ages. I became aware of it as a child because so many of the writers I liked, such as Alan Garner and Lloyd Alexander, drew upon its characters and stories. Later, it served me well when I was writing Here Lies Arthur, since several of the tales are early versions of Arthurian legends. But it's not an easy read; there are some marvellous images and incidents, but many of the stories are strange and rambling, full of long lists of old Welsh names and bits of Celtic symbolism which were probably pretty obscure even at the time it was written.

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