The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander

So, everyone in the universe has had at least 40 years to get it together and read these books, so I'm not even going to mess.  

I read these books for the first time during my first semester at BYU, when the wonders of the library were just beginning to make themselves known.  I can't even remember what put me onto them--I never heard of them at all when I was a kid or in the real YA target demographic.  Actually, I think it was when I was buying textbooks for the first time and I saw The High King (book 5) as a textbook for a upper level English class, and I thought, a)That book looks pretty epic and has an archetypally epic title, b)How long before I can take that class?  And then away I went to the library (after figuring out how checking books out at the circulation desk worked) and all my wildest dreams came true!

Over the subsequent years they'd faded pretty much completely from my mind--I only vaguely remembered the basic plot, and mostly what stood out was how freaked out I was of the Cauldron Born and Arawn's Huntsmen and how cool I'd thought it was that I was a big kid getting seriously freaked out by the bad guys in some littler-kid books.  The desire for revisitation came when I was in England.  This one night when we were in Cornwall at my very most favorite place in all the world, sitting on these rocks on these cliffs over the ocean watching the sunset, and being a bunch of bookish nerds we started talking about The Dark Is Rising books since they take place in Cornwall (although I only vaguely remembered that--that's the next series I need to revisit when my reading list dwindles) but then we shifted over to Prydain.  With everyone talking about them I remembered that they are sort of faux-Welsh, and I realized that at this point I could probably actually pronounce the character's names, after a year of Welsh classes!  A few days later in our trip we actually were in Wales, staying at this hostel in the middle of a national park, all forest and hills and lake and waterfalls.  At the time I wasn't like consumed with thoughts of Prydain, but it was really amazing this week as I reread them all to think, all the time that they're tramping through forests and hills and lakes and waterfalls (which is like 87% of the books), Holy crap, YES.  THAT WAS ME.  

Really, one of the best parts of the whole England adventure was that I have such revitalized sympathy for all the times in all the epic fantasy novels where the band of heroes have to go traveling miles and miles on foot to take on the dreaded foe--um YES I know what that is like you guys, I am right there with you Taran/Frodo/Whatever, I will no longer just glance over those paragraphs and think they are boring.  Although I guess they've still definitely all one up'd me, since at no time were there dark lords to be defeated before we could get into a hostel every night.  Much to my chagrin.

PS I put up the cover of book 4 because it is my favorite, which is funny because I guess that's the only one not to receive Newberry or ALA recognition.  PSH!