This might be a bit crap, but the books that seriously got me practicing magick were the “Dark Is Rising” series by Susan Cooper, and “Moon Of Gomrath” by Alan Garner: bought both from my “pocket money” or maybe it was Christmas gift money when I was, I think, about 8 or 9 years old, and I played about trying to adapt the concepts in them in total earnestness for years afterwards.
I knew they were fiction, I wasn’t stupid, but I figured they were based on real folklore and I was determined to try and contact the entities and forces, and make magick work for me just like it did the kids in the books. I don’t remember how I chose them, I think my mum recommended them because she knew I was already interested in this stuff.
They were quite old-fashioned books and it’s funny, even back then I thought the good guys were mostly priggish and the “baddies” were far more interesting.
The magick and the power they describe, being wielded by children as part of some larger battle that involved ancient British spirits like Herne and people like Merlin, took me from playing at magick (something I’d mostly seen in horror movies, coz my fam had no concept of “age appropriate viewing” lol), with the rug in the living room for my Circle and twigs for wands, to seriously thinking “I want this”… hope that’s not too OT Gnosis but they were the first books I tried to work from!
They’re all set in England and Wales, and feature magickal trees like rowan and oak that grew just up the road, so it all felt very credible and grounded in my everyday reality.
My life was really shitty at that time, lots of poverty and family members losing it to drink and drugs etc., and they were the only good thing I had to hold onto of my own.
Then I read The Golden Bough aged about 10 or 11 and that was extremely influential, along with Mertz’s Red Land, Black Land about ancient Egypt, which also (bliss!) included spells and prayers!
That stuff’s probably why I’m still into experimenting, because my earliest concept of magick was “take these scraps and half-truths, and make from them something that will really work”… something I hadn’t realised until I just typed this! lol