I have been reading habitually (according to my mother) since I learned how in preschool. The first time I realized that reading was a hobby, a pasttime, a joy and a thing I did because I wanted to was when I was 6 or 7.

My father, when we would go camping, retold the Lord of the Rings to us over the campfire. He went TDY a lot when I was in the first grade and I got unusually upset. So he gave me his copy of the Fellowship of the Ring to keep me company. I remember being most disappointed to discover there was no mention of peanut butter being a favorite snack at elevenses. I did not make it through before he got home, but I did finish it that year.

My parents, when they were first married, read the trilogy at the same time, sneaking it out of each other's bags to read on the bus. I had that copy of the Fellowship until my last move. I'm fairly certain it's still in the boxes in my parent's garage, but I'll be very sad if it isn't.

I was four, and it was the summer before I started kindergarten. I was obsessed with comic books, mostly, and Dr. Seuss and pretty much every picture book I could get my hands on. I was too scared to go near non-picture books until I was six, when my father bought me a Nancy Drew novel and said that it was even better than books with pictures. It was.

Seriously? I have been a constant, almost obssesive, reader ever since.

The first book I remember reading out loud, as I was afraid of messing up for a long time after I learned to read, was "The Little Fish That Got Away."

I've been a "reader" almost my entire life. Most pictures of me as a kid at holiday functions show a book, just set down, slightly off to the side.
My mom insists I learned to read at 3 by myself. Legend has it she woke up to see me with a copy of A Christmas Carol, and asked me what it was about. And then nearly fainted when I, apparently, read it out loud.

It doesn't shock me, though. My mom isn't a big reader, but my biological father is. He actually worked in a bookstore when I was born. So I was being read to pretty much my entire life.

when my father bought me a Nancy Drew novel and said that it was even better than books with pictures. It was.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about my Famous Fives and Secret Sevens... loved those books.

I almost forgot about my Famous Fives and Secret Sevens

Ah, Enid Blyton! I grew up on those too. For me, I distinctly remember sitting on my mother's lap as she read the International Herald Tribune and seeing the unintelligible lines separate into more meaningful words. I don't know if this happened suddenly, or over the course of some days. Once that happened, I switched over almost immediately to the Ladybird collection of children's books, and then to the Bancroft Classics. I've never stopped since.

I've been reading habitually since I learned how. The first book I read that I remember making an impact on me was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The first "adult" book I read was Nineteen Eighty Four which I must admit i didn't really understand that well at the time (I think I was ten at the time). It was still very memorable and very depressing.

AH! I'm glad you asked. This is SO relevent to MeCha and its bunny theme!

I think my first reading experience may have been:

≡ Click to see image ≡


My Mom read it to me when I was a tot and soon I was reading it by myself. It remains an influence on my reading tastes (and, yes, my writing style!) to this day. It was a delightful tale of a baby bunny who was very hungry. I still marvel at the plot twists. First she ate lettuce. Then she ate carrots. Then she ate lettuce again!

She really liked lettuce.

And I read a lot and I'm vegan now... coincidentally?!

OKAY, really, they hooked on books and magazines pretty early in my school.

Anyone remember Dynamite Magazine?

≡ Click to see image ≡

≡ Click to see image ≡

≡ Click to see image ≡


And there were books about monsters, "real" (like Nessie and Bigfoot, heh) and imaginary, and SF stuff like Asimov, and Lester Del Ray's The Runaway Robot. And of course Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time!

Then, for me, it was novel reprints of 1930s - '50s pulp fiction. Mostly tons of Robert E Howard's Conan stories (which are actually very good and intelligently written, nothing like the damn Scwarzennegger/Milius bullshit film), books and books of Doc Savage, and others. That was a great place to start. I still occasionally re-read Howard's fiction today, along with stuff by his pal HP Lovecraft and contemporaries like Arthur Conan Doyle and ER Burroughs who made their living being paid by the word in Magazines like Weird Tales. I subscribe to the current incarnation of Weird Tales, frequented by writers like Caitlin Kiernan, and I'd LOVE to get a story published there someday.

The first time I bought a Conan novel it was one with a Frazetta cover, probably of a half-naked barbarian chopping people up with an axe.

≡ Click to see image ≡

I thought it was the most rad thing I'd ever seen. I brought it sheepishly to my Mom, showed her the BACK cover, and said, "Can I have this?" I think she was too happy with my burning desire to read to worry about what I was reading, because she bought it for me without a second glance. No worries about intense violence, heh. Gawd, I was overjoyed. After that I was hooked. Still am, LOL.

I started to read in 1st grade after they finally figured out that I desperately needed glasses - my eyes got tested when noone could understand why I couldn't read yet. Turns out I'm so myopic as to be damn near blind. The family story is that I got my new glasses, came downstairs the next day and read the New York Times out loud to my father. I've been reading fast, obsessively and more or less constantly ever since; I used to hide books - up in trees, in the bathroom, under the couch - so that I knew I'd never be too far away from one. Luckily both my parents were readers too and the house was full of books - I just read everything I came across. My mother being my mother, that meant most of the 19th century children's classics, from Swiss Family Robinson (we had this big oversize edition that had a whole appendix of Survival Tips in the back; stuff like, if you're stuck in the desert, use your car hubcaps to collect dew. I memorized it, just in case.) to Heidi to Five Little Peppers and How They Grew to, of course, Little Women and the Secret Garden and the Little Princess, and on and on and on. I worked my way through every library in every town we moved to and read all the Dr. Doolittle books and all the Tarzan books and the Princess of Mars books, which confused the hell out of me. I couldn't even tell you which book had the first big influence on me: they all did. And they mostly all still do - it's rare that I don't read 2 or 3 or more books every week and I've done that all my life. Just this morning I read the second two thirds of a bad detective novel and then all of Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat. It was awesome.

Like many here I've been reading since I knew how. I don't remember any details particularly (which is funny, because I'm like that with pretty much any fiction I read - I don't remember details!) but I do remember my mom taking me to the library every 2 weeks, at which time I would take out the maximum number of books allowed in a two week period - 14. It was lots of non-fiction back then. Stuff about ancient Egypt, and the Old (American) West and...so on.

I got into fiction, I'm guessing, around the age of 9 or 10? I read the Narnia Chronicles, and Encyclopedia Brown, and The Great Brain, stuff like that.

It was in my teens that I started getting snobby I think, and wanted to read only cool books, or important ones. I read On the Road when I was 16...it altered my world view dramatically. I've continued in that vein, loving thre Beats, when they are understandable, and I've also become a bit of an anglophile I think, loving Nick Hornby and Christopher Brookmyre, not to mention all the Sherlock Holmes stuff.

I do love lots of American and Canadian authors too, of course, Robertson Davies, Coupland, and Mordecai Richler, and Kerouac, Burroughs, and Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson and I've even liked a couple of Dave Eggers.

So, in sum, yeah, I started early and haven't stopped. I've known many more voracious readers than me though.

My mum sure her kids knew how to read before getting to kindergarten and I've been reading since then. The Little House series is what cemented it for me when I discovered it in the second grade. They were the first "big" books I read.

I almost always have a book with me; when I have a book with me I'm never bored. My nieces don't read and would complain about being bored. I'd tell them to read a book and they'd say reading was boring. The mind boggles.

I don't have a very good memory of my early childhood, but I can't remember a time when I didn't read obsessively. I always carried a book with me to school to read after finishing my assignments (I've always worked fast), and I still find it hard to go out of the house unless I have a book or magazine in my bag. I start getting really anxious if I realize I have nothing on me to read.

My mother also always used to read pretty constantly.

I first remember getting obsessive about Agatha Christie mysteries. I would go through one a day. I was reading Murder on the Orient Express after a vocabulary quiz in fourth grade, and I remember just falling into the text -- it was the first time I remember having that feeling of the world falling away and being somewhere else.

I can't remember ever not reading. I can't remember the earliest books, though I remember Dr. Suess books, the Little House on The Prairie series (I've read every one, and even re-read some as an adult), Marguerite Henry books (Misty of Chingoteague; Brighty of The Grand Canyon; King of The Wind, and more) - which I still have, in fact! I loved the M. Henry books, but reading Watership Down was really memorable for me. I was 12, and my brother and I had flown to California to spend a month with our father. We went to a yard sale one day, and I got that battered paperback. I read it voraciously (and I still have that copy, too). I am never far from a book; I have some at home I haven't gotten to yet but I intend to.

Oh! Also, my father used to read my brother and me a bedtime story every night. When we got old enough to read, we got to do the voices of the characters in the story and he'd read the narration. That was always very cool.

Wow. You can take mygothlaundry's answer, almost word-for-word, for me, too.

And so much of what everyone else is saying is part of my experience, too. Funny, though - I pretty much felt completely alone among my peers in this book madness when I was young... and there you all were all along, doing the same thing, same same. :)

How very lovely to find you here, finally, all these years later. Sleepover?

redvixen! I read Watership Down every single day for a whole month when I was twelve - I mean I read it cover to cover, every day. I didn't do much of anything else, granted, but OMG that book completely and totally floored me.

and, yes, what taz just said. Where WERE you all when I was the geekiest kid in 4th grade?