What kind of books did you read when you were a kid?

[Niko]

"Aku Aku" by Thor Heyerdahl

had forgotten about that one... i remember that i read this in fourth grade, my baby-sitter's dad had also been a researcher on the easter island and i felt pretty much like an insider reading the book, it was pretty cool

[ghost of miles]

Musil (never read "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften" so far, but will do)

my dad said reading this book made you an intellectual (he never read it, don't think he planned, too (although he no doubt was an intellectual)... i've been stuck somewhere around page 700 for several years now (but it's excellent))

hey, but you're not 30 yet - it's supposed to be the ideal books for people at the age of 30, because there's that passage where Ulrich asks himself how he had turned into the person he was... without remembering any decisive or important decisions he made... I'll have to read it next year, shall suit me perfectly well then

Another reading for your 30's.

Das dreißigste Jahr - Ingeborg Bachmann

Oh yeah! Encountered THE THIRTIETH YEAR in my early 20s...excellent story collection. I like some of her poetry, too.

[Dave Garrett]

I learned to read somewhere around the time I was 3 1/2 - 4 years old, from the Dr. Seuss books that our next-door neighbor gave me after their older kids had outgrown them, and I've rarely been without my head buried in a book or periodical since then. One of my earliest childhood memories is being taken to the elementary school near our house to be tested for aptitude before I was old enough to be admitted to kindergarten, where I joined in on a reading exercise in one of the second-grade classrooms and was able to keep up with the rest of the class easily.

Favorite childhood reading in addition to Dr. Seuss: the Bantam Doc Savage reprints, Hardy Boys, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, Conan, all sorts of random sci-fi, lots of comic books, Richard Halliburton's armchair travel books. About the latter, I've met more than a few avid travelers in the intervening years who claim that their love of travel had its origins in Halliburton's tales of adventure in faraway, exotic places.

[Alexander]

As a small child, my three favorite books were "The Moon Man" by Tomi Ungerer, "The Island of the Skog" by Steven Kellogg, and anything at all by Maurice Sendak (if I had to pick, I would probably choose "In The Night Kitchen," which indrectly led me later in life to the work of Windsor McCay).

When I got a little older, I got a library card, which was probably the single greatest acquisition of my childhood. My dad introduced me to "The Hobbit" and later to "The Lord of the Rings" books. From the library, I got a lot of books on folklore and mythology. I was particularly interested in anything having to do with vampires and werewolves. I can still tell you the best traditional ways to stave off a vampire attacks (which I have shared with my daughter, who lives by them, despite my assurances that there's no such thing as vampires). I also liked books on ghosts. I was actually strangely attracted to horror for a fearful child. Somewhere in elementary school, I discovered Edgar Allen Poe and quickly devoured everything I could find by him. I also enjoyed reading Washington Irving and Charles Dickens.

In the eighth grade, I got heavily into comic books (I wouldn't say that I had "discovered" them at that point, since I'd been reading my dad's Marvel comics since I was a toddler, but this is the point where I started buying them for myself) and stopped reading everything else for about two years. The last book I read before this dry spell was "The Last Unicorn" by Peter S. Beagle (I had seen the movie).

In tenth grade I became friends with a guy who was a heavy reader (he was also into comics, but he was at that time a big Dickens fan), which got me back into reading books. The first book I read following my fallow comic-book-only period was "Strange Wine," a collection of short stories by Harlan Ellison (I found that reading short stories was a good way to get back into longer forms). I went through a brief Stephen King period, getting his books out of the school library. I remember reading "Carrie," "The Shining," "The Stand," and a couple of others. I was just starting "Cujo" when I realized that everything King wrote was exactly the same, and I gave up on it. I read "Native Son" by Richard Wright and "Crime and Punishment" that summer and began to get into more "literary" fiction, which is still where my tastes run. These days I'm primarily into that and also history books and some "pop science" stuff.

[BruceH]

Ah, I have fond memories of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, one of the very few fantasy novels I really enjoyed as a teenager. Read it years before seeing the animated movie, though.

Also, one if the first "real" (i.e., non-kid-oriented) sf novels I read was H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, in sixth grade. Come to think of it, that may have been the first 19th-century novel I ever read.

[BillF]

Also, one if the first "real" (i.e., non-kid-oriented) sf novels I read was H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, in sixth grade.

My first one, too - followed quickly by War of the Worlds and John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, but much later than you, at age 16. (Still have the Wyndhams on the shelf, with "1956" written in them!)

[Bright Moments]

doc savage!

Man, I remember spending quite a bit of time with those at one point! One word of advice: if you decide to revisit the series, just grab two of them. One to enjoy, and one to let you know that one was enough...

[Alexander]

when i was thirteen or fourteen i discovered paul auster and read most of his books that were available at the time...

I went through a big Auster period in my early twenties. I think the first book of his that I read was either "The Music of Chance" or "The New York Trilogy." I got very into him, even opting to write my (aborted) Master's Thesis on his work (it was to be titled "Private "I"s and Missing Persons: Issues of Identity in the the 'New York Trilogy'"). The Master's Thesis was really doomed from the start because nobody on the faculity at my grad school had ever read Auster, so they sent me to the one professor who dealt with modern authors. He'd never read Auster either, but he agreed to advise me. After reading the "New York Trilogy," he called me into his office and said, "You're joking, right? You're not really writing about this pretentous clown, are you?" That didn't kill my thesis, but it certainly didn't help. What killed my thesis was the day my advisor called me into his office and told me that I "write like a damn newspaperman" (another grad school professor called me a "restfully clear writer," which means pretty much the same thing, but is more tactful).

I've since come to pretty much the same conclusion as my old professor, actually. I still enjoy Auster's work, but some of his more "writerly" turns make me cringe. It's like reading a teenager who's read a lot of Kafka.

Edited December 4, 2008 by Alexander

[BruceH]

I've since come to pretty much the same conclusion as my old professor, actually. I still enjoy Auster's work, but some of his more "writerly" turns make me cringe. It's like reading a teenager who's read a lot of Kafka.

Yeah, Auster kind of gave metafiction a bad name for a while.

[ejp626]

I've since come to pretty much the same conclusion as my old professor, actually. I still enjoy Auster's work, but some of his more "writerly" turns make me cringe. It's like reading a teenager who's read a lot of Kafka.

Yeah, Auster kind of gave metafiction a bad name for a while.

But he's still at it, adding layer upon layer. I do like the New York Trilogy (or at least the first 2/3rds of it) but he's really a one-trick pony with another 4 or 5 books that are basically just reformulations of his earlier work.

Somewhere I actually have a list of all the books I read from roughly 18 to 25. Some days I wish I had continued it, though I probably could more or less reconstruct it. One year I came awfully close to 100 books (a mix of novels and poetry), though normally it is in the 30-50 book range.

[Jazzmoose]

I remember at age eight deciding that, since I could read, I could read anything, and grabbed Poe's The Gold Bug off the shelf at home. I think I made three or four pages before my theory was completely destroyed...

I'll always be grateful that my mother considered reading to be important and passed that love on to me.

[Alexander]

I remember at age eight deciding that, since I could read, I could read anything, and grabbed Poe's The Gold Bug off the shelf at home. I think I made three or four pages before my theory was completely destroyed...

I'll always be grateful that my mother considered reading to be important and passed that love on to me.

Even more important, in my view, is simply growing up with BOOKS. My house growing up was filled with books. I knew that my dad was a reader and that made reading important to me. Today, my daughter loves reading. She reads a lot on her own (particularly things about pirates, which is her current favorite subject. I can't wait until she's old enough to take on "Treasure Island"). She and I read together all the time.

I also think - apropos of your Poe comment - that it's actually a good thing to try to go beyond your reading level as a kid. I remember reading "The Odyssey" in sixth grade for a book report. I understood very little, but I'm glad I tried it! And what I did understand, I loved!

[Niko]

when i was thirteen or fourteen i discovered paul auster and read most of his books that were available at the time...

I went through a big Auster period in my early twenties. I think the first book of his that I read was either "The Music of Chance" or "The New York Trilogy." I got very into him, even opting to write my (aborted) Master's Thesis on his work (it was to be titled "Private "I"s and Missing Persons: Issues of Identity in the the 'New York Trilogy'"). The Master's Thesis was really doomed from the start because nobody on the faculity at my grad school had ever read Auster, so they sent me to the one professor who dealt with modern authors. He'd never read Auster either, but he agreed to advise me. After reading the "New York Trilogy," he called me into his office and said, "You're joking, right? You're not really writing about this pretentous clown, are you?" That didn't kill my thesis, but it certainly didn't help. What killed my thesis was the day my advisor called me into his office and told me that I "write like a damn newspaperman" (another grad school professor called me a "restfully clear writer," which means pretty much the same thing, but is more tactful).

I've since come to pretty much the same conclusion as my old professor, actually. I still enjoy Auster's work, but some of his more "writerly" turns make me cringe. It's like reading a teenager who's read a lot of Kafka.

when i was an exchange student in the US in 1997 nobody i talked to had heard of auster while in germany he was all over the place at the time... (the h word comes to mind) i really enjoyed moon palace, music of chance..., and then somehow lost interest when leviathan... came out; i even played in a band named after a character from moon palace for a few years (but at that time it wasn't me anymore who read these books); nowadays his stuff seems pretty flat (hollow) to me most of the time; (funny thing i was in a bookstore with a friend a few weeks ago and for the memories had a look into "land of last things", read half a page and then handed it to my friend saying "hey, isn't this exactly the way you are trying to write" and he had to agree that it all sonded completely like him...)

btw, a great collection of short stories, somewhat reminicent of auster but more lively, discovered it back in the day at the public library (where it was filed next to kerouac) is "missing kissinger" by israeli author etgar keret

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/009949816...me=&seller=

Edited December 4, 2008 by Niko

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I'll always be grateful that my mother considered reading to be important and passed that love on to me.

Even more important, in my view, is simply growing up with BOOKS.

That's right. We always had a load of books around. My mother was into left wing politics - her father had been a Bolshevik revolutionary - so there wasn't a great deal for an eight year old there. But the one thing of hers I did read was "Monkey" by Wu Cheng En - I've still got her copy of that. And the Shakespeare.

MG

[T.D.]

Just saw mention of Poe, which reminds me (re. detective stories) that as a fairly young kid I read all of the Poe (not just detective stories, of course, though I started out with them), Arthur Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton (Father Brown) stories I could find (as an adult, I bought complete collections of all). Poe's The Gold-Bug, specifically the gold beetle hanging from the tree, is one of my very earliest reading memories.

Only specific young children's books I recall are Beverly Cleary's (which I remember fondly) and of course Dr. Seuss.

OT re. Paul Auster, I read a little about him, expected to like his writing a lot (having lived in Brooklyn for quite a while) but read Ghosts (I believe), and didn't care for it at all. Barely finished, and have expunged most traces from my memory. I remember it being excessively Beckettian, while much more tedious. Have avoided his books ever since; considering that critics talk of his Lacan influence , I very much doubt I'd like them.

[A Lark Ascending]

I remember at age eight deciding that, since I could read, I could read anything, and grabbed Poe's The Gold Bug off the shelf at home. I think I made three or four pages before my theory was completely destroyed...

I recall getting 'A History of Prussia' out of the school library at age 13 - I liked the name Prussia and had only just found out what it was. The teacher warned me with a wry smile that I might find it heavy going. Of course it was incompehensible - a dry academic tome put there in the hope 6th Form students would read it.

When I brought it back the teacher asked me (same wry smile) if I'd read it. 'The bits I was interested in,' I lied.

I do recall reading T.H. White's 'The Sword in the Stone' whilst ill in bed around 11. Loved it. Though it would be another ten years before I read the full 'Once and Future King'.

My father left school at 14 and was never a reader; my mother reads historical romances. My dad knew how important books were but had no idea what to buy so we had some pretty random things in the house. A few copies of 'the classics' but it was more of a Reader's Digest household. Until I went to university most things I read came from the library.

Edited December 4, 2008 by Bev Stapleton

[Jazzmoose]

At some point one of those fast talking encyclopedia salesmen must have cornered one or both of my parents as we had a complete set of Encyclopedia Americana which provided hours after hours of great reading as a kid. I believe it was from '63 if I remember right. Anyway, it was from back when they weren't smart enough to realize that children needed their reference books dumbed down, so it was really great stuff. Years later in high school a librarian handed me a volume of World Book which I glanced at and promptly pronounced crap. For some reason the librarian was offended. Heck, so was I! The damned thing should have been printed in crayon. I may not have been precocious enough to read The Gold Bug at eight, but World Book was insulting.

[rdavenport]

I was quite a big reader as a kid, but other than Marvel comics (generally Hulk and Fantastic Four), all I can remember was "Carrie's War" by Nina Bawden, "Our John Willie" by Catherine Cookson (!) and "The Machine Gunners". The last named was made into a children's TV serial, which created a short-lived and very un-PC craze of my schoolmates shouting "Where You Going Now?"

Edited December 4, 2008 by rdavenport

[BruceH]

I'll always be grateful that my mother considered reading to be important and passed that love on to me.

Same here.

My mother read to me almost every night before bedtime from as early as I can remember up through first grade.

[T.D.]

How could I forget John R. Tunis' sports books -- all the baseball novels of course ("The Kid from Tomkinsville," "Rookie of the Year," etc.) but also two fantastic books about Indiana high school basketball, "Yea, Wildcats!" and "A City for Lincoln." Tunis also holds up well to adult re-reading. Philip Roth was a Tunis fan, or at least he read and was affected by his books as a

boy -- they're referred to in the early pages of "American Pastoral."

I got nostalgic and rounded up a couple of Tunis books (The Kid From Tompkinsville and The Kid Comes Back) from interlibrary loan. They indeed hold up extremely well to adult re-reading.

I also had persistent vague memories of some very good, though dark, baseball books featuring the New York Mammoths. It just came to me that they're the Mark Harris novels, including Bang the Drum Slowly! (With all the DeNiro film hoopla, and even having seen the film, I'm not sure I ever connected the story with the books I read as a child... ) I'll have to revisit those as well, as they're not kid-targeted and I doubt I could have grasped all the nuances when reading them in middle school.

Off the sports subject, I also recall some H. Rider Haggard novels.

[patricia]

The stuff I read when I was a kid ranged from Robert Louis Stevenson to Booth Tarkington, to the Nancy Drew mysteries, to the Readers Digest condensed books that used to come regularly.

Everything on my parents' estensive bookshelves was available to me though, with no restrictions, and as I got older, into my early teens, I branched into F. Marion Crawford, A.E.W. Mason, Dashiell Hammett and Earl Stanley Gardner, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Mickey Spillane, and all kinds of mysteries, biographies and non-fiction.

Clearly, we had no TV.

Edited December 19, 2008 by patricia

[Chuck Nessa]

Never read a "real" book until I discovered how far behind I was in college. Tons of reading then.... I focused on Nathanial West and followed with a bunch of stuff.

West is still a favorite.

[jazzbo]

I'll always be grateful that my mother considered reading to be important and passed that love on to me.

Same here.

My mother read to me almost every night before bedtime from as early as I can remember up through first grade.

Both my parents have always read. My father taught ME to read before I went to the first grade. He then over the course of the years told me what I could NOT read and so I would be doing double duty, because of course I had to read what was forbidden (comic books, anything that wasn't a history book or for kids. . .) and what I was allowed to. . . .

[Jazzmoose]

My father taught ME to read before I went to the first grade.

I had to learn to read early. Mom would only read one chapter a night from the latest Happy Hollisters book and said if I wanted to go faster I'd have to read it myself. It's amazing how "evil" then looks strangely like "brilliant motivation" now...

[T.D.]

I also learned to read very young, before starting school. I don't even remember how. My parents were both students, so I probably got the idea that reading was a good thing, and then likely urged them to help me with it. Long-term, this of course proved excellent, but it was rather unpleasant short-term, as my early years in elementary school became excruciatingly boring (many of my school memories from that time involve staring out the window).