My sister cared for me while my mother worked two jobs. She taught me to read at a very young age, so that when I first entered elementary school I was way ahead of everyone else. The Dick and Jane books were too elementary and they bored me. The town librarian allowed me to check out books on my mother’s card, as I was too young for my own card. I have my sister to thank for my being an avid reader and an excellent speller all my life.
Aesclepius, is that you?
My sister (three years ahead of me in school) didn’t teach me to read (Mom, who’s a teacher, did that), but every day after school, my sister would teach me everything she’d learned in math class that day. Gave me a huge head start on math.
Since it’s your birthday, I’ll let you slide for that obscure reference. 
I, too, was a precocious reader, sounding out the words on the toys when I was as little as 2 years old, according to my mom. I startled the snot out of the kindergarten teacher, who didn’t realize I could read pretty good at the age of 5… and then probably a little less than a year later, got in trouble with the babysitter for reading Judy Blume’s Are You there, God, it’s me Margaret.
BTW, Thank you, Aunt Lee, I learned a new word today LOL…
I’ve told this story before. My son was not a particularly early reader. As a toddler, no interest in being read to or in books (or, for what it’s worth, TV or movies). He went to kindergarten reading, but barely. Wasa good but not extraordinary reader through primary grades.
But once he got old enough to read and discuss complex stories on the meta level, he exploded. Read all of Haery Potter in February of 4th grade. Reads humdreds of pages a week. This year he’s read The Hunt for Red October, Jurrassic Park, and the Martian.
But that doesn’t really scratch the surface. He’s so, so analytic. It was like he couldn’t appreciate stories until he could analyze them. The conversations we’ve had about story structure and narrative choices and point of view amaze me.
I was also a late, or at least, not early, reader. I’m an English teacher.
My point is just that early reading is not, in my experience, particularly correlated with lifetime reading habits. My brother who was reading by 4 is only one of the 6 of us who vragged about never reading a book in his adult life.
How old is he now?
I have no recollection of being read to as a child, or even of having children’s books available at home before I started school. I remember being in first grade and feeling like I had been missing something because I seemed to be the only one in my class who wasn’t familiar with the concepts of “words” or “reading”. Fortunately I was a quick learner, and it wasn’t long before I started making up for lost time. I remember in later classes being bored because the teacher was explaining stuff I had already read in the textbooks (usually before we had been assigned to read it),
I remember not being able to read. In fact, I have a very specific and vivid memory of the moment, when I was three, that I realized that the magnetic letters I was playing with on a toy chalkboard had formed a word, and that I could make other words with them. While I wasn’t “taught” to read, and didn’t begin reading books, until I started kindergarten* about a year and a half later, that was the moment when I began to be able to read. It was halting and inconsistent, because I was mostly using the names of the letters to sound out words, but I could do it.
*Reading was not normally taught in kindergarten in that time and place, but Mrs. Hill (whom I think fondly of to this day) noticed me stubbornly working my way through a book I found on a shelf. She gave me a quick lesson on phonetics, promised to answer my questions, and turned me loose on a box of books. And she made sure that I had time each day to read them.
He’s 11. 5th grade. And Im sure tons of 5th gradrs read on that level, but its also clearly way ahead of “average”, and, again, not in any way an early reader or even an early book lover.
That’s wonderful! I think it’s very exciting to have a kid of that age with a high reading level…think of all the stuff he has to look forward to, or that you can recommend. 
I don’t recall learning to read, although I must have in kindergarten or 1st grade. But what I do remember was that I used to go to go through comic books without reading the balloons, until one day when I around seven I discovered that they were much better when I did read them. My father read bedtime stories every night and I might have learned from that. I know my kids did.
One day when my son was 4 and his sister 5 1/2 we found him reading to her. Theoretically, she could read French but English because her French immersion teacher had admonished us that reading English would only confuse her and we didn’t. But then we found her correcting a few mistakes her brother made and my wife asked her to read. Shy said she couldn’t read English, but my wife told her to try. Of course, she could. We read to them a lot (things like Pooh and Swallows and Amazons) and they looked at the books and learned from that. When our son went into French immersion, we ignored what the teacher said about reading.
I remember not being able to read, somewhere between the ages of 4 and 5. It’s a vivid memory of seeing the other three members of my family sitting around reading and wanting someone to read a book to me. I learned pretty soon after that.
My older daughter learned to read organically from being read to around the age of 4. Her younger sister was probably 5 before she started learning, and she wasn’t all that interested in reading in early childhood. I used to get a little frustrated that she would invariably choose picture books that were below her reading level during upper elementary school and into the middle grades. She loved having us read Harry Potter to her, but it wasn’t until Twilight came out that she really got into reading chapter books on her own (not what I would have chosen for her, but that’s a valuable parenting lesson I learned).
When my older daughter was 7, she told her teacher that she was really worried because her sister didn’t know how to read. The teacher reassured her that different kids learn at different rates. She then asked how old the sister was. “Four,” my daughter told her in a scandalized whisper.
I’m another. Oldest of the three sisters, ten years my senior, taught me. The youngest of them took the torturer role. I don’t remember not reading but I remember her putting gold stars for each time I read Green Eggs and Ham. I take full responsibility for her having become a school teacher.
My brother, immediately passing on his comic books to me, is where I think my reading and vocabulary really took off. The old World Book Encyclopedia set in the basement was also fascinating!
As a parent of four I have been struck by the diversity in reading achievement tempo.
The eldest finished KG barely knowing letter sounds, upset as his friends were all readers. Near beginning of first grade it clicked and he could, really over night, pick up any book and was reading multiple grade levels above.
The next stayed in a steady average progression.
Third had speech therapy and I give it credit for his reading well before KG: the therapy focused on breaking words into their component sounds, the basics of coding/decoding. He was ahead reading and stayed ahead.
The last, my daughter, was young for her grade and had to work to keep up until it evened out by third grade.
My great frustration with her was that the three older boys always enjoyed my reading to them at night, and we kept that up a very long time, reading books that by subject matter were above grade level and that I thought reading together to discuss was appropriate. She quickly rejected that activity.
They are all fine enough adult readers.
I don’t think reading earlier portends much honestly.
We had a set of “The Book of Knowledge”, which was an encyclopedia set for younger folks. I pretty much devoured those, and when I had more vocabulary I read the Encyclopedia Americana for fun.
I don’t remember learning to read either. Similar to @Master_Wang-Ka , I recall an early childhood scene where I was being asked to read something random, probably from a newspaper, with doting parents looking on. There was no doubting aunt.
By the time I got to elementary school, after a few months of effort-free group reading (which they did, strangely, at my school) I was placed in a much smaller group, just me and another bright lad, in which we were allowed to race through the available material at our own pace. We were maybe a full year ahead of the others by the end of that year.
I was an early reader. One of my earliest memories is of reading a version of “The Country Mouse And The City Mouse” (where the terms “country mouse” and “city mouse” were represented by pictures) in day care when I was 3; my mom said that the day care people were surprised.
I think most of my reading was learned by asking my parents “what does that say?” over and over again, ad nauseam.
Things got a bit confused for me as mum thought Russian would be easier as it was phonetic and English was not.
I learned to sound out Russian, but not English. In English I saw words as they are, not as individual letters that form words.
Fantastic OP. Thanks.
My mom was a great reader. She read a lot of slightly gritty murder mysteries, nothing appropriate for children. When I was about 5, I found a book laying around with a very grown-up and slightly scary-sounding title. I asked her about it, and she said “oh, that? You can read it if you want. But you probably won’t like it – it’s too grown-up for you.”
Turned out I did like it. She was an expert child psychologist. The book was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Oh, Mom never tried to trick us… That was one of the books she read to us, when we were little. Repeatedly, by demand, until we’d pretty much memorized it.
My mom told me that when I was in first grade, the nun who taught my class told her that she’d have too be careful about what books she left lying around the house.
I also have memories of sitting on the living room floor with my brothers and sister while my dad read aloud to us from The Tin Woodman of Oz. Funnily enough I can’t remember anything about what happened in the story, and although I surely had the opportunity to read it myself, I never did. The Tin Woodman of Oz was basically The Princess Bride of my childhood.