When I was in second grade, I was reading Newsweek every week. Everyone once in awhile, the teacher would pass out “My Weekly Reader” and I was unimpressed, since the news was three weeks old and major parts of the story were cut out.
I’ve always been anambitious reader. I asked for Kon Tiki and Gulliver’s Travels as Christmas and birthday presents as a kid. We had the Reader’s Digest condensed version of Kon Tiki, but I wanted the Real Thing.
In college, I read Moby Dick and War and Peace for the heck of it.
My diary says I read Ed McBain’s “Cop Hater” when I was 9 years old!
I decided to time reading Stephen King’s unabridge The Stand . Took me 27 hours.
I think the largest slogfest I ever put myself through was a complete collection of Harlan Ellison’s short stories.
We were on a two month vacation, so I figured something large would be a good deal. And really, 1200 pages isn’t so bad, but a compilation of short stories by a single author is rarely a good idea. Fairly quickly you get the four or five themes that interest the author, so that becomes a bit monotonous after a while. And Ellison is a pretty monotonal author. He doesn’t have a lot of cheery stories (perhaps none, even.)
So the last 2/3rds of the book was pretty monotonous, but I pushed on through.
I thought he was a fairly good author, but I’ve never felt a great urge to seek out any more of his work.
My dad read *Gravity’s Rainbow * by Thomas Pynchon. I bow at the feet of anyone who can read it, no matter what your age. I can’t make heads or tails of it even with the companion book.
I think that I was about 6 or 7 when I read A Tale of Two Cities.
I did read it when I was sixteen or so, and I thought that Holden was an obnoxious whiny git that needed to be slapped a few times.
At what age did you read TILL WE HAVE FACES?
Fifth grade- I was (still am) a Monster Kid. Finally tackled Stoker’s DRACULA and Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN. I knew enough then to know I would appreciate them eventually (and still do) but at the time, except for a very view scary passages… YAAAAWN!
Fifth grade- I was (still am) a Monster Kid. Finally tackled Stoker’s DRACULA and Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN. I knew enough then to know I would appreciate them eventually (and still do) but at the time, except for a very view scary passages… YAAAAWN!
Now, there was available at the time a very good CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED comic of FRANKENSTEIN, though not of DRACULA. I’ve seen over the past decade two good children’s level adaptations of both (plus a Hildebrant Brothers illustrated storybook of DRACULA that totally rocks & is now sadly OOP). I’ve have given a limb for those when I was in elementary school!
I read loads of Asimov as a young teenager. I was very impressed with his concept of psychohistory. I intended to develop it for real myself (being about thirteen years old, and no-one else in history ever having come up with a workable theory, were trivial objections :rolleyes:… ah, good times). So to help get me started, I spent two years on and off, trying to read our school library’s copy of Toynbee’s Study of History. :smack: :smack: :smack:
I’d like to say my computer’s currently processing the possible outcomes of the Americo-New Prussian War of 2032 but… well, it isn’t.
I’m currently reading, with about as little success, Newton’s Principia. It’s not in Latin, but it might as well be. How he got anywhere without vectors, I’ll never figure out.
When I was about 12 I was presented with a signed copy of Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy. I tried to read it, but the politics and economics were too much for me at the time and I don’t think I finished it. I finished it at some point and I read most of the Jack Ryan novels in the eighth grade and through high school.
In the first grade I did a book report on a Star Trek TNG novel, #2 I think. Of course there was a fair bit of content I didn’t understand. The other kids complained when I was supposed to read part of it aloud and I couldn’t pronounce some of the words.
As for Atlas Shrugged as recreational reading in high school, that’s what I did. I’ve heard it’s most common for people to get into that around age 17 or sometimes in college. I first heard her name in a newsgroup, relating to atheism or something, and read most of her books as a junior and senior in high school.
When I was in junior high/high school we had a program called Accelerated Reader in which we read books, took a test on the computer about the book, and earned points for them. Usually we had to get around 17-20 points per quarter to get an A. One of my choices (I think I was in eighth or ninth grade) was “Gone With the Wind.” I got 78 points for it. I also read “Wuthering Heights” for Accelerated Reader but I think that one was only worth 25 points. “David Copperfield” was another one but I don’t remember how many points that one was worth.
I went on a WW2 kick when I was ten or so, took a stab at this but then ended up just skimming it.
My sister has a funny story about that book, though. She lent it to a friend who noticed it on her bookshelf. She slipped a bookmark into the book without looking too closely at it. Her friend later teased her, because she’d earlier written on the bookmark when lending it and another book to someone else, “I think you’ll like this book. The characters are little wacky, but the plot is pretty interesting.”
At the paper where I worked in the early 90s I was effectively “The Ross Perot Desk.” One of my assignments was to follow and report on his various campaigns and read a lot of background. Kiss the Boys Goodbye was pretty good, but on a compressed timescale Save Your Job, Save Our Country was a tough read. Ugh.
I read Bleak House when I was 12. I hate Dickens to this day.