While reading the thread about people’s First SF Stories Read a few weeks ago, I noticed that many people that responded mentioned that they were pretty young when they first started reading SF, and it started me thinking - much like many other habits, how many of our reading preferences were formed at an early age? Did most people that prefer SF start reading it at a young age, or was it a taste that they aquired as they got older? And that goes for other genres as well. If you lean toward Horror, or Mysteries, or Thrillers, or Romances, has that been for as long as you remember, or did you pick up the habit at a later age? And is there a genre that is more likely than the others to have been discovered as a favorite early on? On the flip side, is there a one (Classics, perhaps) that tended not to be adopted until later?
So here’s my totally unscientific poll:
What genre are you partial to? (Although many people are fairly eclectic in what they read, I believe that most people have at least a slight inclination toward one genre.)
I’ve got a weakness for mysteries and science fiction. Then again, I’m equally a cat and dog person, so perhaps that’s not unusual.
I’ve been reading both for as long as I can remember. My parents subscribed to the Mystery Lovers Book Club, so I grew up with tons of books containing three different novels. I got a nice broad exposure to the genre back then. Science fiction is a weakness which appears to be unique to me in my family. I started off on Isaac Asimov, graduated to Robert Heinlein, and read everything in sight as I grew up. Again, I don’t know when I started reading it, but I think it was before I was 12 or 13. I’m now enough of a hard core fan that I even go to SF conventions which led to me meeting three of my closest friends.
I honestly don’t remember. I don’t remember the genre I first liked and I have enjoyed reading as long as I can remember. I think I’ll ask my parents what I started reading.
Interesting question. I like pretty much straight fiction, but also enjoy mysteries and the occasional biography or book of essays. I’ll pretty much read anything I can get my hands on aside from romance and poetry. (Poetry – blech!)
I think I seriously caught the bug one summer when I was able to cajole my parents to let me stay up one extra hour, as long as that hour was spent reading quietly on the sunporch. (As opposed to reading in my room, where the temptation to whisper across the hall and tease my little brother would be too great.) Mom would dutifully take me to the library every week to replenish my stack of books and I think I went through their entire stock of Trixie Belden mysteries. (Around 50 or so, if memory serves.) This led me to be the kind of person that would be so engrossed in a good book that I would bypass sleep entirely rather than interrupt the story, and as a result to quite a few groggy mornings.
I was nine years old, in the summer after 4th grade, when I was having trouble finding something to check out at the bookmobile. They didn’t have any Encyclopedia Brown or Beverly Cleary or Jim Kjelgard that I hadn’t already read, and nothing else seemed very exciting to me. So the librarian/driver asked me, “Do you like science fiction?”
Huh. Well, I liked science. And I like fiction. But I didn’t really know what they meant together. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “It’s like Star Wars.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, “I love Star Wars.”
So he handed me a copy of The Red Planet.
It was love at first sight. I remember scouring the bookmobile shelves, after that, greedily snapping up anything that had the rocket-ship “Science Fiction” logo on the spine. And then school started. The library at school was very large, and had many books with rocket ships on the spines.
I’m rather fond of science fiction and fantasy, but I don’t remember when I first started reading them. My dad is a big fan of those genres as well (though leaning more towards science fiction than I do), and he read The Hobbit and part of Lord of the Rings to me when I was little, so I’ve always been exposed to such stories. But in 4th grade, I got into Madeleine L’Engle and read A Wrinkle in Time over and over. I think that’s really when the bug hit. I’ve been in search of half-decent fantasy novels ever since…
I started reading cereal boxes at breakfast, sitting across from one of my brothers who was also reading cereal boxes.
I switched a long time ago from cereal boxes to science fiction & history. The book that got me hooked on history was V.M. Hillyer’s 'A Child’s History of the World"
I started to enjoy reading outside of school with iirc the Family Circus series, I think I moved onto Judy Blume, then V.C. Andrews, then Stephen King. I am not particularily loyal to any genre though, but if I had to choose it would be whatever you classify Stephen King under.
If you would call cheesy vampire novels a genre, then that would have to be mine. I have an extensive collection, paperbacks and hardcovers alike. Some extra cheesy, some not so cheesy.
I think the first (adult) one I read was I, Vampire by Micheal Romkey. I was in grade 7 (1987/88). My mom’s friend then suggested an author to me by the name of Anne Rice. I picked up Interview… and have been hooked ever since.
I automatically say science fiction when asked what I read most of when I was young, but when I actually thought about it to post this it occured to me that I didn’t really get into science fiction until I was in high school. The first books I clearly remember reading was the Hardy Boys series. One of my friends had a collection of them, and he started selling them to me at 35 cents each (this was in the 60s BTW). I remember saving up my allowance so I could buy a bunch of them to take with on a family vacation.
My high school library had a rather extensive fiction section with a lot of SF, including most of the Heinlein juveniles, and between that and pulling just about everything in the local public library that had a spaceship stamped on the spine, I got pretty well hooked. Somewhere along the line I also started reading adult mysteries, and most of my current collection is SF and mysteries.
It’s interesting how often tastes for science fiction and mysteries seem to go together; I’m there too. I started reading before I started school, and got into my father’s SF not long after. I also read my mother’s mystery magazines and books. By now I read all sorts of stuff, but those two genres are the big ones.
I, too, like SF and mysteries (mostly historical mysteries). There are numerous authors (Kate Wilhelm, Isaac Asimov) who write in both genres, and they are two of the main genres with magazines devoted to short stories. I agree that it is interesting how the two seem to go together. There are also numerous SF writers who write historical fiction (and vice versa.) All very interesting.
Like, I suspect, most girls, I started reading fantasy first. I can’t pin down the first fantasy book I read but it was probably something along the lines of Ruth Chew, who wrote huge amounts of short chapter books about magic in every day life, with young heroes/heroines. That’s if you’re not counting picture books and so on.
I read mystery books for kids as well, i.e. the Encyclopedia Brown series, but I didn’t really get into adult mysteries til a year or so ago.
As for the first science fiction book, I have no idea. Probably some time in middle school with one of the many sf books in the YA section at my library. I recall reading a YA book written by, I think, Silverberg, about 2 siblings who discover an ancient race on Mars. I started reading books in the YA section about age 10 and books in the adult section of my library about 12 or so; it gets a bit confusing.
I never read any of the Heinlein juveniles or the imitations by someone-or-another (they were shelved in the adult section, somewhat counterproductively.)
I was looking for a different book in fiction when I was in fourth grade, whose title elludes me at the moment. The author of the book in question had a name that stared with ‘H’, and I saw an odd book, whose title was intriguing enough that I really had to find out what it was. So I read Podkayne of Mars, and was well and thoroughly hooked.
The same year, there was a library reading of Taran Wanderer (where the librarian read one chapter to us out loud), and that pretty much got me hooked on fantasy. I’ll read damn near anything these days, but continue to be partial to SF and fantasy.
When I was in elementary school I read my mom’s entire collection of Nancy Drew mysteries. I LOVED Nancy Drew. In junior high the library only had sci-fi and these horror/mystery books with ghosts that turn out to be people. I hate sci-fi. I liked the mysteries (they were like Christopher Pike and R.L. Stein and Lois Lowery). But I kind of stopped rreading that stuff when I was in high school. I got more involved in the books we were reading in English class, and finding other books by those authors.
Now I read mostly parenting and homeschooling books, and history texts. That only started about a year ago, but I’ve been having trouble finding fiction that interested me for a while. The last fiction book I tried to read was Lolita, which I got bored with and didn’t finish.
I can’t remember NOT loving to read; I learned around the time I was four and haven’t quit since. My family tell me that even when I was a toddler I would demand that they read to me – and if it was a story I knew, I’d quote it to them verbatim. Woe to the person who tried to skip a page!
I love fantasy novels, mysteries, and horror fiction. Also, I’m partial to kids books – youth fiction outnumbers adult fiction two to one at my house, and I’m twenty-five years old!
I just started reading fantasy last year. I have been a heavy reader all my life (in elementary school I would hide in the library and read for hours, my teachers would have to come and drag me out), but never went for the SF/Fantasy genres. My SO is a big reader of fantasy, so I decided to read his books instead of going to the bookstore or library twice a week.
I don’t remember not being able to read. I know I could read by the age of three, according to my parents, but it could theoretically have been even sooner: I kept the secret of my literacy away from my parents, because I was afraid they’d stop reading to me at bedtime if I could do it myself. (They didn’t, of course) I learned how to read from TinTin and Asterix comix books. Once I was old enough for “real” books (i.e. ones without pictures) I went straight for the Fantasy section and stayed there until college, where I found my tastes shifting to science fiction and “straight” fiction. Nowadays, I hardly read fantasy at all*, and I take my Isaac Asimov in equal doses with my John Steinbeck. I have a terrible fear that this means I might be growing up. <shudder>
[sub]*For reasons I’m saving for a future Pit Thread. However, I can summarize it here: “Robert Jordan. Grrr!”[/sub]
I don’t really recall when I got into reading, I suspect it was in first grade when we learned to actually read that I got hooked. I read tons after that and got a few awards from summer library programs and such for sheer volume of reading I did (and not just easy stuff either, the majority was novels)
My tastes are constantly changing, I’ve found that I especially love books that are cross-genre though. Most of what I read when I was younger was Nancy Drew mysteries (the whole hardcover collection, or most of it). I then switched to novels like Anne of Green Gables and eventually Romance. Now I read a mix of Fantasy and bad vampire novels (I love it when I can find a new one to read, that will interest me. Not a lot do)
I have kind of delved into the SF books and such, but not so much. Last one I really read would have been… Starship Troopers, about a year ago. I should pick up more if I find some that interest me.
My parents (incorrigable readers themselves) read to me often enough that I could read by my third birthday. Their own preferences were SF/fantasy, mystery novels, and nonfiction, and I spent my childhood surrounded by such books, so I suppose it was only natural that I should enjoy the same genres as a child an early adolescent. I pretty much stopped reading mystery novels in high school due to time pressure and never went back, so my current preference for SF/Fantasy in fiction is the inherited habit that I failed to grow out of, I suppose.
My mother and I had a nice discussion about the Discworld novels when I went home for Thanksgiving, so there may still be mutual reinforcement involved here.
I remember my uncle buy for me the book entitled THE CALL OF THE WILD, by Jack London. Ever since then, i have been reading any book that has caught my fancy.
My first love was science-fiction, dealing in the Star Wars universe to be more precise. I almost read all of them up until the NEW JEDI ORDER…kind of grew out of it.
Next phase was non-fiction, mostly Dave Barry stuff. Funny guy.
Phase after that was horror and fantasy, which is where my interests lie right now. I loved all of Tolkien’s work and am reading it over and over. Stephen King has to be one of the more character driven writers i have read, and only now am i starting to like Clive Barker, who is an odd assortment himself.
So i’ve never really had one favorite until recently, and i started really reading when i was about 10…
I remember scouring the bookmobile shelves, after that, greedily snapping up anything that had the rocket-ship “Science Fiction” logo on the spine. And then school started. The library at school was very large, and had many books with rocket ships on the spines.