I’ve always read all the time and can’t remember not being able to read. (Not that big of a feat, since I can’t remember anything at all before age 4.) As a kid, I read anything and everything I could get my hands on, unless it was labeled a classic, in which case I wouldn’t touch it.
I was probably 11 or 12 when I found fantasy as a genre and went through the obligatory Anne McCaffery/Piers Anthony phase. I’m still a fantasy/SF reader, though not hard-core.
I never started reading mysteries until college; not even Agatha Christie, which everyone else was reading at 13. Now I read a lot of them, though mainly as mind candy, esp. at the gym. I also got around to reading the classics at that point (as a comp.lit. major, I kind of had to), finally getting to things like Jane Austen, the Brontes, and Little women–again, that everyone else read in high school.
In the past few years I’ve almost abandoned general fiction for non-fiction of any and all sorts. I’ll still read classics, though. I just pick up anything that looks interesting, which is a lot, since I work (sort of) at the library.
I’ve been reading from a young age - and remember going through six library books a week from a young age.
But I don’t “do” “genre” I read SF. I read Fantasy. I read Literature. I read Mysteries. I read Romance. I tend to head for the Fiction and Literature section of the bookstore and don’t regularly venture into the genre sections unless I’m hungry for something specific. I read History, Sociology, Science (but not well), Management, Technical material, Current Events.
I also can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read. Books I know I read in early elementary school – no later than 3rd grade – (about age 8 for non US readers)
The Witch Family – by Eleanor Estes Star Circus - A.M. Leightner
the Miss Bianca series by Margery Sharp
the Borrowers series by Mary Norton
Trixie Belden series (my third grade teacher brought her own collection in just for me, I think)
My uncle tells a story about a 4-year old me identifying Pegasus on his t-shirt as being from Greek mythology - something I read in one of my mom’s books.
My tastes definitely skew towards SF/Fantasy… more towards science-fiction.
I remember that book! My older brother had a copy and this is the first time anyone else has ever mentioned it. Neat.
Growing up in a house with more books than some libraries I read everything I could. I would go by spells, reading all of one subject for a while then switching to another. I have to say that the type of books I’ve read most consistently over the years though are science fiction and fantasy works.
I had a subscription to something called Children’s Digest (I think) that excerpted stories from a wide variety of sources. It was there I first read Tolkien-the riddle game between Bilbo and Gollum. I found Gollum incredibly creepy, being intrigued and repulsed at the same time.
I distinctly remember my first sf book. I checked it out of the school library when I was in fourth grade. It was Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage and I’ve been on one ever since.
I was your basic illiterate kid in my early teens when I came down with an especially bad strain of mono. I was totally laid out. I was like Roderick Usher in Fall of the House of Usher. You remember, he couldn’t stand intense light, sounds, the company of people, the feel of cloth on his body etc. (He also wanted bury his sister alive, but I felt that way about my older sister normally - so that part of the allusion is weak).
So I couldn’t listen to rock music, watch television or play sports. I could just lie in bed and read, but I wasn’t a reader so what could I do? My parents were not readers either so they had little to contribute, but a neighbor that they and I barely knew heard I was looking for reading material and she brought some books over and told my parents that I might like them.
That first batch was Ian Fleming’s 007 novels. I devoured them. They were wonderful…Reading was wonderful. I was hooked. Then she brought over mysteries, then SF, then histories…six weeks later when I was able to get out of bed and eat solid food. I was a reader.
To this day, I will always have a representative of mystery, SF, history, biography, general fiction or even the occasional western lying around ready to be picked up and either started or finished.
I am partial to science fiction, which I think partially stemmed from my fascination with disasters when I was 6-7 years old.
I was taught to read at a relatively early age (3), and took a liking to it, so much so that I was able to read significant portions of Walter Lords’ A Night To Remember when I was 6 years old. That book led to a number of books about disasters - shipwrecks, the Hindenburg, etc. When I exhausted all of those that I could find, I turned to science fiction because not only did it feature stuff that exploded (this was before Star Wars, btw) but it also kind of tied in with my other love at the time: monster movies.
So I went to the school library and, never having backed down from a reading challenge, checked out Seven Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells (I can still remember the title and the book cover) and went from page 1 to page 700± in 2 weeks. For reasons I just cannot imagine, I found the genre was dull and boring and didn’t pick it up again for another 8 years, until I decided to read Dune. :rolleyes: I just never learn.
I got Dune when the movie came out, read the first hundred or so pages and said “This is just as dull as that HG Wells stuff!” Giving up, I donated the book to the school library… and couldn’t forget about it. It was always there, in the back of my mind… “you know, that was kinda cool, how he created an entire Universe”… “can you really have an interstellar society without computers?”… stuff like that. So I went back to the librarian (like all proper geeks, I had a good relationship with her) and asked if I could, well, you know, maybe have my book back?
Horror is my favorite genre, but I’m not exactly sure when I started reading it.
I do remember reading The House with a Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs when I was a kid, not sure what age. Also, our fifth grade teacher read The Blue Man by Kin Platt to us everyday (a chapter everyday after recess). It’s science fiction, but scared the hell out of me.
I got into Stephen King when I was about 14, and have been reading it ever since (and writing it as well).
I am a fan of fantasy and science fiction, and I believe my first fantasy novels were The Black Cauldron books by Lloyd Alexander, which I read in 3rd-4th grade (this is also when I started playing D&D–bless my parents for the Basic Set, which came with dice and a crayon for blacking in the numbers). They were followed by The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis, and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle.
The science fiction began with Ray Bradbury short stories when I was in 5th grade, followed closely by Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. I read Dune when I was in 6th grade and have read it about 10 times since then.
The way I read the responses so far, with a couple of exceptions, those people who have stated a preference seem to have found them at an early age.
I just realized that I didn’t include myself in this - I tend toward SF and that’s been my prefence as far back as I can remember. The mention of the rocket ship logo on the library books brought back a lot of happy memories.
As rjk mentioned, it’s interesting to see how many people mentioned SF and Mysteries together. I wonder why that is? Perhaps it’s because both genres tend to focus on “what if?”
Well, I’m primarily interested in science fiction and fantasy. For me it’s because the author is free to create a world of their own, while most other types are constrained to the real world. I do read other genres from time to time, but these are my main interests.
::jump starts memory::
Ok. This is going to be hard - I started reading a long time ago from my perspective, and my memory doesn’t work very well past 2 or 3 years ago.
I first started reading seriously when I was about 5 (I had to check this with my mother - I could remember the event but not the age, except that it was a fair bit more than 11 years ago). Apparently I didn’t start reading sci-fi/fantasy until I was about 8-9, and the first books I can remember of that type are the redwall series and some (cringe) star trek books. After that came the wheel of time series, which I think was my first ‘serious’ step into sci-fi / fantasy, and the addiction has progressed from there.
Actually, correction. I think the first fantasy/sci-fi I really got into was the ‘So you want to be a wizard’ series. One of the few decent things about the school I went to in Saudi was it’s library, which had a decent selection of fiction books.
Not that it really matters. I’m just indulging in a rare opportunity for nostalgia.
My folks (and most of my family) are big readers, so I guess I picked up the habit from them. The first books I remember are the ones read to my older sister and me by my Dad. I can remember being about 5 and listening to him read Ozma of Oz stories to us.
In 3rd or 4th grade, I remember picking out children’s mysteries to read. A few Hardy Boys, a couple of Nancy Drews, things like that.
In about 5 or 6th grade (11 or 12 years old) I started to pick up the magazines that my older brothers had. Among these was Analog (formerly Astounding Science Fiction). Then I started reading their books, also heavy in science fiction. I read the Heinlein juveniles, and some short stories by Robert Silverberg. My mother was a big mystery fan, and so I read some of her Agatha Christies and a few others. But at that time, science fiction took over for me.
My first real dip into fantasy on my own was Lord of the Rings which I read for the first time at 14 or 15. Even though I never got into fantasy as much as sci fi, it remains one of my all time favorite books. I’m re-reading it now. I got back into fantasy more during my 20s.
Mysteries have been in and out. I retained my childhood fondness for them, but didn’t read many during my teen years with one or two exceptions (I read all of the Conon Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories one week). At about 30, I suddenly began reading more of them (all of John MacDonald’s Travis McGee books, all of Dick Francis’ mysteries, all of the Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters, all of the Kinsey Millhone books by Sue Grafton, etc.)
So, to directly answer the OP, my preferred fiction genres are 1) Science Fiction, 2) Mysteries 3) Fantasy. Mysteries and fantasy came first, but got edged out by Sci Fi about age 11.
Up until I was about 13 I didn’t read. I was more interested in playing outside. But then I got in trouble and my Dad said I could either be grounded or read “On A Pale Horse” by Piers Anthony. Within a few years I had about read every Sci-Fi or Fantasy novel in the school’s library.
Actually I guess I did read a lot when I was aged 6-10. I really loved the McGurk mysteries by Hildick. I’m still planning on getting a the complete series. I also read Belinda and other books like that. We lived across a very empty street from the library.
Another one who can’t remember a time without being able to read. I’ll read pretty much anything, but I got hooked on SF/Fantasy in middle school. I had to read The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper, went to the library to read the rest of them, then picked up Anne McCaffrey and the rest was history . For whatever odd reason mysteries don’t really float my boat, and I never got into horror because as a kid my imagination was a bit too vivid and the scariness outweighed the miniscule fun I felt. That, and an absolutely horrid Stephen King book I picked up in HS. I don’t remember the title, but it was like he gave up in the middle of a decent story and decided to use magic to solved all his problems :rolleyes: I mostly hang out in SF/Fantasy, but I like YA books, teen books (guilty pleasure), regular fiction, classics. I don’t read any non-fiction, now that I think about it.
Little Golden Books’ The Sailor Dog was the first book I remember loving. I don’t know how long I’d been reading before then, but I dragged that book everywhere the year I was four. I still have my copy of it, if you can call most of three grubby pages and no discernable cover a ‘copy.’ After that it was science fiction with a big side of fantasy for me when Mrs. Ferguson introduced me to the Narnia chronicles in second grade. Then books about horses and eventually S.E Hinton (The Outsiders,etc.). I regained my sanity and returned to SF/Fantasy throughout college. After that I was game for anything and a trip to the bookstore requires hours and hours because I have to go up and down every single aisle checking each book carefully. I can’t imagine why it’s so difficult to get anyone to go bookshopping with me. Other than a strange side trip into depressing, emotionally equivalent to poking yourself in the eye with a fork, Oprah-book-club type novels-- thank you I’m much better now-- I’m an omnivore, literature-wise.
I’m going to have to go look through my boxes of books 'cause you all have reminded me of stuff I’ve just got to re-read. Haven’t thought of The Black Cauldron books and Dick Francis in ages.
I, too, read cereal boxes. And encylopedias, dictionaries, the band-aid box, the first aid manual, in other words, anything that was printed. My first love was for Fairy Tales (you know, *the Green Fairy Tale Book, The Blue Fairy Tales Book, * etc…I must have been about 5 at the time. After I had read every fairy tale book in the library, I went on to biographies for awhile, then historical fiction.
Read Gone With The Wind in 4th grade and helped out in the library to make sure I didn’t miss any new books. Then back to the fairy tales, which naturally lead to SF/Fantasy, then to Horror for a long time, then Romance, back to Historical Fiction and that’s pretty much where I stopped.
So, in summation, but not in any certain order
SF/Fantasy (currently starting over on the Wheels of Time series, since I just got installment #10 and can’t remember a damn thing.
Horror - Stephen King, Clive Barker
Historical Fiction - not fiction, but just started Guns, Germs and Steel
Romance (but only if set against an historical backdrop) - Outlander series
I come from a family of readers, began reading at age three, and have never stopped.
I don’t read much fiction, unless it’s a critically acclaimed “must read,” or comes highly reccomended from a friend. (The last fiction I read was * The Crimson Petal and the White, * a novel about a whore in Victorian England.) My favorite books are sociological studies, histories of the way people lived in the past, and the histories of common objects. I also love biography and science.
The worst thing about my town is the lack of a decent bookstore. The first thing I do when travelling is research where all of the bookstores are located.
I’d rather buy books than food. (I should buy stock in Amazon.com, because sometime I think I single-handedly keep that company in business.) I literally spend more on books than I do on rent.
Like many others here, I am a serious book junkie and cannot remember not being able to read. The first book I remember that made a serious impression on me was Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Max in his wolf suit dancing in wild abandon with the friendly monsters was just amazing–I can still close my eyes and summon the smell of the paper and the ink of the freshly printed book.
I always make sure that I have a book with me when I leave the house so that if I am stuck waiting for a train or eatinglunch thatr I have something to entertain me.
