I’ve been reading, since grade school. Ii read a lot of what I guess you would call historical fiction then. Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone kind of stuff. I grew into and out of hardy Boy’s mysteries, but the mystery genre has stuck with me. I read a considerable amount of S/F and fantasy in my teen years, but I’ve gotten away from that. Mostly now I read detective novels and police procedurals, with the odd thriller. And all from the library. I gave up buying books long ago.
Hmmm…oh dear (desperately tries to jog memory)…Ah yes, ok, it started with Nancy Drew when I was around 8 or 9?? I read a Nancy book a day and my parents were worried about me because I would not come out of my room. I wanted to have “titan hair” like Nancy. I tried to “sleuth” around my boring Long Island town, but really couldn’t come up with any viable mysteries. Sigh…
Then over the years I moved on to Little Women, The Hobbit, Dune, Catcher in the Rye, Pride and Prejudice. I wish I could pin my taste down to a particular genre, but I don’t think I can…Although I don’t think I’m drawn to a lot of the contemporary stuff that is out now. I seem to be stuck in another century these days.
World Myths and Legends
I read them voraciously from an early age - I know I was reading this sort of story from at least the age of six - collections from various countries.
Fell in love with the books of C.S. Lewis and L. Frank Baum (Narnia and Oz respectively) at about 8, and I guess I’ve always loved a well made fantasy world since then.
Sci Fi - not quite my thing. (All the tech’ speak - sigh!)
I’ve always had a weakness for Sci-Fi and fantasy, as well as well-written nonfiction and political thrillers.
My evolution into a book-devouring dynamo probably has its most direct roots in 3rd grade, when I exhausted the material in the regular reader before the Christmas break. Instead of having me loaf about, Mrs. Benitez had me select books from a bin of fiction paperbacks, or from the reference shelf in the back of the room, and answer the daily set of standardized questions from that material (did anyone else have P.L.O.R.E.?)
I distinctly remember her misgrading my answers because she had forgotten (or hadn’t herself read, I’m not sure which) the books. For example, I was answering a question in which I had to refer to Mr. Tumnus (from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), a faun, or half-man/half-goat person of the woods. She corrected my spelling to “fawn” thinking it was a talking deer or something, and took off a few points. I gave her what-for for that one, as I did when she told me to spell out the names in Twenty One Balloons, a hilariously fictitious account of the eruption of Krakatoa, in which all 21 inhabitants of the doomed island go by unique alphabetic initials.
As you can tell, this experience also was the emergence of my distrust of authority figues.
To cap it off, I learned the basics of physics by reading a set of science encyclopedias, each a thin volume on a different subject. A few weeks after I read about the Newtonian laws of motion, we were wathing a shuttle launch (like ya did back then). One of the students asked how it worked, positing that the exhaust pushed against the platform, lifting the shuttle as the pressure built up. To my horror, she agreed! I got put in the corner when I quoted Newton to her, and proposed a rolly-chair-and-medicine-ball experiment to prove it.
She really was a good teacher, though…
When I was a kid I used to read a lot of mysteries and a fair bit of science fiction. Eventually I grew up and wanted something with a bit more depth and character, and less novelty-focussed. As such, I’m not really into anything specifically genre focussed anymore.
I suppose my pet-area, in terms of unusualness, is plays, although it’s hardly all I read. I can read a good script like others read a book. This didn’t really happen until I started studying them in high school drama though, so I guess I completely fly in the face of the OP’s theory. Sorry.
My dad unfortunately died when I was very young, and I was a reader since I can remember. One day when I was about 10 I was reading some Ray Bradbury book or another and my mom asked me where I got it from. I said the library, why? Because your dad loved that writer, he was his favorite. She then pulled out a box of dad’s old books from a closet that she had stowed away - all sf, lots of Bradbury and Asimov and Herbert. She thought maybe I’d stumbled across his old books, but no. It was like finding buried treasure.
No one else in my family is a reader and I was too young to be influenced by dad’s likes and dislikes, so we both thought it was pretty weird that I’d picked up sf on my own, it being such a “guy” thing (and me not being one of those). Just like the day as a young child I made a tuna sandwich with raw onion and mom mentioned dad always did that - she hates raw onion and since she never made them that way for me she wondered where I’d picked up the habit from. I didn’t get it from anyone else, I just thought it sounded good.
Genetics, man, genetics.
I was a “spontaneous” reader at about the age of 3 and have been unable to resist reading much of anything ever since. The first book I really loved was called ‘Herman the Helper’. That was in the first grade.
These days, my most prominent genre preference is mystery. I’ll read SF, but generally, the series stuff doesn’t appeal to me, which is funny because I tend to love mystery series. I’m also not a huge fan of fantasy series, thought I’ll read some stand alone fantasy.
As a kid, I most identifiably read mysteries - The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, Encyclopedia Brown, Two Minute Mysteries - but I also read a lot of general fiction. Gordon Korman was a favourite, as were Judy Blume and LM Montgomery. The thing was that as a kid I just read a lot. I lived in a small town with a limited TV selection (2 channels) and was fat and unpopular so there wasn’t much to do. I averaged 10-15 books a week during the summer and 5 a week during the school year.
As a teenager, I phased away from mysteries into a lot more horror stuff - VC Andrews, Stephen King, Dean Koontz. I also tended to read a lot of Harlequins while I waited in the library for my mom to pick me up after school (they were short enough that there was a very real possibility of finishing one in an hour and a half, and repetitive enough that even if you didn’t finish it, it didn’t matter because you knew how it would end).
As an adult, I’m back to mysteries - Lawrence Block, Kathy Reichs and Ian Rankin are favourites, and I love collections of short stories. I’ll read most things though including a lot of Canadian women authors (Jane Urquhart, Anne Michaels, Ann Marie McDonald, Margaret Atwood). I also read my fair share of trash - Penny Vincenzi, Tom Clancy and Stuart Woods jump immediately to mind.
My father doesn’t read anything but newspapers, and my mother wasn’t much of a reader when I was a kid. She reads more now, but stays pretty much in the realm of general light reading and romance novels. My brother read a lot of fantasy.