After finishing “Good Times on the Farm” with Dick and Jane and Spot, I dove right into L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz/The Marvelous Land of Oz.” My mom didn’t believe me that I was actually reading the book so she made me read out loud to her. I was about four years old.
I can’t really remember when I first started reading “real” books - although I do remember faithfully earning coupons for Pizza Hut starting from 2nd grade. I do remember my first series - the Laura Ingalls Wilder books - but I don’t remember when I read them for the first time.
On a related note, I used to read the “Parents” section of my Seasame Street magazines, which I found much more fascinating than the actual magazine itself. I guess I was around 4-5 years old at the time.
When I was five, I’d memorised all the poems and stories from book one of “The Young Folks Shelf of Books”. I’d read most of the stories in book two before starting school. By the time I was eight, my favourite story was Mischief in Fez, from book three.
Lord of the Flies when I was six. I liked Simon the best and (in case there’s a soul left on the planet who hasn’t read the book):
cried my eyes out when he died. It took me a long time to get over, and my father had to have a long talk with me, and I remember he told me to “lay off the big people books for a while, okay?”
I read Charlotte’s Web after that. It didn’t help at all!
By second grade, I was winning awards for reading so much. I spent all my allowance on books, and every picture taken of me during that era was a photo with my glasses on my head, and my face stuck in a book.
I read Siddhartha when I was eleven, and I still own a copy of it. However, my original copy was thrown out by my mother, who thought it was tripe. Don’t tell an eleven year old girl her taste in books is tripe; she’ll only want it more. I suppose in this case, it was a very good thing.
However, being a dyslexic, I have every sympathy for those who struggled with reading and writing. I just wanted to learn to read really, really badly, and didn’t get too frustrated with it, because I enjoyed everything I did learn. But you know what I do hate? Friggin’ math. Know what I hate the most about math? Friggin’ algebra. Great. I hate math to begin with, then you throw in 6 and 9 to go with the b, d, q and p? What are you trying to do, kill me? That’s a surefire way to make my head explode. 
I read plenty of kids’ books and adaptations (I read The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek, too!), but the first rerally adult book I recall reading was Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki. We had a Reader’s Digest Condensed version, but even as a kid I knew I wanted The Real Thing, so I asked for and received it at Christmas. Loved it, too.
The nuns at my parochial school confiscated it briefly, because I was reading it at recess.
I can’t remember the title of the first book I was able to read by myself. It was a picture book, and it was about a cat in a blue coat that ate everyone he met, until he was all bloated up and waddling like Violet Beauregard, and I think at the end he exploded or got sliced open or something and everyone he ate escaped. I was 6 and I’d been struggling with reading, spending hours painstakingly sounding out words - and then one day I opened up this book and something “clicked” and suddenly I was reading as fast and as smooth as if I’d been doing it for years. Man, nothing else in my life has ever come close to the fierce joy and excitement of that moment.
My first chapter book was Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking-glass. I had just seen the Disney version on TV and asked the Librarian for it, thinking she’d hand me a big glossy picture book like the one I had at home of Disney’s Cinderella. She brought me a big fat library bound chapter book. I was a little taken aback, but thought it would be rude to argue, so I took it home, opened it up, and was delighted to find that this was great stuff. I was 7; I read Pinocchio the same year, as well as an old copy of The Red Fairy Book that had belonged to my grandmother, and was forced to come to the conclusion that Disney made things boring.
I used to get in trouble for reading at recess, too; their rationale was if I read at recess, I’d get tired of it and wouldn’t want to read in class. :rolleyes:
I assume we’re excluding things like children’s books consisting largely or mostly of pictures, comic books, primers and the like.
By the time I was ten, I’d already read much of the King James Bible, many of Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories, and all of John Bunyan’s * The Pilgrim’s Progess.* That year I also found a paperback titled Daybreak: 2250 A.D. by Andre Norton at the school library. Andre Norton remained my favorite writer until I discovered H.G. Wells when I was twelve.
I regard the Norman Schwarzkopff biography I read as a child, simply to prove to my parents that I could, as the first real book I read. It was a long boring read and I only recall bits of it today, but I was very proud of myself for being grown up enough to read it.
Hell, I don’t think my dad ever read it, and it was his book!
The first book for adults I remember reading was Journey to Shiloh, apparently by Will Henry. I was about 8 or 9 at the time. Before that, I had read some Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift Jr. books that were more for my age.
Three years old. The collected children’s stories of Oscar Wilde.
I guess I don’t beat the Moby Dick in kindergarten, admittedly. 
That was my favorite book, though. My mother had gotten it in England when she visited in high school, and I read it so many times it fell apart.
It think it was Ivanhoe, when I was 9 or 10. Either that, or Around the World in 80 Days.
When I was a kid (preschool - age 4 - and on) I read everything I could get my hands on. I learned to read from a combination of PBS and my mom reading a children’s bible to me (my parents aren’t religious though, the rest of my family isn’t outwardly religious either, only my grandfather’s family is, one of them probably gave it to me). I remember in first grade we had a bookshelf with all these books on it, and we were supposed to get through one a week. But I read ALL of them in one week.
I don’t remember my “first” real book, but I read literally EVERYTHING that crossed my path. I was always reading. Or playing outside. I always begged my mom to order me books out of those newsprint catalogs they gave to us at school (Scholastic Book Club?) and my aunts and uncles started giving me old young adult novels when I was seven or eight. A trip to the library was at least a weekly thing, if not more often. It would be so cool if I kept a list of every book I read or something. It would be a huge list.
I wish I still had the time…
Might have been To Kill a Mockingbird. Might have been Black Beauty. I was a voracious reader, and read all the Nancy Drews, etc., before I started kindergarten. I loved the Weekly Reader - I’m sure I (my parents) spent a small fortune on books. The library was a popular place.
I read everything on my parents’ shelves, which is where I ran across TKaM. The Thin Red Line was there too, but I can’t remember what it was about. Heck, in my family, we read the dictionary for fun! Encyclopedias, the back of the cereal box…if it had words, it got read.
I don’t get people that don’t read. It’s such a pleasure!
I remember reading Around the World In 80 Days when I was 8 or so. I remember the teacher telling me it was “too old” for me.
I was also a recess reader. There were a couple of us, and we’d sit on the rocks and read. The rocks were these big rocks that stuck up out of the ground about 18 inches that I assume were too big to dig up or move. They were about six or seven feet across and had lots of flat spots that were great for sitting and reading - until the mean old teachers came and told us to ‘go play.’
The other kids played this awful version of Dodgeball called Greek Dodge that was really bad. You’d get hit with the ball no matter what, and they used volleyballs, not those softer rubbery playground balls. Volleyballs hurt.
The first book i read aloud was the Hungry Little Caterpillar. The first book I read for pleasure was the autobiography “Bo”
BTW, this is my first post in the straight dope forums. looks like i’ll have fun here. about me: i work in consulting for companies like general mills out in our nation’s capital, i live with my gf who works for harry reid, and i’m really into sports, reading and going to the movies.
Uh. I’ve been reading as long as I can remember. Plague of locusts upon the local library system and all that.
…
OK, now I remember my first novel. It was CS Lewis’s The Silver Chair when I was in Campfire Girls. Or was it Bluebirds?
A few years later, I remember trying to tackle the Aeneid since one of my parents had left their copy on a high shelf in my room, wound up skipping large parts of it because I just couldn’t get my head around those bits, but eventually got to the end. (this would have been when I was nine or ten, I think) Didn’t get to wade through it again for about 15 years.
Little House in the Big Woods, followed immediately by nearly all the books in the Nancy Drew series, which got me forever hooked on mysteries.
Next were: The Hardy Boys, Ellery Queen, and Alfred Hitchcock.
Those are some good early reads Large Marge