In a thread I’m too lazy to search for or link to, Anaamika writes:
I too come from a family in which few others have any interest in the sort of things I like to read. Oh, one of my older brothers was a fan science fiction and fantasy novels when we were growing up, just like me, but he hasn’t any interest in mystery novels or poetry, which I also love. I ascribe my taste in literature mostly to my 4th & 6th grade teachers. The former introduced me to Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time; the latter not only gave me a copy of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, but also read me the first real poem I ever heard (Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I’ll always love her for that.
Anywho – who in your life most influenced your taste in literature?
Why, yes, I DID leave out television and movies. On purpose too. There’s a sacred story that explains why.
My dad. He wasn’t a reader growing up, but when he joined the navy he started out of boredom, mostly fantasy & sci-fi when I was young, which led him to hard science, especially astronomy and geology. If he really liked a book he’d bring it home, and from a fairly young age I would pretty much read anything left lying around. By the time I was ten he had brough home The Hobbit and LOTR, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and several Ray Bradbury books, so I was well on my way to geekdom. My first exposure to Dr. Who was a couple novelizations he gave me - I had not idea it was a TV show until a couple year laters when it showed up on our local PBS station.
My brother.
He got me going with The Hardy Boys when I was a pre teenager. Then got me into science fiction, that got me into science and the history of science, that went to straight history. Just kept building and building. I’m willing to pick up almost any type of book now. Thanks brother John.
My parents were not big readers and mostly stuck to nonfiction. And, in the beginning, I was most interested in history. But I stumbled upon The Space Explorers in 1958 or so (I was 5 or 6) and got hooked on science fiction. I started reading Tom Swift, Jr. around that time. Around 1964, I went to summer camp with only one book – Great Science Fiction Stories – which I read over and over again.
What RealityChuck said.
My father was the only other reader in my family, and his tastes ran to books with titles like “Why You Are So Fucking Depressed.” I found better uses of my time.
Myself, also. I mean, my teachers had a lot to do with me loving literature in general, but my tastes come from somewhere else, somewhere mysterious. When I was nine or ten years old I tripped over a book about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and I was lost forevermore. I read and read and read every bit of sci-fi and fantasy I could find - more sci-fi in those days (now I read more fantasy!) I devoured them whole, and looked for more.
I never really asked for suggestions. In those days sci-fi was always this tiny little unimportant section in the library, and bookstores often would not even have a sci-fi section. It wasn’t very respected. So finding good sci-fi books was kind of like finding good sex books; you had to really search, and I had to kind of hide them from my parents, and not tell them what I was reading, and no one around me ever read the stuff I read. (“Why do you read that stuff? It’s just an escapist fantasy.” Well, duh.)
Even as an adult most of my immediate peers don’t read or watch sci-fi or fantasy, which is one of the reasons I love this board so much. I joined this board for book talk, and I still stay on primarily for book talk.
ETA: The only other reader in my family was my real mother, who read those Harlequin romances. Still, at least she read - no one else thought it was worth their time.
My Dad, easily the most prolific reader anyone that’s met him will ever know. While only a tiny fraction of what he digests, he got me interested in William Kennedy, Cormac McCarthy, John Graves, Dan Jennings, Peter Drucker, Larry McMurtry and hundreds more.
Well, my mom took me to the library all the time when I was a kid, even though we lived way out in the country and it was a long drive. She taught me to look for medal stickers on kids’ books as a point of quality.
My fifth grade teacher, Mr. Miller, turned me on to Tolkien.
My grandmother, born in 1924, was a science fiction fan. She also loved mysteries and historicals, but it was the science fiction that I picked up when I was a kid. Apparently she was introduced to sci-fi by my dad, her son-in-law. I read all of their Asimov and Heinlein and Pohl and McCaffrey, and all of the old Star Trek novels, too.
But lately I’ve been prowling through my mom’s old books - Dorothy Sayers and Georgette Heyer and Elizabeth Peters.
I hated reading as a young kid. I could do it. And generally better than the other kids. But reading for entertainment never worked for me. Through elementary school mom, who liked mysteries and such, would take me to the local library and I would complain the entire time.
Then one day…
In Wilmette, IL. At the A&P behind the Carson, Pirie, Scott at Lake Avenue at the Edens Expressway…
Mom said, “Here. Try this. You might like it.”
“It” was a paperback edition of Robert Anson Heinlein’s “Red Planet”. I was lost from that moment on. Every weekend we’d be at the library and I’d be allowed to check one book out.
Now my movers told me in June that, with out move, they’d moved more boxes of books than any other move they’d ever done.
Her daughter had been murdered by the daughter’s husband, and Dr. Adams was (understandably) at the trial every day, plus became responsible for her infant granddaughter, now effectively an orphan.
The first book we did as a class together when she returned to full-time teaching was Crime and Punishment. She made me understand the way no one ever had before how literature is about real people, even if it’s fiction.
