Books That Made You a Reader

[casey]

I was way more the devoted lit enthusiast when I was in elementary school than in college. I read EVERYTHING. American Girl books have an irreplaceable spot in my memory - such well developed characterizations and really didactic in terms of history. Also Babysitter's Club and Babysitter's Little Sister (FCKING KAREN!! Such an unlikeable protagonist).

[alyoshka]

The Series of Unfortunate Events and As the Sun Rises.

[Dodger Thirteen]

Everything I could get my hands on once I started reading. I remember plowing through The Boxcar Children as a kid, so those, I guess.


ETA: I'm not kidding when I say I read everything I could get my hands on.

My parents (read: my mother, since my dad was working a lot when I was young) never really pushed me to do anything I didn't want to do, mostly because they couldn't. I was a very stubborn child - still am.

I was/am also very competitive.

In first grade, I learned to read. Why? Because I found out one of my peers could read and I couldn't. This made me upset. I came home, flung my bookbag across the room, and screamed "JEFFREY CAN READ AND I CAN'T!" My mother then sat me down and began to teach me. That was about...a quarter of the way through the year or so?

At the beginning of second grade, my mother and father when in to their parent-teacher conference for me. I sat down in the library, reading a picture book about that guy who dug through the mountain while racing the steam shovel. That book. My teacher, very irritated with me apparently, told my parents that I "really should be reading chapter books." My mother then took me outside afterward and demanded to know why I hadn't been. I shrugged.

After that, she signed me up for a library card. It was soon decimated of the young children's section. Then came the bookmobile. Then came the school library. I read everything, and would often read five to ten books at a time. (I get bored easily.)

So yes, I read whatever I could. Except Sweet Valley High. Fuck that.

[alyoshka]

Whoever read as a child is lucky I learned to read by 3rd grade I think and learned English around the same time...I was kinda a dumb brick kid though.

[Silva]

I was about four or five when I started reading those picture books with one very short sentence a page. I went through all the stuff like The Boxcar Children and The Magic Treehouse and of course, zillions of books on cats, at a young age. I never had a single book that sparked my reading mania, really.

[meh]

I loved reading by the time I got around to reading these, but I know I was really obsessed with The Saddle Club books and especially the Redwall series. I picked up Brian Jacques' Marlfox at a book sale one day, and from then on I was hooked.( I know this isn't an author thread, but this is a story worth sharing.) I read Marlfox in fourth or fifth grade, and have read everyone since then. My mom told me Brian Jacques was having a book signing at a bookstore about thirty minutes away from our house when I was in ninth grade, and my dad was nice enough to take me and stand in line with me for hours. I was still about 45 minutes away from seeing my favorite author when one of the workers at the store announced that Mr. Jacques had already been there thirty minutes longer than he had committed to be, but that he was willing to stay until he had signed a book for each person still waiting in line. That was awesome, and I still have all of his books.

[meh]

Jun 9, 2011 19:27:34 GMT -5 @meh said:

( I know this isn't an author thread, but this is a story worth sharing.) I read Marlfox in fourth or fifth grade, and have read everyone since then.

That's supposed to be every one of his books since then.
/Englishmajorfail

[onlyaworkingtitle]

Jun 9, 2011 15:04:25 GMT -5 casey said:

I was way more the devoted lit enthusiast when I was in elementary school than in college. I read EVERYTHING. American Girl books have an irreplaceable spot in my memory - such well developed characterizations and really didactic in terms of history. Also Babysitter's Club and Babysitter's Little Sister (FCKING KAREN!! Such an unlikeable protagonist).

AMERICAN GIRL YES.
Pleasant Rowland (the founder of the American Girl Company) (yes that's her real name) is an alumna of my alma mater! She donates metric shit-tonnes of money, and funds most of its renovations, but those renovations are all entirely cosmetic. So the campus looks like its straight out of the Victorian era (one of the lounges is directly based off of Samantha's house, yes seriously) but shit falls apart, like, all the time, and electrical outlets are cunningly hidden in the least useful places so that it looks more "authentic." We have a... love/hate relationship with Pleasant Rowland.

(She tried to convince the college's previous president to plant a field of dandelions on the main green so that it would be prettier. She doesn't realize that people WALK THERE. Every day. All the time. Dandelions wouldn't last long.)

[flute88]

Picture books, I guess. My mom read books to me ever since I was a baby. I started reading on my own at three, and I read the Little House on the Prairie series when I was five. That and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing are the books I remember reading over and over in kindergarten, so I guess they're probably responsible, lol.

[Josefine]

Well, so thinking about this, I can't actually remember a time when I didn't love books. My mom has always read a lot and we didn't have a tv until I was 8. I remember loving my storybooks and the books my mom read to me before I could read myself... then reading everything that involved horses that my library had to offer lol eventually getting tired with the kids' section, moving on to YA (when I probably wouldn't have been considered one yet lol), eventually getting tired with that too, going through a fantasy phase and eventually starting to read books in English because I "got bored with reading German" and wanted a new challenge.

So, there's really no particular book that stood out for me at all. I think I was born with a love for books! :]

[inarikins]

...You mean you guys weren't born loving reading? I don't really have a 'lightswitch' book that turned me on to reading, I just always read. I started kindergarten able to read. My parents like to tell me the story of how I was alone in the car with them (without my older brother) and I would read the signs as we passed them by. I was three, I think.

One of the books that really stood out to me, though, was part of a series that featured a blue and yellow striped dragon and a kid in a jungle. Mostly because we had the Accelerated Reading program at my school growing up (you take a test at the beginning of the year and they judge your reading level based on how well you do) and the teacher I had in 4th grade made the ENTIRE class start out at kindergarten level. I was testing in the 10th, 11th grade by this point. We weren't allowed to check out books above 4th grade because of this teacher. The book I wanted (the one with the blue and yellow striped dragon, remember) was like... a 6th grade book. The librarian had to call my mother to ask her if it was alright if I checked out this book, because I was in 4th grade and it was a 6th grade book, no matter what my tests showed.

After I finished the book in two days, though, the teacher kind of stopped having a problem.

If you guys know what books I'm talking about, can you please tell me, because I don't remember at all and I remember loving them.

EDIT: Nevermind, I found the series. It was the My Father's Dragon series by Ruth Stiles Gannett

[Dodger Thirteen]

Jun 10, 2011 12:37:09 GMT -5 inarikins said:

...You mean you guys weren't born loving reading?

Reading? No. Love and appreciation of stories? Yes. My mother read to me from the time I was a small child and asked me numerous questions concerning the pieces that I answered. It's part of what caused me to remember the tiniest details of a work, even after reading it once. I wish more parents had done/do this, because it seems like such an easy thing to do.

[Silva]

My mom was/is a teacher, so she read to us all the time, and of course I started reading on my own just because I wanted more stories. I mean, she couldn't read to us every second, so I read on my own to get those stories.

[formerlyanon]

I've just always been a reader, always. I learned to talk around when I was two, and my earliest memories involve me comprehending signs on the street or on tv and knowing exactly what they meant or implied. My earliest books, the ones that got me really into reading, were actually old nursery rhymes and traditional fairy tales. We had this huge Richard Scary-illustrated collection of songs and poems, little nursery rhymes. I would just sit and read that for hours, going over it again and again. I also had a collection of Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales that belonged to my mom as a kid. I quickly branched off to other tales and stories, but kept on coming back to those two. My mom dumped all my childhood books one day when we kids were at school, though. She thought we were getting too old for them. I've rarely been so pissed off in my life. All my Dr. Seuss, all my fairy tale collections, Stellaluna, Strega Nona, all gone. She kept the Anderson tales though, since it's more of a novel length collection instead of a picture book. I fully intend to hunt down every book I had as a child as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

And I still read my Anderson tales. I hunt down complete collections at libraries sometimes, since it's missing a few, but it has most of them in it.

[Lilt]

Anyone else read the Magic Treehouse series when they were young?

I used to get them from the Scholastic book order pamphlet they would pass around at my school. Anyway, they were these fantastic books about a brother and sister who find this old treehouse in the woods absolutely packed with books of varying historical time and place, and they would read them and be, quite literally, transported into another world.

I had a moment a few years ago after I found an old copy (Mummies in the Morning), and I was like, holy shit, it's a METAPHOR.

But yeah I hold them responsible for me being a reader.