1

What books got you into reading, Morons?

Isn't that like the proverbial chicken and the egg question?

2 Sci-fi is teh ghey for me to poop on

3 I like historical fiction, so the Flashman series, Aubrey/Maturin and the Sharpe series are all good.  Recently a friend turned me on to Terry Pratchett.  His stuff is fantasy but more like "look at what all these silly people do with magic" rather than "behold the awesome power of so-and-so".  Pratchett also has an excellent sense of humor which is present throughout his books.  For example, there is a scene in one book where he has the four horsemen of the apocolypse drinking in a pub waiting for the end of the world and they get drunk and sing "we are poor little lambs who have lost our way".

4 Old Yeller made me weep

5 The Gallery of Great Americans series by Matthew Grant, my kids are reading them now.  Then Encyclopedia Brown and the Hobbit sealed the deal.

6 How does one get a link into the "comments" sidebar?

7 I forgot to include the Lensman books by E. E. "Doc" Smith. I've still got those books downstairs someplace....

8

Barsoom! I got almost the entire set (10 books) when I was 11 at a church fair for about $1.50. I completed the set some time after, when they came back into print. My 2 grown sons rad them also. Classic!

   For Helium!

9 The Call of the Wild-Jack London. A christmas gift from an Aunt. I've read and re-read that book more times than I can count.

10 Stephen Donaldson: The Wounded Land. Hippie shit, but a great fantasy tale.

11 White Gold Wielder- The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

12 When I was six or seven, I was very sick with a fever. And on a Saturday, my older brother and sister took turns and read aloud to me "The Wizard of Oz", cover to cover. It's a terrific book, much better than the movie, and much darker. From that day forward, I was hooked on fantasy stories.

One Christmas, my parents gave me the children's version of Rachel Carson's "The Sea Around Us". I have no idea why they picked it, but I loved it. It was gorgeously illustrated, and presented the latest science of its day. Living in the Midwest as my family did, I had never seen the sea, and I wouldn't until I was well into my 20s. But I read that book again and again; and that was the beginning of my love of science and history.

Is there a finer gift parents can give children?

13 What books got you into reading, Morons?

Penthouse Forum Stories-A compilation

14 I used to love the novels based on Star Trek when I was a kid.  Some of them were really crappy, but more than a few were rad in a pulpy way.   The way they presented Kirk, Spock and McCoy fleshed out the characters in a cool way. 

15 I read a LOT when I was young. The books that always stood out for me as favorites were:

Alan Dean Foster's Flinx series
Azimov's Foundation and Empire series
Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covanant series
The Mote in God's Eye
Anything by Arthur Clarke
Conan series
Lovecraft's stuff
The original Buck Rogers novel Armageddon 2458AD...nothing like later versions!

16 Barbarian beat me to the punch.

17 laura ingalls wilder, "little house in the big woods"

18 What books got you into reading, Morons?

Pre-teen, I read a lot of R.L. Stine books including his Goosebumps and Fear Street series.  I soon "graduated" up to Dean Koontz's fare, although I wasn't always impressed with his "happy endings".  As far as I know, he only wrote one book without his standard formulaic ending - Dark Rivers of the Heart.

I never was a big fan of sci-fi, except for Timothy Zahn's "Heir to the Empire" Star Wars Expanded Universe series. 

19 Probably the Narnia & Lord of the Rings books. Then on to Starship Trooper, Armor, Hammer's Slammers. And almost anything that Baen is willing to publish. And anything by Terry Pratchett.

Baen has a ton of free e-books here, btw:

http://baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm

20 Sherlock Holmes - I discovered him when I was 10 or 11 and practically wore out the library's 2-volume set, I checked it out so many times. When I finally amassed enough babysitting money, I bought my own copy, and proceeded to wear that one out, too. It turned me into a voracious reader - I was reading Dickens by the time I was 12 (a little too ambitious, actually - I didn't really enjoy it that much) and I was one of those kids with a really big vocabulary. Well, Conan Doyle was a good writer - energetic, graceful English - a very good example for kids to start with. I'm afraid I wasn't able to persuade my own daughter to take an interest in that sort of classic English literature - she's a fanfic aficionado.

21 Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein, Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick, and Out of their Minds by Clifford D. Simak, and of course, even before that Jack Kirby's Thor and Fantastic Four!

22 What books got you into reading, Morons?

LOL, Another Monty book thread.  Monty I have read all those books you were talking about except the Asimov's I Robot series.  At the time those were big I was getting into Heinline and reading everything I could find of his at the library and I just haven't got around to picking them up now.

I just recently finished S. M. Stirling's latest book, A Taint In The Blood.  It is unlike any of this other books and deals with Vampires which seems to be the latest fad for women now.

After finishing that I have began re-reading all my David Weber stuff; currently on Mutineer's Moon. 

 

23

For reason of the individual teachers, my tiny Class B school in Texas gave us a fairly classical literary education but included Twain, Kipling and Jack London. 

24 I was a sci-fi book club member in the early 80's and read all the Larry Niven, Ray Bradbury, A.C. Clark etc etc stuff. Then I went to Engineering school and the fiction fantasy stuff was no longer appealing.
 

25 #22  I just recently finished S. M. Stirling's latest book, A Taint In The Blood.  It is unlike any of this other books and deals with Vampires which seems to be the latest fad for women now.

Do the vampires sparkle?  Are they ghey emo-gits?

26

Vic,

Damn them young 'uns!  They've tainted the word taint forever.

27 I was dumb enough to read some stupid crap DragonLance book.

28 John Christopher- The Tripods Trilogy!  And The Swords of the Spirits Trilogy. I loved those books.  Also 'Smoky the Cowhorse'.  'King of the Wind'.  There was one book about a group of kids during WWII who took gold and under the noses of the Nazi's put it on their sleds and were able to hide it- true story- and I can't remember the name.  My mom found a box several years back where I had put all my favorite kid books and marked it 'for my kids'.  I had forgotten about it until she found it.  My kids have loved those books and loved reading books that I read and held in my hands when I was their age.

29 Alice in Wonderland and Grimm's Fairy Tales were probably my first.  I nearly destroyed my father's "Annotated Alice" by reading and re-reading when I was still too young to understand the annotations.  Then, sometime in the mid 60s, "Gone With The Wind" was spiffed up and re-released and my mother took all four of us girls to see it at a reserved-seat engagement.  There was only one copy of the book in the house so some fights ensued, but we got through it and GWTW was probably my first grown-up book - there's no telling how many times I have read it:  "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful but men seldom realized it when caught by her charms as the Tarleton twins were."

30 I'm re-reading "A Connecticut Yankee In The Shit, Man!"

31 I am struggling thru Paradise Lost w/ Pilgrim Progress on deck. Going thru the classics. Generally, I prefer vintage wordsmithing.

32 Asimov, Foundation
Clarke, Childhood's End
Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
Heinlein, Space Cadet
Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

Damn, that was a long time ago... almost fifty years.

33 Texas gave us a fairly classical literary education but included Twain, Kipling and Jack London.

We had Twain as well, but I will lay dollars to doughnuts you will not find them using him in the current schools. 

Do the vampires sparkle?  Are they ghey emo-gits?

Damn them young 'uns!  They've tainted the word taint forever.

LOL, actually I was surprised.  After I started the book and found what it was about I figured it would be all "bodice ripping" feminine stuff and was prepared to hand it over to my wife and abandon it.  It turned out to be pretty good. Not his best work but still OK.   

34

Comic books are my pleasure.  I like the snappy pictures.

Hit the tip jar.

35 Heinlein, Asimov and Jim Kjelgaard's Fire Hunter...followed by "My Side Of the Mountain".  I then found Poe, Lovecraft and Burroughs' John Carter Of Mars books soon after....  Around the age of 12 I picked up a copy of Nordoff & Hall's "Bounty Trilogy", I have read this at least 6-7 times since then and a book that, I for some strange reason, I associate with Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here"..

36 My father had a set of Travis McGee novels by John D. McDonald. Started in on those when I was in sixth or seventh grade. I remember waiting at the local bookstore on the day one of his books came out (I think it was the "blue" or "turquoise" one in theme, if you remember the series). Anyway, Jaws and the Thorn Birds were also lying around the house when I was young and I devoured them. Don't think I really "got" Thorn Birds, but I was kinda just showing off by reading it anyway. A recent interesting read (some mild Oprah-ish liberalism in the early pages, fair warning) was "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks". I'm on the waiting list for "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" at the local library. Somebody I hadn't spoken to in months specifically called me to recommend it, so I figured I'd give it a try. I think it's in the "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" genre, but I'm not sure.

37 Your article reminded me of my discovery of John D. MacDonald and Travis McGee. They still sit on my shelves and recently I thought it would be fun to read one or two of them again. I was 21 - a long time ago - and the manager of a small bookstore and a terrible snob about "literature". My mother - a constant reader - recommended them and I was disdainful. Then I tried one and was hooked. What a wonderful writer he was. I read everything I could get my hands on up until the day he died. Short, tight little thriller/mystery novels, the Travis McGee series especially, beautifully crafted and compelling. I have often wondered why Hollywood has not discovered Travis - they are lovely perfect opera and the character is interesting and substantial. And you can't beat a houseboat. I guess I know what I am going to do with the rest of this lazy Saturday - put aside Charlie Huston. Deep Blue Goodbye!

38 Winston Churchill's History of WW2. Yeah I was a real upper on dates as a kid?

39 I was dumb enough to read some stupid crap DragonLance book.

My wife got me a bunch of those in paperback. I read one of them and the rest sat on the shelf for a long time without ever being opened. 

That is rare around here.

40 I recently sent my 13-year-old nephew the complete Sherlock Holmes. Hooked another one.

41 Fists of Steel. The Third Reich Series by Time-Life

42 CDR M, You know, I don't think I've ever read a "Fletch" book. Wifey is headed to the library later today, perhaps I'll have her pick one up. Thanks for the tip.

43 In grade school, I read Ivanhoe and Kenilworth. That got me off to a good start, and I read parts of the Horatio Hornblower series. Didn't finish it until I was out of college. Next was part of Le Morte d'Arthur, and Idylls of the King.

So, yeah, I love castles, wooden ships, and descriptions of how they are built, how they function, and how they are destroyed. Oh, and the societies that built them, too.

Later, I read the Perelandra series, and discovered the best part of it to me was in the third book, where a view of Merlin and his world was described that was  completely different from other writings. As a result, I really hate, for example, SyFy's Merlin series.

Unlike most of you morons, I didn't really read a lot of sci-fi until adulthood. I mostly read military history now, with ancient history and the occasional novel thrown in for good measure.

44 That got me off to a good start, and I read parts of the Horatio Hornblower series.

If you liked that series and want to get some more SF check out David Weber's Honor Harrington series.

45 I read the "All of a Kind Family" books.  I loved Dickens.  Loved Tom and Huck.  Read Moby Dick in two days, unabridged, couldn't put it down.  I remember them making fun of me at the dinner table saying "you and Moby can sit there so you can exit dinner fast".  One of my all time two favorite short storis are "The Lady or the Tiger" and "The Gift of the Magi".

46 "The Lady or the Tiger" Posted by: curious at May 22, 2010 09:29 AM (p302b) A golf book?

47

I can't remember ever not reading. Lots of wonderful children's books. Then I started on mysteries with every Agatha Christie I could find. Read some of my step-father's Heinlein's.

And here I am, several (ahem) years later, still reading mysteries and sci fi.

48 "To Serve Man"

49 The Cask of Ahmontalietoyou

50 #40 I think I read somewhere that Zahn has another Star Wars book coming.

Thanks for the heads-up.  The last Zahn book I read was "Outbound Flight", it was good and actually gave a superb explanation of how Thrawn's fleet could beat a numerically and technologically superior force (stupid Trade Federation mechs). 

Here's the news-release that yet un-named book, although it's from April 2, 2009.

51 Great story. Mine is weirdly obverse regarding Burroughs. I was also laid up at 14, and missed about a month of school. I discovered a Tarzan paperback in my older brother's bookshelf (he'd moved on to the Alexandrian Quartet and other proto-hippie works) and devoured it. I begged my mother to buy the entire series at our local five-and-dime. She did the best she could, and I spent the month in a kind of rapture of dense jungle forests, imperiled maidens, savage Bolganis and villainous great white hunters. It was tough going back to school.

52 I started out with Gordon Korman books, which were mostly comedies about kids living in a private all-boys school. But, being a girl, of course I HAD to read the Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe series. Through my early teens, I turned to the darker VC Andrews books. My parents worried...

53 Anything Alinsky

54 "55 "The Lady or the Tiger"
Posted by: curious at May 22, 2010 09:29 AM (p302b)

A golf book?

Posted by: nevergiveup at May 22, 2010 09:30 AM (0GFWk)"

that was funny.....here's a link

55 My parents worried... Posted by: cold canadian at May 22, 2010 09:33 AM (hDDka) And locked their bedroom door at night?

56 I can certainly tell you the rubbish that I will never read: any crap ghost written for teh one or algore or nancy or any of that leftie bull shit. Although, I might read the willie sexcapades series, when released in paperback.

57

H. Beam Piper's "Space Viking".

58 H. Beam Piper's "Space Viking".

59 Texas gave us a fairly classical literary education but included Twain, Kipling and Jack London. That reminds me of the old British joke: "I say, sir, do you like Kipling?" "I cannot say; I've never kippled."

60 Nice reminder on David Weber Vic.  He does do good stuff as well.

Thanks, yes I love Weber. I don't think he has ever written a bad book. I like the Honor Harrington series but I am ex Navy so I may be biased there.

61

Piers Anthony - Incarnations of Immortatality; Orwell - 1984; Tolkien - The Hobbit

Anthony wrote a great fantasy, as did Tolkien. 1984 confused me so much I reread it and bugged my older sister on its meaning on a trip to AL. But I can't forget Bradbury with Farenheit 451.Couldn't stop after those.

62 I won't list the titles, since so many of them have already been listed. 

Unlike most of you morons, I didn't really read a lot of sci-fi until adulthood. I mostly read military history now, with ancient history and the occasional novel thrown in for good measure.

I think this mix, in various proportions, is probably true of a large fraction of the readers here. 

I do remember that at my urging, my HS English teacher reluctantly agreed to let us read a novel about something other than the inner life of a bunch of whining neurotics. My classmates and I chose "Childhood's End" and enjoyed it immensely.  Of course, the usual pretentious little twits sneered at its "inferior writing", but I'm sure that in their dark little hearts they enjoyed it too. 

Favorite book: Moby Dick.  I know, I know.

63 My mom read to me the childrens illustrated versions of Robinson Carusoe and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and Moby Dick.I memorized passages before I could read.Started me on a lifelong love of reading.

64 Nothing like a good old fashioned book burning.

65 I was always an avid reader (and am pleased to see my children becoming so) and started like many young boys who grew up in a house filled with books - Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Call of the Wild, Robinson Crusoe.

As I got older, I dove into my Mom's collection of science fiction, and last month I tracked down a copy of my old-favorite: Assignment in Space with Rip Foster

It is just as awesome a tale of adventure today as it was then. The John Carter of Mars novels were also favorites. I also liked Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot.

66 It doesn't matter what anyone writes here; we'll report that you all said Mein Kampf.

67

I'm on the waiting list for "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" at the local library.

Fair warning, it's not as funny as the premise.  But it is highly biographical (plus vampires) and moves along at a good pace, and Lincoln is quite a badass.  When I'm done, I'm going to read real history, Lincoln: Redeemer President.  That book would have been unread without the other, I think.

68 Piers Anthony - Incarnations of Immortality

That was one of my favorite series, although it did bog down towards the end with the last couple of books.

69 Favorite book: Moby Dick.  I know, I know.
Posted by: pep

People look at me funny when i confess this too.

70 If truth be known I started off reading all the "National Geographics" I could find to see naked boobies on the natives

71 Despite his many, many, many faults, I have to credit Gore Vidal for doing what no teacher did: get me interested in history. Loved the historical fiction and from there, when I'd hear something about American history that I'd learned from his books, I'd actually hear the click and be happy to know something and want to learn more.

72 My grandfather passed on his love of Zane Grey and Louis L'amour to me as well. Education of a Wandering Man is still my favorite book.

73 What books got you into reading, Morons?

Anything, and everything, Robb White, Alistair McLean, Robert Howard, and Ian Fleming.

74 81 If truth be known I started off reading all the "National Geographics" I could find to see naked boobies on the natives

Yeah, sure, that's a given.  I once gave a Flashman book to the 13 year old son of a family friend, with the warning that it was a bit spicy.  She was worried that it would be too much for him.  All I could think was that she didn't really understand the reading habits of hormonally crazed adolescents. 

75 I'm reading Rand Paul - Why He's Bad for America and Rand Paul, The Tea Party Movement and the Rise of Fascism in America

76

79

I know what you mean. Following that series up with 1984 was interesting to say the least. Poor sister is trying to explain some of the ideas to me stuck in a car for 12 hours. Serves her right for giving me the book.

77 Want to read an annoying but strangely compelling short novel? Try "Pincher Martin" by William Golding. Picked up a paperback at a book sale, probably cost a quarter. Anyway, if you've got an afternoon to burn you should give it a whirl.

78 Since I can remember I have been an avid reader.  Two of my early memories are of a series called "The Boxcar Children", an "Encyclopedia Brown" set I got for Christmas one year. 

I loved reading anything sports related and probably my favorite book as a yute was "Five Yard Fuller of the NY Gnats".  In fact, I need to track down a copy of that for my library.

Somewhere around age 11 I discovered my father's Time-Life series on WWII.  There were probably 30 hard-cover books, about 125 pages each.  I read every title and read some of them multiple times.  To this day I'm fascinated with anything WWII, ie Band of Brothers. 

79 my favorite book ever is james and the giant peach

80 Reading is for the proles.

81 Got into reading when I read aloud, "The little kitty had now here to go." Thus began a fascination for the tricky world of compound words (nowhere, now here... hey!) which inevitably evolved into Shakespeare and so on.

82 "The New School: Furniture on a Human Scale"

83 CS Lewis. The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe and the rest of the books in that series. Unbelievable stuff!

84 "Jaws" was the my first real book that I read when I was a kid.  The ultimate page turner.  Plus it had some naughty bits.

85 Posted by: Darth Mallamutt at May 22, 2010 09:42 AM (OWjjx)

I used to love to read the almanac.  I just used to love to read.  I still read but in a different way.  I'm not a fiction fan at all. 

86 I've read most of Terry Pratchett's books.  He is excellent.

87 "Jaws" was the my first real book that I read when I was a kid. The ultimate page turner. Plus it had some naughty bits. Posted by: Crusty at May 22, 2010 09:51 AM (qzgbP) which they left out of the movie?

88

Going way, way back, it'd be The Billy Goats Gruff. I read that book repeatedly. Something bothered me about that story, though, and I didn't know what it was until years later.

Then I discovered that most kids my age could read a lot faster than me, and they liked the stories a lot better than I did. Discouraged, I didn't read much until later in life. Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood's End were the bee's knees. I also enjoyed Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

Anyway, whose bridge was it in The Billy Goats Gruff? Because if the bridge belonged to the troll, then he had every right to charge a toll. It was sort of implied that the bridge was a public thoroughfare, in which case the troll got what was coming to him. Either way, it was a fine tale about solving one's problems with violence. I'm just not sure if it was violence used in the defense of the common good or violence used to approrpraite private property for public use.

89 What book?

Andre Norton "The Stars are Ours" in sixth grade. Changed my life.

But what got me started reading was a complete set of Zane Grey westerns 4th or 5th grade and I'm profoundly near sighted because of it; reading under the covers at night with a flashlight.

90 Since no one has said it yet: What got me reading was The Hobbit.  I was ten, and I wanted to write a letter to the author to tell him I enjoyed the book.  I found out that he had died before I was born.

91 As a child, I read Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Hayek - you know the classics every child reads. Why, what did YOU read?

92 My early youth was filled with The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion. 

I found Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle by mistake in 1982, on a grocery store paperback rack.  That whole series is a rich mix of sci-fi and fantasy.

Another favorite of mine is Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.

But the one book I still like to read again every few years is Gibson's Neuromancer. 

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

93 The Brits: Hammond Innes, Desmond Bagley, Alistair MacLean, Ian Flemming.  The end of WWII found millions of mustered-out men who didn't have jobs right away and the competition was fierce.

I somehow missed Travis until a week of what was supposed to be watersports at my Dad's cabin turned into a John MacDonald marathon.  The whole series!  It was better than finding the lost treasure of Henry Morgan.

I still check the shelves looking for a "missing" book by one of these authors.  As if...

94 Reading Lassie gives me a chubby.

95 Kenneth Roberts' NORTHWEST PASSAGE...I must have read it nine times as a kid. Also A CANTICLE FOR LEBOWITZ, can't remember the author. TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE, by Heinlein. Herman Wouk's WINDS OF WAR and WAR AND REMEMBERANCE; anything by Tolstoy if you can find a good translation (post 1980).

96 Going with a video-game link-in, movies based off video games, without exception, are terrible pieces of dog-vomit.  This generally applies to books based off video games.  Why would anyone want to read about Sonic the Hedgehog when they can just plug the Sonic game into their Sega Genesis?   That requires imagination and patience to read the book, and it's so much easier to see dear Sonic on the screen destroying his enemies than to actually read about it such destruction in a book. 

With that being said, I have come across several notable exceptions.  One being the Resident Evil: Nemesis book.  Quite good.  If you're a fan of the RE series, I suggest giving this a look.

The best game-to-book series IMHO are the Myst series of books (Book of Atrus, Book of Ti'ana, Book of D'ni).  Myst, as you may recall, was a PC game released early '90s centered around the concept that one could travel to other worlds via "linking books".  The Myst series reads like a fantasy series, although the major setback is that the books need the games to be relevant.

97 O/T: Earflaps to speak at West Point commencement today. Aw crap...

98 Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton and Keith Laumer when I was six and in the hospital after a bad accident.

99 Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt books are easy and fun reading usually sprinkled with historical tidbits. The early "The Executioner" series by Don Pendleton  is pretty good too.

100 I remember helping my gramps clean out the garage.  That's when I discovered the Almanac.  they had a huge box full of them.   I now realize they were a treasure trove of information and history but at the time, they were fascinating.  I often wonder what happened to that box of almanacs and to all the books they had.

101 how about a thread on newspaper comics we read as kids

102 Nice reminder on David Weber Vic.  He does do good stuff as well.

Posted by: CDR M at May 22, 2010 09:29 AM (5I8G0)

John Ringo is pretty great, too, for mil-scifi.

103

After forty years I recently tried reading "A Canticle for Leibowitz" again. 

Couldn't get through it.

But I still like dipping into Clarke's "Rama" trilogy.   

104 Wow - this post takes me back.  I think I really got into reading regularly for pleasure around 13 or so.  The Mars series was an early one for me that really helped suck me in.  I also read a bunch of Pierce Anthony fantasy, various older sci fi from a wide range of authors.  Ender's Game was another that I really loved.  I also liked books about real war, of course, so WW2 books were another fav.

105 Ah reading, I love to read, everything except AZ bill SB 1070.

106 Have to agree with you Monty. The I, Robot is what really peaked my interest in reading. But now, I'm more into audiobooks for some reason. The I, Robot series on I-tunes is pretty good.

107 Reading border law is just too hard. And did I mention racist as well?

108 "118 Ah reading, I love to read, everything except AZ bill SB 1070.

Posted by: Eric Holder at May 22, 2010 10:05 AM (w9bVp)"

there has to be a warning sign on some posts....my newly made coffee is all over the place...

too funny....

109 The early "The Executioner" series by Don Pendleton  is pretty good too.

I used to love that series because it was the first series that I had read that explored "law and order conservatism" in a time when there was very little of that around.

I still have some of the higher numbered ones on the shelf. Last year I decided to look at getting some of the early ones and re-reading them.

Alas, they are out of print and have become collector's items.  You can get them but you will pay through the nose for them. 

110 77-I did the same thing-read and re-read our entire encyclopedia collection. But I started reading when I was very young, Jack and Jill magazine, (I think I was 4) and then moving on to books. My favorites were historical fictions-Samuel Shellabarger, Thomas Costain, as well as Dumas, Hugo, Poe, and mysteries. One good thing public schools do is use the Scholastic Accelerated Reader program to encourage kids to read. Scholastic also provides low-cost books through their mail-order system for schools. If your kids are in elementary school, take advantage of the inexpensive books through this program, and please support the librarian who is in charge of AR-he or she could use the help, and it definitely encourages reading.

111 Yo soy un pinche perdasa de mierde.

112

how about a thread on newspaper comics we read as kids

I was raised on "The Far Side". If that didn't warp me permanently...

113 I found Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle by mistake in 1982, on a grocery store paperback rack.  That whole series is a rich mix of sci-fi and fantasy.

Posted by: GulfCoastTider

Is this the "Spocks Brain" version where Lord V was put in someother dudes body and needed to get it back, meanwhile he has taken up with a traveling circus?

114 RAH Citezen of the Galaxy. Andre Norton Star Man's Son. Ed Mcbain the 87th Precint series.

115 Heinlein, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Favorite book ever. Read that book in High School back in the early 80s. Blew my mind.  Every time I read it, I pick up something new .  Politics, relationships, philosophy. I pray they never make a movie. 

116 i've never read a book. My brother read Stop that Ball a couple of times. It is about a ball that was difficult to stop. He said it was good.

117 John Ringo is pretty great, too, for mil-scifi.

Sure is; I have every one of his books. I wish he would hurry up and finish the council wars series.

118 Either way, it was a fine tale about solving one's problems with violence. I'm just not sure if it was violence used in the defense of the common good or violence used to approrpraite private property for public use. Firehorse-that was brilliant.

119 I read everything I can find written by Bill Ayers. What a writer!1111!1!11!!!

120 First ones I bough all by myself with my own earned money - picked up The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring at a yard sale when I was 10, for 25 cents. Scored many Asimov titles and Starship Troopers  and some other Heinlein at a library sale a little while later... (also my first 2 vinyl records - Jimi Hendrix , Are You Experienced and Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath). That was in 1980.

I have spent tens of thousands on books since, and still have most of them. Lots of fantasy and sci fi. The modern titles are mostly history, and gun stuff (like "To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak The Truth" by Jeff Cooper). The cover price on my 60's-era printing of Fellowship of The Ring is 95¢.

121 mama aj my dad had a book of charles addams new yorker cartoons.....my brothers, sister and i would spend hours looking at the ghoulish drawings....that really warped all of us..... my favorite farside is the penguin surrounded by penguins singing i gotta be me.......

122 The cover price on my 60's-era printing of Fellowship of The Ring is 95¢

I can recall when the typical paperback cost 50 cents. If it was a big one it was a dollar. Now they are all around 8 dollars.

That is inflation.

123 I read the history of the Mormon Church in America, especially the parts about Joseph Smith finding the lost golden tablets of the lost tribe of Israel. Gosh, we they lost!11! All the way to Rochester!1!!1! What a story, and so believable!11!1 I'm going to put on a white shirt with a cute skinny black tie and go for a spin on my new bicycle!1!!1!1

124 I read "The Graduate" by Charles Webb when I was a 6th grader. Gosh...I wonder how much influence it had on my lust for older women, at that time being a woman between 19-45.

125

What got me into reading?  Johnny Tremain and the Hardy Boys.

126 Oh, and Rifles for Watie. 

127 Scanning the bookshelf I see an old, quirky book. "The Nixon Recession Caper" by Ralph Maloney. My father-in-law was tossing it out and I needed something to read on a long ride. Anyway, the highlight throughout the book is the portrayal of 70's suburbia. Funny stuff. The "caper" itself is only passable.

128 Actually it was an eclectic mix.  Some classics from different genre.  Hawthorne to Heinlein, Kipling and Kilmer.  Dickens and Twain.  Maybe that explains my.....oh look!  A rabbit!

129 I read voraciously as a young boy and teen, but rarely do now as  an adult.

In junior high I inhaled sci-fi and fantasy. Everything Asimov, the Xanth and  Adept series from Piers Anthony (his Macroscope book freaked me out at the time), Sherlock Holmes, the Dragonlance series, Agatha Christie, Lord of the Rings, Neuromance and the rest of Gibson, the Ender series.

Some of my grade school series:

The Great Brain books
The Three Investigators
The Hardy Boys (which I ditched once I found the Three Investigators)
Encyclopedia Brown books
Various Choose your own Adventures
Some illustrated, abbreviated adventure classics -- tiny books with pictures every other page.

Sadly as an adult I find I get too bored, too easily. I try to read new novels, but put them down after a chapter or two and go back to reading the web.  Either my attention span has been destroyed ... or my ability to suspend disbelief. Or I've read so many plots everything seems boring.

130

Dickens, Twain, Stevenson, boring Cooper, Melvin, anything about Franklin, The Encyclopedia Britannica.

131 I have spent tens of thousands on books since, and still have most of them. Highland Pipes, I admit great jealousy that you still have your books. Since we have to move with husband's job, he makes me purge every two years. It absolutely breaks my heart, but we can't afford to move every book I have purchased (which is a lot.) Good thing is, my kids are now bibliophiles, and think that going to Barnes and Noble is a great way to spend an evening. Now I need to teach them about garage sales, since that's how I disposed of many of our books.

132 So those greedy doctors took out your appendix when they could have just given you a red or blue pill

133 "Johnny Tremain and the Hardy Boys."

Don't forget Nancy Drew!   

134 For me my start was with the classics, then on to SciFi. Asimov, Clarke, etc. Plenty of Niven. Ultimate Geek: I used to read the Dictionary.

135 I discovered John Steinbeck when I was 11. Turned me into a communist.

136 The Constitution of the United States of America. You mainstream Republicans, compassionate conservatives, Dems and Progs should try it.

137

Tom Swift, Jr. actually- I read and still have the first 35 or so books. I also managed to collect several of the original Tom Swift books from the '30's. I was actually reading "Tom Swift and the Race to the Moon" when i was in the second grade.

My first "real" Sci-fi was an Ace Double of Jack Vance's "The Five Gold bands" and "The Dragon Masters".

 

Loved the "Lensman" and "Skylark" novels, too. Still have them all.

138 Early life changer was C. J. Cherryh's The Faded Sun series.

139 So those greedy doctors took out your appendix when they could have just given you a red or blue pill

Billy got the blue pill and went to sleep....
Mary got the red pill and went to sleep.....
Monty had a greedy doctor and learned to read

140 I don't remember not reading.  Milk cartons (rare treat--our milk mostly came in boring glass bottles), cereal boxes, ......

The earliest books I can remember reading were the Bible, Richard Heinlein[1], and Sir Adrian Conan Doyle.  And Dictionaries.  There were a lot of science and stuff but I don't remember specifics. 

And Reader's Digest. And National Geographic (but just for the pictures, IYKWIMAITYD).  Lot of Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Mechanix Illustrated, and such.  Boys Life and The Weekly Reader.

[1]  Which is interesting because I don't read sci-fi anymore.  (Or identified-as-fiction of any kind, much.  "Inconvenient Truths" was not identified as fiction when I read it.)

141 Also A CANTICLE FOR LEBOWITZ, can't remember the author. Walter M. Miller, that was. Excellent book. The sequel? Not so much. (It can be tough sledding, though. I had to keep a Latin/English dictionary handy while I was reading it. You can tell Miller was writing as a Catholic who heard the Mass in Latin.)

142

All my buddies were reading SF back in the early and mid-70s, but I never could get through any of them, except for the stray Bradbury novel. A number of my friends back then in Austin were even fairly well-known published SF authors who were nice enough to give me copies of their books. Sad to say, I never got past the first five pages..

I'm more into classical literature, European and American history, British literature, American urban fiction (Saul Bellow, Malamud, Roth), a number of 20th-century Southern (Faulkner, O'Connor, Welty, Chopin) writers and regional authors, such as Larry McMurtrey's early stuff.

And really I mostly read technical stuff in my field, which is a hell of a lot to read in itself

143

Historical Fiction! Try the Matthew Corbett novels (3 so far) by Robert McCammon: Sings the Nightbird, Queen of Bedlam, Mr Slaughter. Set in early 18th century Colonial America, and just terrific. I also enjoyed (perhaps less enthusiastically) Edward Rutherferd's Sarum, New Forest and Russka. His new one, New York, is sitting here waiting for me ... there's always too much of a pile...

And if you like cold war spy stuff: Charles McCarry is the ONLY one to bother with.

144 Your mother must have been a lot like mine.

145 I didn't like "the old man and the sea" and "waiting for godot"...
both small books that I had to read in school and could barely get through...

146

I've read for so long I can't remember what book (or books) "got" me into reading. I remember in my middle school years the S.E. Hinton novels about moody, alienated teenagers affected me greatly. Tex, The Outsiders, That Was Then, This Is Now.

I also loved The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and re-read it several times. For years, though, I refused to read any of the rest of The Chronicles of Narnia, for some reason.

 

147 Reading the lyrics on albums was also a great start. Though Black Sabbath's first album probably wasn't the best influence on an early-elementary kid. But it did lead me to the likes of Lovecraft and Poe which made a vast improvement on my vocabulary. Those and "101 Dalmations."

148 So those greedy doctors took out your appendix He not only took it out; he put in a jar so I could see it after I woke up from the anesthetic. My surgeon was cool. I wanted to keep it (it was mine, after all) but alas, it was against the rules or something.

149 If you're talking strictly about sci-fi, Asmiov was cool, but Ray Bradbury (especially his short stories) and Arthur C. Clarke were my faves. As for others, Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" is amazing. Right now my little guy is reading "Call of the Wild" for Scouts, another one of my faves. A fantasic book of poetry is "Here Bullet" by Brian Turner, about his time in Iraq.

150 Starship Troopers by RAH

The Last Legionary Quartet by Douglas Hill

151 148 I discovered John Steinbeck when I was 11. Turned me into a communist.

Posted by: Beto at May 22, 2010 10:20 AM (H+LJc)

Yeah but when that hot dumb Okie Rosasharon flopped out her big boobs at the end of "Grapes of Wrath" (NOT in the movie, btw), that was a memorable moment for this 11 year-old reader. 

152 Another book I'll remember forever is Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. I read that book when I was in my early teens. It's probably one of the reasons I'm not fond of tattoos to this very day.

153 I read milk cartons too, looking for any information on my first and second wives.

154 A high school teacher decided she would make us never want to read a book again by making us read Great Expectations. Breakfast of Champions got me back into reading when I was 21. I didn't know that books could be fun until that.

Wilbur Smith novels are epic stories set mostly in Africa. I don't know from what experiences the author draws, but his characters and scenes run from the cruelest you can imagine to the most heroic.

Reacher novels are great.

155 Anyone read "The Gray Lensman" series by E.E. Smith

156 When I was a young teen my brother stashed a huge and secret collection of Playboys in my room. (Teamwork) And, you know, it's true, you eventually get bored looking at boobs. So, I started to read the articles. There certainly was plenty of Commie garbage, but also a nice mix of really good stuff.

157 I read The Lady of Arlington by Harnett T Kane, a fictional rendering of Robert E Lee's wife. From there I dove into the Civil War and never looked back.

158 Spacehounds of IPC rocked my world as an 7yo.

159
164 It was Of Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row that did it to me
Grapes of Wrath just pissed me off at the world

160 My aunt used to go to used bookstores and hunt for old books for me to read when I was a kid - she always told me a book isn't used until you've read it.  She found me some old (I mean 1930's era, some even earlier) girl's books that I absolutely adored.  "Patty Fairfield", The Bobsey Twins, "The Counterpane Fairy".  Those are the books that really got me into reading.  Of course, things evolved from there - Robert A. Heinlein, Dean Koontz, and true crime.  (My aunt even humored me there - bought me "Helter Skelter", which I read over and over until the covers fell off and the pages came out.)

161 As a recovering fundamentalist, I found Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry to be quite amusing.

162 I love me some Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe, and more recently JK Rowling. http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B003FVB83E

163 #169  And, you know, it's true, you eventually get bored looking at boobs. So, I started to read the articles. There certainly was plenty of Commie garbage, but also a nice mix of really good stuff.

Looking at sheaths of fat and flesh constantly does get boring over time. 

But the only article I ever "read" in Playboy was their interview with Rush Limbaugh. 

164 166 I read milk cartons too, looking for any information on my first and second wives.

Posted by: Newt Gingrich at May 22, 2010 10:28 AM (w9bVp)

Newt - stop obfuscating!

Remember, you cruelly bored both of them to death with your verbose bullshit, then hastily buried each of them in the same dirt pile in your backyard, hidden behind an 80-foot tall stack of your remaindered books.

165 Our class was forced to read A Wrinkle in Time in third grade. Then me moved from FL to Massatwoshits (my kids pronounciation, they have no clue how accurate they are) at the end of the school year and  read Jaws on the way. After that, I read nonstop. Then one cold, snowy, miserable Massatwoshits day I ran out of my kind of books. And I saw the wall of previously ignored sci-fi that my dad had collected. That's when I read most of the sci-fi mentioned above.

166 Kratos, The Playboys I read were from the mid-Seventies.

167 172 I tried, but I couldn't even make it halfway through "Grapes of Wrath", and that was only last year. 
I did, however, manage to get through "The Gulag Archipelago" and "The Jungle" - both absolutely terrific.

168 179 Kratos,

The Playboys I read were from the mid-Seventies.

Posted by: eman at May 22, 2010 10:35 AM (hVdJG)

Then you sadly missed the "Little Annie Fanny" cartoon series by Will Elder in the mid-60's. We kids read those like law books at camp. Well, not QUITE like law books..

169 Crane's "Red Badge of Courage" was good early one. Plus entire encyclopedia sets. Drank it all in. Forgot it all pretty fast, too.

170 Then you sadly missed the "Little Annie Fanny" cartoon series by Will Elder in the mid-60's. We kids read those like law books at camp. Well, not QUITE like law books.. Posted by: TexasJew Nope, my brother's collection went way back. I remember Annie.

171
Lace Wigs and Spam

172

Plus entire encyclopedia sets.

Yes! And I wonder if anyone else actually read the dictionary for fun.

173 "Absolute, Absolute!"

174 A high school teacher decided she would make us never want to read a book again by making us read Great Expectations.

I didn't mind Great Expectations.  What killed me was being forced into Heart of Darkness by Joesph Conrad. I hated that book.

175 180 172 I tried, but I couldn't even make it halfway through "Grapes of Wrath", and that was only last year. 
Posted by: antisocialist at May 22, 2010 10:36 AM (Rwudm)   Many years ago, People magazine, in one of the few decent articles that they ever had, tracked down the Okies in California that were in those famous heart-breaking photos from the 30's by the WPA. It turned out that they were living prosperous lives and do very well, as were their kids. I suspect they were also mostly Orange County Republicans, as I recall. I They were Ronald Reagan supporters, too as I recall.. That didn't fit into Steinbeck's poltical outlook. He turned very bitter towards the end of his like, although his last book "Travels with Charley" - travelling across America with his part-poodle Charley - is a great and funny book to read and was #1 for months when I was a kid. I wrote him a fan letter when I was 11 but he never replied.

176 Everything by Heinlein, starting with Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. I re-read his stuff on a regular basis, even the juveniles. I also read a lot of Asimov's stuff back in the day, but recently, when I tried to reread some of it (Caves of Steel), I was struck by how poorly Asimov handled dialog, like an aborigine handling tritium water vapor. Couldn't finish.
Discovered John Wyndham early on; his stuff was hard to find, but Day of the Triffids and Midwitch Cuckoos were worth the search.

177 180 Solzhenitsyn my be the best ever
One of my favorite lines from The Gulag Archipelago


"We have been happily borne—or perhaps have unhappily
dragged our weary way—down the long and crooked streets of
our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood,
rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given
a thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to pene­trate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is
where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away
from us."

Borne...I still use that word in my poetry

178 "Shit My Dad Says"

179 I can't really recall which books got me interested in reading, seems like I always loved it.   I read the Bobbsey twins and Nancy Drew.  I think my first addiction though were books about horses...typical girl I guess.  The Walter Farley(Black Stallion,etc.) and Marguerite Henry(King of the Wind, etc.) books were special favorites.  I never really got into the typical romance novels, instead I happened to pick up my brother's Mars series by Burroughs and I was hooked.  Then came the 60s, high school and college and I fell in love with Fritz Lieber, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, and Michael Moorcock.  How could anyone have lived then and not?  I have to give my parents the credit though, they read to me every night.  I recall when I had measles at ten and couldn't have bright lights.  My dad read War and Peace to me for a week.  Yeah, I know, a bit much.  LOL

180 Beowolf was dreamy.

181 I couldn't tell you, I've been reading for as long as I can remember. Possibly Sherlock Holmes - my mom got me into them way back when. But Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke hooked me on Science Fiction in the 7th grade, and that's just about all I read nowadays, except for W.E.B Griffin and Tom Clancy.

182 Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars Series was a major joy for me as a kid. Carson Napier of Venus and the Moon books were almost as good. Thanks for bringing up some fond memories.

183

A friend of mine in Mississippi told me that he once went up to Oxford, Mississippi once and went over to see William Faulkner, who had known his dad years earlier. His dad had written Faulkner that his son was coming.

Faulkner was pretty crazy that day, having already drained a couple of bottle before noon (not an unusual occurance with him) and chased the kid off his property while riding a horse as soon as he showed up at the gate.

184 My grandmother introduced me to a very competent crack dealer librarian in the fifth grade. She asked what my favorite book was (Swiss Family Robinson, at the time) and handed me a copy of "Rocket Ship Galileo" by Heinlein. Since then I have read every thing he ever wrote, at the bare minimum, three times. Currently rereading "How to Take Back Your Government". I wonder how RAH would feel (now that Ginnie has joined him) about filesharing a book so important that is so rare? I think it is more important than ever with the totalitarian forces marching to "Rules for Radicals".

When I was homeschooling my three step-kids about nine years ago, to supplement the Robinson Curriculum, I found sets of Britannica and Great Books printed in the 60s and a 1973 Webster's Unabridged for a total of of less than $50 in a "friends of the library" thriftstore. I got them because I remembered how many times I had found interesting things I hadn't been looking for because I was searching for something else in all those printed pages.

185

The last book I read was Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, by Terry Teachout.  It was Christmas present from my sister.  Teachout is a great writer, Armstrong led an interesting life, and Teachout used to be a professional bassist, so he writes with real authority about music.

Did the late Frank Frazetta paint the covers of the John Carter of Mars books that you read?

I was in a comic book store earlier this week, and saw reprints of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, written and drawn by Frank Hampson.  The artwork is superb, and Arthur C. Clarke was a science consultant for the series.

186

Pre-cable TV-DVD player there was nothing else for a child bedridden with rhuematic fever to do other than watch boring soap operas.  I was horse crazy so it was Walter Farley's Black Stallion series, the horse stories by Marguerite Henry plus the beautifully illustrated books of artist/authors C.W. Anderson and Sam Savitt.

I discovered John D. MacDonald when I was getting my MBA. There was a student lounge where people dumped paperbacks and I had time to kill between work and evening classes.  I now own just about every book he wrote with the exception of a couple of rare and expensive titles the author himself tried to supress.  For some reason on those titles after the intial printings MacDonald refused to authorize additional runs. They did film one of the McGee books in the 70s with actor Darrin McGavin as McGee.

Nowadays I mostly read history, biography and current events but I will consume anything new by Bernard Cornwell.  Like MacDonald, Cornwell writes to earn a living not to please academic critics or earn awards. After the Sharpe movies brought him many new readers, Cornwell not only stopped describing Richard Sharpe as being a tall, imposing, dark Londoner, he started to write Sharpe's dialogue to fit the cadences of the scrawny, blond Yorkshire native Sean Bean!  I was particularly fond of Cornwell's Grail Quest series, which came out around the time of the LOTR films.  If the ring wanted to be found, Cornwell's grail seemed determined to remain hidden.

187 I haven't actually read any books, but I know of them, Senator.

188 I wish he would hurry up and finish the council wars series.

I think that's going to be a long time coming.  Ringo's deep in two other series right now.

Here's a link to Baen's upcoming:
http://www.baen.com/scheduleXML.asp

189 Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Earth's Core" series.

190 When I was a kid (like still in single digits) I read Beverly Cleary's Ribsy. No, it's not about a tween girl struggling with anorexia. It's about a boy and his dog and the adventures the dog has when he gets lost and is eventually reunited with his owner. It was published in the early 60's and is extremely well written. I still have my copy and am currently reading it to the boy at night.

After that, I read pretty much anything I could get my hands on. I cut my teeth on early Stephen King and got into Bradley, Heinlein, Asimov, etc when I was a teenager.

191 I refused to nap when I was 3 so my mom told me I could read quietly to myself and not wake up the baby. One of my older (by a couple years) neighbors had left Meet Molly An American Girl at my house and I worked my way through that. No naps and there were little girls who lived through a war? What's a war mommy? What did Molly's dad do? What do turnips taste like?   Yeah, I was hooked, and my parents have regretted it ever since :-)

A Horse and His Boy got me into my adult reading habits.

192 I think that's going to be a long time coming.  Ringo's deep in two other series right now.

Yeah I know, and he has quit even updating his web page. I just wish authors would finish one series before starting a new one. Any the other aggravation is the number of books being placed in a series now. I like trilogies and even 4 or 5 but when you get past 5 books in a series with resolving the ultimate plot is gets tiresome.

And these are not like the old series like the ERB Mars books. Those were not series so much as they were "serials". Each book resolved a plot.

193 In elementary school (I think 4th or 5th grade) we had to go to the school library and pick a book to read for a book report.  I wasn't into reading at all, so I went to a random section (the one aisle of science fiction) and picked a random book off the shelf.  It was Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, by Heinlein.  After that, I think I read every single book in that section of the school library.  A few years later, I made a pretty good dent in the public library's Sci-Fi section.  I particularly remember, however, that neither library had either Stranger in a Strange Land or Starship Troopers.  I didn't read those until I was in my 20's.  Favorite from the library has to be I, Robot.

194 I like the early military science fiction by Andre Norton (Star Guard, Star Rangers, Space Police) and Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers).

195

Andre Norton (Alice Mary North) Galactic Derelict. my l'il dog and me went over the spillways waterfall one fall, we were wading in the water when swept away, I managed to throw the dog on the bank and he escaped unscratched but alas I was destined to go over the 15 foot drop. The water emptied my pockets and took my shoes ripped off my shirt and jacket I hit the rocks below and banged up my feet something terrible, no broken bones but algae and crud was all packed in the wounds it took two weeks of bed rest and anti biotics to fix them.

A friend brought by this book and I was hooked on the time traders serial books. The very next was Star Conquerors by Ben Bova and of course his sequel Star watchman.

196 All Robert Heinlein, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and so many others... still have those old tattered paperbacks on my shelves...

197

My Dad read to us after supper - The Chronicles of Narnia, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series, The Hobbit and "Farmer Giles of Ham" - and that is probably what got me reading. I myself learned to read fairly late, about seven years old, but went from "see spot run" to reading the Chrnicles of Narnia for myself within  a year, and by age ten was reading through the autobiographies of WWI fighter pilots. It is hard to pick out particularly influential books, as I read constantly throughout my childhood, most of it non-fiction - military history and technology.

In high school my Mom forced me to read Beowulf (I was homeschooled). I had already read a terrible translation in middle school and it did not grab my attention, so I was reluctant to reread it.The translation Mom had acquired was by Rebsamen, and kept the feel of the original Old English instead of translating it into rhyming couplets. I loved it, and got very interested in Early Medieval and Late Roman history as a result.

198 I believe you have conflated Robert Howard (author of the 'Conan' stories) and E.E. 'Doc' Smith (who wrote the 'Lensman' books).

199

Along these lines- go to Project Gutenberg and look for science fiction. You'll be amazed at the classic stuff thats there for the taking. They even have an illustrated version of what is still one of my favorite stories; "Rip Foster Rides the gray Planet" by Blake Savage. All Burrough's Mars books are there too, I think.

Also some great historical stuff. I d/l 'd  the joutrnals of Lewis and Clark and Teddy Roosevelts's History of the naval war of 1812.

 

Project Gutenberg is a treasure trove that doesn't get enough publicity or support.

200

I started off reading through the Encyclopedia Britannica (the red set with the kids' stories in the back) when I was about 3, and moved up to the adult version of the Encyclo. B. (the black set with the tiny words and very thin paper) when I was about 10.  Which is why my head is chock full of unrelated though interesting (to me) information.

Anything at all by Ray Bradbury

Watership Down

Kon Tiki

Endurance: Shackleton's Valiant Voyage

LOTR

Starship Troopers

The Mote in God's Eye/Lucifer's Hammer/Inferno

I spent the summer of 1983 working as a security guard at an Intel plant in Arizona (swing shift, so nothing to do but sit and read n air conditioned comfort for 40 hours a week), and I read, alternatively and from their first published book to their last, everything by Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, and Leon Uris.  That was an awesome summer.

Shogun/Tai-Pan/Gai-Jin/King Rat/Noble House/Whirlwind

There are several books that I remember reading that I cannot remember the names of and have never been able to find.  I just have fleeting rememberances of the stories and wish like heck I could find them again.

Now I will read anything at all, and have added a lot of Christian works. 

I wish I could find a job where all I had to do was read.  As a real estate lawyer, I do get to read a lot, but it sucks shit that I then have to actually type something up and/or talk on the phone all day with people about insanely boring stuff.

I swear if there is ever an opportunity to be the Bruce Dern-type care-taker on a deep space voyage where slightly psychotic robots do all the real work, I'll knock out anybody who gets in my way to volunteer for that job.  I'll just need my Kindle and a ten thousand pound bag of sunflower seeds, and I'm gone . . .

201 The Tontine by Thomas Costain  and Fr. Francis Finn's Thomas Playfair, Percy Wynn and Harry Dee series about life at a boy's boarding school. 

202
The Complete David Brooks Reader

203 I wish I could find a job where all I had to do was read.  As a real estate lawyer, I do get to read a lot, but it sucks shit that I then have to actually type something up and/or talk on the phone all day with people about insanely boring stuff.

Heh. One of the most hellish experiences I ever had was taking notes on a contract negotiation conference call between our attorney, two attorneys for the contracting company, one attorney each representing 4 different counties, and 2 attorneys for a state agency.

About 3 hours in I was looking for a handgun to eat.

204 Horse books.

Marguarite Henry illustrated by William Dennis.  I had all of them hardcover, and the illustrations were beautiful. And Henry could get into the mind of an animal.  Anthropomorphism at its finest.  I wish I knew what mom did with them.  She's gone, they're gone.  I wish I had them today.

205 The first book I remember reading/loving was "Champion Dog Prince Tom" in second grade, I think.  It was about a tan cocker spaniel from a litter of black cocker spaniels.  Black was the show quality color, but Prince Tom wound up becoming a show dog.  I accidentally "stole" the book from our elementary school class lending library (forgot to return it). 

Biggest influence as a pre-teen/teen was LOTR.  (I hated The Hobbit.) 

I don't have the patience to read novels much any longer so now I tend toward pulp mysteries (like Hillerman) or short stories (my favorites being P.G. Wodehouse and John Mortimer). 

206 Dan Frontier and Encyclopedia Brownbooks from very early in grade school. I read a lot of Greek Mythology, a lot of American Heritage type history for young readers (something called The Year of the Bloody Sevens made quite an impression on me, but couldn't tell you now if it was history or historical fiction). I inherited a collection of Landmark Books from my father. There was an American history and a World history set. Favorites were Wyatt Earp: United States Marshall, William the Conqueror, The Story of the Crusades, The Adventures of Ulysses. I used to be up way past my bedtime, reading by flashlight. I even read 1984 in 1984, just to say I'd done it. I was 12.

207 My childhood favorites (and I'm still rereading them):

Sci-fi:
Ender's Game (Card)
This Alien Shore (Friedman)
The Roads of Heaven (Scott)
Decision at Doona (McCaffrey)

Fantasy:
Lord of the Rings (duh)
The Fire Rose (Lackey)
The Coldfire Trilogy (Friedman)

Other:
Lucifer's Hammer (Niven & Pournelle) <-- Favorite book.

Gotta disagree with the folks that list Donaldson's Covenant books. I own them all, bought for a quarter a piece at the library booksale when I was in highschool. I can't stand them. The whole story is an unlikeable protagonist who, each book, realizes that if he'd just do something or say something the situation would resolve itself. And yet, he never learns his lesson and it drags on for book after book while he just angsts and complains that it's all just so hard... Ugh.

208

I don't remember ever NOT reading. There were four of us kids, and our folks got us started early. I remember my mother reading The Horse and His Boy to us. As a kid I also loved Walter Farley's Black Stallion series, and now I never miss watching the Triple Crown races. I also read and reread Albert Payson Terhune's books about his collies. It was years before I realized that most of the stories were fictional. The first book I was given was Gray Dawn, and he remained my favorite collie. Many years later I learned that the real Gray Dawn was a savagely vicious beast that couldn't be brought out and paraded before visitors, so they always used a ringer.

I also liked sports books. A memorable one, written for kids, was The Boys of Summer, about the great (and some little-known) baseball players.

We lived in Canada for a while, and learning French was compulsory starting the the eighth grade. One of our assignments over several weeks was translating  a little red book called Jean Val Jean. I got so immersed in the story that I stayed up late several nights in a row to read it and finished it 'way ahead of schedule. I promptly picked up Les Miserables (in English) and read it cover to cover.

Asimov's I Robot series got me forever hooked on sci-fi.

Dickens got paid by the word and his books show it. I'd rather see the movies.

Anything by Jane Austen is read-worthy.

I have little time to read now, but currently I'm deep into Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove.

209 Horse books.

I remember reading a book about Man O War and being totally engrossed. I devoured the book in a weekend.

Unfortunately, I don't remember the title. But, man, that was an awesome racehorse. Won 20 of 21 races, and came in second on the race he did lose only because of a fumble out of the gate. No matter how much the handicap, that horse could not be beat in a clean race. I remember the book saying that Man O War never ran at free rein, the owner's were afraid he'd get hurt, so he won all those races being held back by his jockey.

210 Ian Flemming

211

Like many here, I grew up on RAH and all his books.  He was a great writer wtih dialogue, and most of his stories/writing still holds up.

 

Recent books: "The Virtues of War", "The Afghan Campaign" and of course, "Gates of Fire",  all by Steven Pressfield.   Very good reading.

To CDR, VDH's book on the Peloponessian War is very good, but at times it gets a little dry.  It is an interesting contrast to Herodotus' book on the subject.

212

mpur, that book about Man O' War may have been written by Walter Farley.

To all Walter Farley fans: Did you know that the horse he thought was the closest thing to his fictional Black Stallion was the filly Ruffian? The only match race I've ever seen was the one she ran against Foolish Pleasure, and it killed her.

213

Did the late Frank Frazetta paint the covers of the John Carter of Mars books that you read?

I was in a comic book store earlier this week, and saw reprints of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, written and drawn by Frank Hampson.  The artwork is superb, and Arthur C. Clarke was a science consultant for the series.

Posted by: Peter C. at May 22, 2010 10:59 AM

Frazetta was an inspiration for my interest in pen and ink work, he died recently.  I was lucky enough to buy a sketch he did at a comic con back in the 70s.  There were so many really good illustrators working in the 50s, 60s, and 70s...Neal Adams, John Buscema, Bernie Wrightson,  etc.  

214 Animal Farm. Thinnking of buying a bunch of used copies and handing them out on July 4. Apparently it is no longer part of the high school curriculum.

215

I went to a one room school in NE New Mexico for a few weeks when I was 4 and 5 years old and learned to read there.  I've been majorly hooked ever since and I have read every kind of fiction.  One standout book from pre-school years is Dr. Seuss's Scrambled Eggs Super!   I could not get enough of that book for weeks.  Science fiction and fantasy, Ursula LeGuin and the Earthsea books, Andre Norton, Robert Silverberg,Ray Bradbury, Isaace Asimov.

I'm a big fan of Dean Koontz (he's a conservative) and Greg Iles and Earl Emerson, Donald Harstad.  Guilty pleasures are JD Robb and Nora Roberts books (hey, she tells a good story).  I was a big fan of Karen Marie Moning's first couple of "Fever" books, the last one not so much.  Lonesome Dove may be the best book I have read, so far.

216 Gotta disagree with the folks that list Donaldson's Covenant books.
Posted by: Gabriel Malor at May 22, 2010 11:40 AM

Yeah, that's Mr. Y-not's take on them as well.  He said he wanted the protagonist to die, that's how annoying the guy was. 

217 I put my Clavell list on the next thread. Seems the moonshine is still working.

218 Gotta agree with Gabe, the Covenant books are vastly over rated.  Critic's love them because Covenant does everything, even in a mystical land surrounded by magic, from a Humanist perspective.  I found the whole "Unbeliever" meme to be tedious.  Also, Covenant does indeed do bad things himself and in the end rides off into the sunset (iirc he gets his writing groove back) without any real penance or price paid...saved because he has "discovered himself.  A kind if "I'm Ok...You're OK" examination with a Tolkienesque twist. Bleah.

219 215-I loved the Tontine-one of his best.

220

Andre Norton's Star Man's Son.

 

I think I was about 9 or 10.

221

While we're into great books for kids- one of the first things I read to my daughter was the entire "Little House of the Prarie" books. She was about 3 or 4 when we started them and she was totally enthralled.

There's an amazing amount of practical knowledge about living under primitive conditions in there, too.

 

222 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov. Pretty much what you'd expect of a lad growing up in the USA during the 20th century. What is amazing about today is that all the Barsoom books are off copyright and there is the Gutenberg project that's compiled etexts thereof. Though a shoebox of paperbacks remains the gold-standard, a Kindle, Nook or Sony and some googling can find all those titles helpfully converted from flat txt to eBook format. An underappreciated SF author was H. Beam Piper, whose novella "Lone Star Planet" is free and highly appreciated by anyone less than thrilled by the current regime.

223 230 posts, and no one else has mentioned Doc Savage? Sad. I started devouring the paperback reprints in the mid-70s. Interest waned in high school, but I've always loved Doc. A new series of reprints began a few years ago, and so I'm reading them again. It's pulp (literally), but they're quite entertaining, and they're generally very well written. What got me into reading? Hard to remember exactly. I was reading at 3. Newspapers, then comic books. Got hooked on Spider-Man at age 6. Still reading comics at 46. God, I'm a geek.

224 Yeah, as a little girl I was also into horse books like a lot of the folks here.  There was one about a palomino... maybe it was a Flicka book?  Also vaguely recall one about a painted pony. 

What is it with little girls and horses, anyway?

225 Oh, another childhood book was "Beautiful Joe".  Anybody remember that?  It was about a dog that was abused as a puppy (ears and tail "docked") but went on to be a great dog. 

226 Print is dead.

227 I was in my second year of ninth grade (~1954) and was still having trouble with English. Hanging out with my palls was more important than homework  My English teacher kept me for an hour after school for weeks to do two things,(a)congregate the verb be, and (b) read "Great Expectations". I will always be indebteted to this teacher. By having me congregating the verb she helped me to better understand and speak the English language, and soon after reading "Great Expectations" I applied for a library card. With luck my first selection was "The Time Machine". I was hooked. I read a variety of genres at this time. Politics, mystery, adventure, history, modern sci-fi and spend a couple of hours a day reading blogs and exploring the internet.. Thank you Mrs. Withersty!

228 I really prefer dead tree books. No batteries required.

229 We had a group of books published by Colliers when I was little - the Children's Shelf of Books. It started with nursery rhymes and continued on with mythology, animal stories, heroic stories - all taken from classic authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne. I read Black Beauty several times along with Heidi, Toby Tyler, Aladdin, and Call of the Wild.

I remember drawing a picture of a giraffe in the animal book of the Colliers set and being scared my mom would find out. Later on when I thought the coast was clear I took the book out and she'd written my name and the date I drew the picture.

Thanks mom for always having books in the house.

230

"An underappreciated SF author was H. Beam Piper, whose novella "Lone Star Planet" is free and highly appreciated by anyone less than thrilled by the current regime."

 

Hear hear!

 

Aaaaannnnnddddddd......

 

Cordwainer Smith, the most original thinker in all of science fiction.

231

Oh, and Keith Laumer.

 

"A Plauge of Demons" is GREAT.

 

Along with the Retief stories.

232 238 Yeah, as a little girl I was also into horse books like a lot of the folks here.  There was one about a palomino... maybe it was a Flicka book?  Also vaguely recall one about a painted pony. 

What is it with little girls and horses, anyway?

Posted by: Y-not is being honest at May 22, 2010 11:59 AM (Kn9r7)

Yeah me too. I had a book with horse stories in it and re-read it over and over. One story was about a horse that had been trained to kneel a little bit so the lady of the house could easily get on and ride. Later the horse was sold to another owner and he somehow broke his leg out in the wild. Just when he thought he was done for, the horse knelt down and he was able to clamber on.

Books are such wonderful friends.

233 Andre Norton's sci-fi started me out. It was the only such book I could find in the small, rural North Carolina grammar school I attended.

Later it was essentially the same route as Monty took. Fond memories.
 Thanks,
Grandpaparazzi

234 Started out when I was around 10 with the whole Stephen King library. The early stuff isn't so bad, but then I read "It" and it scared the shit out of me. Don't know what my mother was thinking. It did, on the other hand, get me to read his Dark Tower series which remain some of my favorites to this day (especially the first three).

Read "The Once and Future King" by TH White in 7th grade. Still my favorite book. I just bought a 40 year-old hardcover of it over Amazon since I pretty much annihilated my first copy.

Just got done with Kafka's "The Trial", and now I'm reading the shorter stories. Weird dude, but spectacular writing.

235 "Wonderfull Flight to the Mushroom Planet".... read it when I was about 7.

236 Strangely enough, as big a sci-fi/fantasy fan as I am, I can't stand Stephen King.

237 It's all about parents, or a mentor.  I remember my family getting the Book of the Month and my mother getting some sort of family/romance book every month.

238 Just to show my age,  I was captivated by the "We Were There" books in the third grade, then the Hardy Boys.  All of the available Heinlein books by before I started the 7th grade.  History, Mystery and SF still good.

239 188 ...Many years ago, People magazine, in one of the few decent articles that they ever had, tracked down the Okies in California that were in those famous heart-breaking photos from the 30's by the WPA. It turned out that they were living prosperous lives and do very well, as were their kids. I suspect they were also mostly Orange County Republicans, as I recall. I They were Ronald Reagan supporters, too as I recall.

Posted by: TexasJew at May 22, 2010 10:45 AM (DcALS)

Here's a poem for you:

Elbie Hayes ruined his
expensive shoes
squashing around the autumn
desolation
of a sharecropper farm
in Caddo County

Okie boy
turned fifty
searching for anything that
had belonged
to his father
when he was fighting the
Great Depression

Kicked at a lump
behind the caved-in cellar
and uncovered a rusty
Prince Albert tobacco can

Stowed it away
as he would a saint's bones
in his Lincoln Continental
and headed back to Bakersfield

---Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel

240 Not that this will be read so late in the game, but what started my life long love of reading was the 1969 editions of The World Book Encyclopedia and The Encyclopedia Britannica that my parents got for me from a traveling encyclopedia salesman.

Learning to read from them made it difficult to set through elementary school read alouds, suppressing the urge to strangle the stammering idiot next to me, grab his book and and scream, "IT'S "SEE DICK RUN", YOU FUCKING RETARD!!" 

241  Strangely enough, as big a sci-fi/fantasy fan as I am, I can't stand Stephen King.

Posted by: Lazarus Long at May 22, 2010 12:26 PM

I agree.  I enjoyed his stictly horror stories but when he got into fantasy or sci fi he lost me.  Mostly way too long and tedious.

242 Strangely enough, as big a sci-fi/fantasy fan as I am, I can't stand Stephen King.

The only Steven King book I liked was The Stand.

243 I also remember my dad reciting Hamlet's soliliquy and me asking what that was from. He told me it was written by Shakespeare. When I asked what it meant, he told me he was sure I could figure it out if I thought about it and he'd give me a week to do it. He found me that night with my great-grandmother's much loved copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, published in 1902. He taught me about handling really old books and then presented me with my own, slightly used, footnoted and annotated copy the next day.

While I've gotten into Fantasy, Romance, History and certain "modern" authors, Shakespeare remains one of my deepest loves.

I really have to thank my parents for encouraging a love of books, especially my dad, because he didn't think anything was too complicated for me to figure out.

244 *...mumbles to self, "It's SIT, you fucking retard...*

245 From Lone Star Planet:
"Look, Fido," I told him, "my government is quite well aware of the source from which the orders for the murder of my predecessor came. These men I just killed were only the tools.

"We're going to get the brains behind them, if we have to send every warship we own into the z'Srauff star-cluster and devastate every planet in it. We don't let dogs snap at us. And when they do, we don't kick them, we shoot them!"

That, of course, was not exactly striped-pants diplomatic language. I wondered, for a moment, what Norman Gazarian, the protocol man, would think if he heard an Ambassador calling another Ambassador Fido.

246 I've never not read - loved All-of-a-Kind Family, Chronicles of Narnia, Betsy-Tacy and Tib series.  I have always loved mysteries, but I'm more Agatha Christie than Sherlock Holmes.

What I think is interesting is how my kids, sons of avid readers, are all different from us.  Big Guy reads non-fiction only, and reluctantly.  If it ain't about math or mathematicians, he just won't read it.

Middle Guy reads the most, but it's mostly horror (Lovecraft, thank you, not sparkly vampires) and Lewis Carroll.  He fell in love with reading after I assigned him Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy.  The descriptions of the food sold him.  He loves mythology, which dh and I don't .

Wee Baby Lamb will read, but only what he wants, and who can tell what that might be?  He liked the Hobbit and Milrose Munce, and loved the Lightning Thief series, the Mysterious Benedict series and the D'Aulieres' Norse Mythology.

247

In tenth grade, we had to study Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.  (Part of the state-mandated English curriculum.)  I absolutely hated it.

Then, in college, I decided to give it a second chance, and I'm glad I did; it is now one of my all-time favorite books, and I try to re-read it at least once a year.

Anything by Dickens, Thackeray, even Jane Austen.  Cervantes' Don Quixote.  Shakespeare. Tolkein.  History and biography, politics and current events.

In short, I'll read just about anything with words, up to and including whatever I find under the bathroom sink.  (Hey, you have to have something interesting to do while you're in there!)

248 I think Steven King is a guy who wishes he were a SF writer, but finds he's a Horror writer instead. I believe he truly loves SF, but SF doesn't love him back.

249 What reminded me of "Lone Star Planet" was the recent outburst by Mayor Daly in response to a question about the 2nd amendment: he threatened to shoot the reporter. Clearly, no-one in the room had read the book. On New Texas the threat would be real and tempered only by the risk of counter-fire.

250 261: give your oldest anything written by Neal Stephenson. He'll take a break in the middle of a story and dedicate a chapter to a math proof or elaboration of a cryptographic system.

251 It wasn't long ago I read Heinlein's Number of the Beast, which was an hilarious homage to E.R Burroughs mars series. That book actually inspired me to go back and read the series a second time and I enjoyed all of them.


Currently I am reading The seven Suns saga by Kevin J. Anderson, after that the 1632 series.

252 Alan Dean Foster's Flinx series
Azimov's Foundation and Empire series

Posted by: Great Cthulhu at May 22, 2010 08:55 AM (Pljlr)

Yeah. 

Monty, you must've missed the sci-fi/fantasy ONT.

253

Hah. The first classic sci-fi books that got me into the genre were . . . The Princess of Mars etc. My 1975 Ballantine paperbacks are still on my bookshelf, yellowing away, the Gino D'Achille covers slowly fading. Five pages in I started seriously reading, and I have not stopped since.

254 265 261: give your oldest anything written by Neal Stephenson. He'll take a break in the middle of a story and dedicate a chapter to a math proof or elaboration of a cryptographic system.

Much thanks!  I will do so.

255 The first sci-fi I remember was a time-travel book called The Lincoln Hunters, about a firm that traveled back in time to collect unrecorded speeches. The book tried to tackle the various time-travel problems, such as avoiding meeting yourself, etc.

256

Mao's Last Dancer, by Li Cunxin. It's interesting to see a poor starving chinese peasant who was fed communist propaganda all his life traveling to America and realizing instantly he was how much he was lied to.

  Coming of the Storm, by a married couple named Michael and Kathleen Gear. It's about the de Soto expedition as told by the Native Floridans

I'm also reading a Dune parody called Doon.

257 Great post.  There's a lot of great books I read 30+ years ago and had forgotten about.

Some excellent reading I haven't seen mentioned:

David Eddings Belgariad series.
The Drenai novels by David Gemmell (especially the first three).
The Four Lords of the Diamonds by Jack L Chalker.
Steven Eriksons Malazan Book of the Fallen series.
The Black Company books by Glen Cook.
Richard Morgans Takeshi Kovacs novels.

Etc...Etc...

258 241-Well done! Glad you stuck through to become a reader (especially with Great Expectations-that's one of my least favorite Dickens book.) Monty, thanks again for a great thread. I love getting suggestions for more books!!!

259 Being older than most of you...

Probably started on the Tom Swift adventures...juvenile science fiction and adventure.  Then there was a whole bunch of WWII adventure books tailored to young readers - usually stories of teens around the world heroically reacting to the war - my favorite back then a story of a mixed group of dutch teens who stole a boat in the East Indies to escape from the Japanese.

Historical and Science fiction from then on.  Starship Troopers & Battle Cry are books I remember from the 50s.  I have 8.2 GB with 20,129 Historical and SciFi novels on my desktop computer as we speak (just checked).

I LUV me my Kindle.

260

There was a series of juvenile fiction Founding Fathers books with titles like "Anthony Wayne, Boy in Old Philadelphia." Every one was a faked-up childhood story of an American heroine or hero. They were published in the 30's or earlier, but my grade-school library had the whole set, and I liked them a lot. They didn't have the mythos of GW and the cherry tree, but each did feature one dictatorial Ancien Regime grownup, a la Johnny Tremain, and the pastiches of everyday life ("in ancient America") were enlightening, or endarkening as it were.

That library also had marvelous early WWII relics, such as silhouette aircraft ID books of most Allied and Axis aircraft, still popular boys' fare in the late 50's. That knowledge has come in handy in later life. I checked: they got rid of those. My first accidental SF find was "Trouble on Titan," by Alan Nourse, which influenced me more than I realized at the time. Decades later I found that Nourse was a successful physician and a friend of RAH, also wrote the "So You Want To Be A" pamphlets that seemed so laughable when handed out by high school guidance counselors, and first came up with "Blade Runner." A full life.

My father worked as a night dispatcher for a major refinery, and a double-bottom driver left a copy of "Best New Science Fiction of 1950" in the locker room. He brought it home, and I was off and running. Lucky it wasn't "Dude."

Before Scholastic Book Service hit gold with Harry Potter, they put out very cheap paperbacks of a slew of bettersellers. That's how I scored, for about 45 cents, Shirer's "Rise and Fall of Adolph Hitler," which, even though they sold it right in class, would get you sent to the principal's office in the fourth grade.

 

 

 

261 The Danny Dunn series of SF Juveniles. A typical one is "Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint". I devoured those things.

262 I forgot Guy Gavriel Kay.
Everything he writes is brilliant.  I expect his grocery list is brilliant.

263 Actually, it was my child's public library card that got me reading.  (One of the first books I checked out was the story of the reputed only US survivor of Little Big Horn, a cavalry horse named Comanche.)  Then my Mom purchased the Hardy Boys books for me, and I was up to number 122 or something like that when I stopped.  I was also into the Tom Swift series in grade school.  Plus Hitler/Nazi Germany books.  The nuns actually banned me from reading them as they were pretty much my genre of choice back then, and to this day.

264

@276, Secret Operative 48 and the Zeppelin of Doom, here.

Did anybody else have a Bookmobile? Summers, it was a BFD in my neighborhood.  Got "Manhigh" and Adamski's "Inside the Space Ships" from the Bookmobile, in the summer after 3rd grade.

265 "Go, Dog, Go" did it for me, that and "Arty The Smarty."

266

All great writers starting with Homer (oral tradition), Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, etc. (and  these guys borrow metaphors from each other-each built on the previous genius) share 4 writing tricks. These style elements are 1. imagery - words that appeal to the 5 senses, 2. drop in allusions- references to literature, history, etc.  3. use figures of speech - simile, metaphor, personification (these are actually hundreds of these -rhetorical devices- thank the Greeks and Romans), 4. drop in an usual or precise word every so often.  Also reading poetry develops writing syle.

 

267 The Bookmobile came to my school 4-5 times a year.  Never let me take all the books I wanted at one time though.  Something about not being able to read that many books before they came back.

I had to re-read the few they did let me take 8-10 times before they came back.

268 Encyclopedia Brown, early on. I loved the puzzle aspect, so much so that when I later picked up Plot It Yourself, my first Nero Wolfe book, I was disappointed, because, despite the title, there was no puzzle for the reader. Later, when I was old enough to appreciate character-driven literature, I realized what a great book it was on the merits, and now the Nero Wolfe books are a treasure for  me, that I reread every couple of years.

Also loved James and the Giant Peach and The Twenty-One Balloons.  Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End really got to me, too.

I'm wondering if I should give John D. MacDonald another try. Everyone seems to respect him so much. But in the book I tried, I disliked the main detective character, and it didn't help that there was a gratuitous slap at Ayn Rand early in the book. That annoyed me, and I've since assumed that I was looking at the soul of a liberal from the inside, and didn't like what I saw. Should I try again?

269 I really caught fire with reading around the age of twelve: Robb White, "Up Periscope" and "The Lion's Paw"; T.H. White, "The Once and Future King"; Heller's "Catch 22"; "The American People's Encyclopedia" (already 10 years out of date); and of course Sherlock Holmes. I also loved an early book on the Manhattan Project by Stephane Groueff, "Manhattan Project, The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb", which was totally fascinating and really put me on the path to becoming an engineer.

270 tim (#2

if you're still on this thread, I believe the name of the book is Snow Treasure ... by Marie McSwigan

271 280 "Go, Dog, Go" did it for me, that and "Arty The Smarty."

Posted by: Otis Criblecoblis at May 22, 2010 01:31 PM (3qmtL)

Go, Dog, Go was fine, but what set my intellect on fire was "Hop on Pop".

That gave me the foundation to go on to the entire "Cat in the Hat" series and really get it. I must admit that was the most intellectually stimulating part of my senior year in high school.

272 In first grade, they started teaching me to read via word recognition. My father put his foot down on that. He decreed that he wasn't going to have an illiterate daughter and started teaching me phonics, although it wasn't called that in the 50s. He had been reading me the Oz books, starting with The Wizard of Oz, and then the following ones in the series. He owned most of them (all the Baum ones and most of the ones by Ruth Plumly Thompson) So when the phonics lessons grew stale, he made me read them  to him. Then he started up reading me Jack Williamson's "The Legion of Space." He always left me hanging at the end of a chapter, and one day I came home from school and thought "Hey, I can read that!" So I got it out and finished the book that afternoon. I put it back and didn't tell him, and had the fun of hearing it all over again. I did the same thing with "The Cometeers", but one day he came home early and caught me reading "One Against the Legion," and the game was up. So after that he brought me a lot of his old science fiction collection and I was in reader heaven.

273

I too cut my teeth on "I, Robot" by Isaac Asimov and also his "Foundation" trilogy.  It took me years to finish the Foundation stuff and decades to get around to reading all the robot books and I was aware that much of this material had its start way back in the 1930Â’s.  But I will tell you that one of the biggest, mind blowing reading experiences I ever had was to read the final robot books and to discover that R. Daneel Olivaw had also been a secret character in the Foundation series -- all along!  Too much man!!  Asimov was a master of plot and my favorite author.

274 I loved the Barsoomian series. Also, the Carson Napier series. Of course Burroughs in general. Before 7th grade, I was a big western fan and read any western I could get my hands on - until I read my first Louis L'amour novel. I have only read him since. He's that good, IMHO. I loved "Gunner Cade" and "Captain Empirical." I was a little disappointed that there weren't any more novels in the "Otherwhen" series (although I don't know if you can call 2 books a series). Georgette Heyer is probably the best historical fiction writer on English history that has ever been. I loved stories written by Christopher Anvil (especially about the Interstellar Patrol, but Pandora's planet holds a special place in my heart is it is the first Anvil novel I have ever read). Robert Munsch books (the ones illustrated by Martchenko) are really great. I liked spidey comics up to the time he got married to Mary Jane Watson (after that, it was all downhill IMHO) and should have kept the marriage issue as I knew it was bound to become a collector's edition. I've read most of Doc Savage, I just wish that the characters of Johnny, Renny, Long Tom and Patricia Savage were better developed. Monk and Ham seem to sort of overshadow the rest of Doc's aides as the series progresses (still enjoyable - to this day, tho). I liked professor challenger and Allan Quatermain. I also enjoyed Prescott's histories of the conquistadores and Harold Lamb's histories of Temujin, Babir Khan and Hannibal (although some of his other histories tended to turn me off because of his penchant for getting "inside the head" of his protagonists). But I do have to admit that I think that Keith Lamour was probably the most versatile wordsmith in the 20th century.

275 My uncle, born in 1917, brought over his original Huckleberry Finn series and the Tarzan books. He was a lifelong bachelor and took his fatherless nephew and niece under his wings. Good, good man, he was. RIP. He also got me into reading biographies like Geronimo and Ben Franklin and Einstein.

276 I read Alice In Wonderland, La Morte d'Arthur, Mark Twain (though I quickly got tired of him), Grimm's Fairy Tales and Rudyard Kipling. Then I read The Catcher In the Rye but liked Franny and Zoey better. That got me into Eastern mysticism, and I also got into Gothic stuff like Poe and Anne Rice. I loved my aunt's copy of The Witching Hour but dropped it in the bathtub. Years later in NYC, I stood in line at a Barnes and Noble book-signing and gave blood so I could replace her copy with a signed one. A friend of mine's father had a book store, and I bought a copy of Rubyfruit Jungle, even though I never thought of experimenting with girls or boys for that matter. Biographies on Hollywood's stars of the Golden Age -- Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner. I read Postcards From the Edge by Carrie Fisher. My stepfather's science fiction books (except Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy) Cosmos by Carl Sagan, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, Exploration of Space by Arthur C. Clarke, I Robot and Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov and Count Zero by William Gibson. Then I think Walden influenced me. I loved Greek mythology and wanted to be an archaeologist. Lastly, Edith Wharton and Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

277 The Night Before Christmas was the first thing I learned to read. I had it memorized at three and learned to read it quickly. I was always  trying to give people Christmas presents when I was little. My family probably thought I was mildly retarded.

278

La Morte d'Arthur. I imagined I was the only junior-high kid who read it. Loved the fantasy of it.

BTW, I have an autographed copy of Ross Perot's book (personally... he touched my hand at the Bush/Clinton/Perot debate in St. Louis. Anyone want to buy it?

279 I'm told I taught myself to read so I could understand "Pogo." In forth grade my father thought I was not reading enough and checked out several books from the county library for me. "Rusty's Space Ship" by Evelyn Sidney Lampkin was the one that took me back to the library myself. Then "Have Spacesuit Will Travel" set the hook good, and there was no turning back.

280

Y-not @ 239 -- LOVED Beautiful Joe! Still have it.

I also used to take out Frank Buck's books from the library: Bring 'Em Back Alive, for example.

 

281

The first real book I remember reading by myself was The Mouse and The Motorcycle.  It was a thrill a minute.  It's still my favorite book and I don't remember a word of it.  Just the title.

I'm a big fan of the John Sanford Prey books.

282 Rereading Mother Goose to my kids gave me a new understanding of the simple genius of word-play, and it also gave me insight into the historical references behind the supposedly nonsense rhymes.

283 "What books got you into reading, Morons?"

Dick and Jane

See Sally run.

Run, Sally, run.

See Spot.

Run, Spot, run.

284 I've been reading since I was in danger from Judge Jack Weinstein. My mom used to sit and read with me, we'd read every other line and even do different voices for different characters, reading books like House on Pooh Corner and Charlotte's Web but what got me really reading was the writings of Louis L'Amour, who taught me that reading was more than entertainment; it is education and makes you a better man.

285

I started "reading thru" my brothers' MAD Magazines when I was prob 7 or 8 until my mom caught me and I got into trouble (didn't think they were age appropriate).  But I love the Little House on the Prairie and Nancy Drew books.  Also, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Trumpeter of the Swans book were also favs.  My daughters grew up with my collections of books from my childhood.

Currently, I enjoy reading the back labels on wine bottles from my local liquor store.

286 Jumpy the Kangaroo Recycles Paper after Divorcing Ahmed, and then Takes Ritalin is next on my reading list ...

287 The first thing I remember reading was "The Hobbit" in fourth grade.  My teacher loved it and had everyone in the class read along as she read it to us.  The first book I chose to read was the "Star Wars" novelization by Alan Dean Foster.  Followed by the Star Wars based novel "Spinter of the Mind's Eye", also by Foster. It was pretty much sci-fi and horror after that.

288 Just finished watching the last episode of The Legend Of The Seeker. Too bad I had given up on it because they butchered the Sword Of Truth series.

But that is the end of the series.

289 Started reading circa age 3 according to my mother who was shocked by it. Discovered reading age 14. Book was The Pawns of Null-A by A.E. van Vogt ( original title Players of Null-A ). Center book of a Trilogy. I met Gosseyn, the man with two brains. Book hint: The Complete Works of Rabelais: The Five Books of Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais. However only read the translation by Jacques Le Clercq if you want to experience the word play of the original French such as: "...the difference between a cunning stunt and a stunning cunt."

290 Lije Baley - named my dog after him because Daneel R. Olivaw wouldn't sound right.  Asimov's robot detective stories are the best, combining scifi with mysteries incredibly well.  I'm still saddened that I didn't find them until recently, even though I've been a fan of Asimov for years.  Heinlein was read before Asimov and I'm still kicking myself for that one.

I've always been an avid reader, thanks to my mom.  The first book I can really remember is The Prince and His Tooth.  After that, it would be Wizards at Large by Terry Brooks from his only really good series - Landover.  It's also the best book in the series due to Strabo.

Narnia, Nancy Drew, and the Oz series were a large part of my middle childhood.  Before that it was Through the Looking Glass, Kipling, and greek mythology.  Honestly, I can't remember all the books I read becuase I basically lived on them.  They were and still are more important than food in the sustainment of life.  Mysteries have always been my favorites - starting with Agatha Christie's Poirot.  Sherlock Holmes was ok, but not as great as far as I was concerned.

For SciFi, I started on Anne McCaffrey's Ship Who and Sassinak series.  Pern sucked for the most part, aside from one trilogy.

Also, Chrichton was a huge influence on my reading, starting with Jurassic Park when I was about seven.  He never treated his readers like they were stupid.  The science was always fascinating and complex.

In horror, I was started on Poe and Kafka around seven as well, leading to a brief and torrid King affair that has since been tainted.

Currently, I have really taken to Terry Pratchett's work due to the comedic nature of the stories.  Nothing better than laughing to get the day done.  Also, Diana Wynne Jones' stories are fantastic.  It's too bad she's been relegated to the kids' section.  I still like Neil Gaiman's work as well, but his best was in concert with Terry Pratchett.

291 Did I mention William Gibson?  He got me through high school and college. 
Erle Stanley Gardner is currently keeping me sane with his Cool and Lam series.  (As well as Perry Mason, but Cool and Lam is so much more pulp fun.)

292

My, this has been a long thread, and I've lost my train of thought dozens of times.  Yes, Andre Norton set a large number of us on the path, and Doctor Edward Elmer Smith's Lensman series appears to be high on everybody's list.  "Vortex Blaster", his last in that series wasn't properly part of the series, but rather set in the same universe.  Very good as a stand alone, however.  I've been captivated by most of the authors, books, and series mentioed here, and I mean captivated literally.  Every time I'd think of something like "How come nobody's mentioned Beautful Joe", somebody would say "I loved Beautiful Joe" and somebody else would say "Me too".  So what's left?  In addition to all the above, what about Albert Payson Terhune's dog books?  Excellent, all of them, especially "Buff, a Collie".  I also read that Ace double, "Dragon Masters and Five Gold Bands"  I used to spend my summer vacations bicycling back and forth to the public library.  Sometimes I'd walk down there barefoot, though there was a space with only asphalt pavement I had to race across, then stand on a pop crate at a gas station halfway across, while my grilled soles recovered, before making the final push.  Then how come nobody's mentioned Roger Zelazny's Amber series?  I read that when it was first written, and had to wait for the next issue of Galaxy Magazine to hit the stands, since it was originally serialized there.  Galaxy was having troubles then, and I had reason to worry that they would fold before I could finish the series.  I've never been able to get into audiobooks, since the calendar caught up to me.  I even find myself saying in the movie theater, "I'll have to wait and watch this on DVD so I can see the captions."  So what's next?  At least I'll be able to retire now and be entertained while watching all of civilization dive down the toilet.  I've gone through several big book purges in my adult life, but I still have the best of my collection.

Thanks, guys, for an entertaining Saturday afternoon.

293 Trevanian was as pleasurable to read as upton sinclair was painful.

294

@223 and 226: Man O'War was beaten by Sir Barton. His only loss out of 21 starts. For some reason I'm thinking that it was a match race, but that's a really fuzzy recollection. Yeah, horses & little girls. It generally lasts until about 15/16 yrs old.

 I even had Derby trading cards. Once upon a time I had all of the KY Derby winners memorized back to Alsab, etc. Ok, it was a really long, long time ago. ...now I can't remember what I had for breakfast.

I believe the first hose books I ever read were the Billy & Blaze series by C.J. Anderson. Our local library still has some: my 6-yr. old grandson loves them.

Oh yeah, Sam Savitt. Awesome illustrator. Also, remember the great animal illustrations by Wesley Dennis?

Terhune and Sunnybank Farm (there's a website, didjaknow?), and Kjelkaard (or somesuch spelling) for the dogs, i.e. Big Red, about an Irish setter. Henry and Farley for horses. Farley would befuddle me when he went off The Black series track, i.e., with The Blood Bay Colt, or The Island Stallion. One horse book that I read over and over was The Horsemasters by Sanford about a British stable/horse management training school. Loved that book. I believe that Annette Funicello from the Mouseketeers played the main character in a movie that Disney made of it.

Any one here old enough to remember watching The Micky Mouse Club after school?

295

hose = horse

Too bad there's no preview or edit function....

296 What books got you into reading, Morons?

The Chronicles of Narnia

297 Well,  I thought I was the only person in the US who had read both The Tontine and Beautiful Joe (WHAT a tearjerker).  

I started with the Winnie the Pooh (can still remember getting it for Christmas) and books from the early Weekly Reader Book Club (big chapter books,  not the picture books of the 70's, since this was 1954-56.)   One of the horse books I loved was from Weekly Reader..."Old Bones-the Wonder Horse"  which was the story of the thoroughbred Exterminator,  who won the Derby back in the early 20's.

Moved on to Agatha Christie (my mom had them), Shell Scott mysteries (off the shelves where I babysat every Friday night), Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke,  and an author I haven't seen mentioned here, Zenna Henderson.  She had a few books about aliens living among us called "The People.."  Quite good books if you can find them.

Read all of the Ian Flemings in junior high (Kennedy was president and read them which is how I got started;  don't carp,  I was 12).  Also read T.S. White's "The Once and Future King" a re-telling of the Arthurian legend.

Also as a kid I read the original Tom Swift books.  My dad had a bunch from his childhood,  along with a series starring a boy named Jerry Todd.

I also recommend  "Quo Vadis" by Henryk Siekiwicz,  and the books of Lloyd C. Douglas ("The Big Fisherman, The Robe," etc.).

298

Narnia was terrific.

Surprised I haven't seen Shel Silverstein mentioned

299

Ms. Marple @ 312: we sound like chronological peers.

Exterminator was a long-owned book that I sold (and immediately regretted) at a garage sale some years ago when I downsized from a house to a condo. A few years ago, I purchased it again from one of the online used booksellers. I've done that with a few of the well-loved books from my youth. Hoping that the g'kids like them as well as I did, I guess.

I, too, read my way through Ian Fleming, probably in jr. high (I so much more liked his books than the movies when they came about). Also Horatio Hornblower. And Alistair MacLean. And Helen MacInnes. And Mary Renault. And Daphne DuMaurier.

Never got into sci-fi, although I did read Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes & it scared the bejesus outta me. (That's probably what got me going elsewhere....)

300 I read whatever was on the classroom shelf to drown out the droning, boring blather from the teachers.

301 Surprised I haven't seen Shel Silverstein mentioned

Yeah, great stuff.

Also Ogden Nash.

I think most folks are excluding poets. 

I loved the imagists and T.S. Eliot.

302

The Protocols of the Commenters of Ace's Blog

Namely,  thou shalt not speak well of RonPaul, RandPaul, or PeterPaul&Mary. 

303 His stuff is fantasy but more like "look at what all these silly people do with magic" rather than "behold the awesome power of so-and-so".

That's why I don't like Pratchett's work. He's mocking the already absurd. Fantasy only works for me if its taken seriously rather than made fun of, for the sake of humor. I don't want dragons that are afraid of maidens or wizards who can't cast spells or warriors who are secretly transexual pacifists. I don't want people injecting modern sensibilities where they don't belong - which makes me despise much modern historical novels, with every woman a feminist and the ever present gay character who is just wonderful and witty and well liked and just better than everyone else.

304 I started reading Judy Blume books when I was 8 years old. I loved those - when I got a little older, I read the entire Narnia series in one summer. And I still love the Narnia books.

305 Aw, I'm always too late for the good threads.  I'll just say the first book I read - first grade - was The Thurber Carnival.  I thought it was fascinating, the teachers thought I was strange (and thought my parents more strange still, no doubt).  We were asked to bring a book we liked to school, and that was my choice.  I brought it every day for months after that.  I loved his drawings and his odd take on most everything ... mystified, bemused and not-a-little apprehensive of the society around him.  It's still a favorite.  My next books (near as I can remember) were Winnie The Pooh and Little Women.  Jr. High/HS were much of the sci-fi and fantasy noted above, after that mostly history & bio. 

For the horse lovers, give Seabiscuit by Lauren Hillenbrand a try - lovely book.  I read that right before Nothing Like It In The World a few years back, and both were huge favorites of mine.

306 The White Mountains by John Christopher. Politically apropos to this very day.

307

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308 Man, if I were a teacher, I would have the kiddies read some Heinlein and "analyze the libertarian viewpoint" therein. Suck it, progs.

309 I started reading at the youngest possible age mostly comics (the originals) picture magazines like Look and Life, little Big Books (don't know what they are, do you) moving to western novels (Zane Grey was one of my favorites).  Today I read everything although my favorites are SciFi, fantasy and mystery.

310 My father was cleaning out an attic for an elderly lady and I was "helping" when I was a small boy. She gave me a 12 volume set of books 19th century called Journeys Through Bookland, its starts old English nusery rhymes and fables then works up through the classics with Greek Roman Norse and American Indian mythology thrown in, after that when we got stationed on Midway Island I discovered Sci Fi in the school library at the age of 8 or 9, I too loved I Robot and when I saw what Hollywood did to it in the Movie?  Good thing I could not get my hands on those cretins

311 anyone else here get in trouble for reading by a flashlight under the covers when you were supposed to be sleeping ;-)

312 329-I did.  By a Sister Agnes, while in a Catholic Orphanage.  Several times.

313 I too grew up with the Winnie the Pooh books. As a wee child, we had phonograph records with the Pooh stories. You were supposed to read along with them, and you were cued to turn the page by the voice of Piglet saying, "Rum tum tiddle iddle um tum tum."

314 Finding The Happy Hooker under my Mom's bed at 12....couldn't put it down!

315 I was four years old...46 now. I read an Archie comic strip not knowing that I was 'reading'...and I have been on a tear ever since. I love the smell of old libraries and the volumes of stuff...
I read about Presidents in the World Book, and then I remember reading Little House, Ramona, Five Little Peppers, Carolyn Haywood, CS Lewis, Twain, Stowe...Fitzgerald. I seemed to gravitate towards older folks and I helped a lady who was housebound when I was 11. She had a room that was a library and we used to talk about what I read...yeah. Love, love, love to read. I don't retain as much anymore, but I love it.

316 anyone else here get in trouble for reading by a flashlight under the covers when you were supposed to be sleeping ;-)

I used my digital alarm clock, and I blame that for my poor eyesight to this day (it's an astigmatism LOL.)

317 Robert A Heinlein

318

Monty my man, that's a great list. I too read everything on that list, at about that age.

Mebbe that's why I'm a proud Moron.

319 I love the authors you mention, but I must say (I'm back in town) that there is no "E.E. Howard." You mean "R.E. Howard" as in "Robert E. Howard." The E.E. bit is from "E.E. Smith" the author of the Skylark and Lensman series. Sorry for being a penis-like thing.

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