when did you get into literature?

difficult to define objectively what this means but i think most people will be able to answer it anyway

if you were a precocious child with a reading age well ahead of actual age, there's a good chance you'll have read genre fiction, or perhaps were given 'serious' literature to read

what is it that allows you to appreciate literature as something more than storytelling, or written pictures?

genre fiction primarily, middle school/high school summer reading lists mainly

then a heavy dosing of crit theory at uni

In seventh grade "reading" class, we read a lot of poetry, and Robert Frost's "The Pasture" and "Mending Wall" and Dickinson's "I'm Nobody! Who Are You?" and "Success is Counted Sweetest" hooked me. A few months later, the brevity and wryness of Hemingway's "A Day's Wait" alerted me to the possibilities of the short story.

I checked illustrated editions of Frost and Dickinson out of the library. On my birthday my parents bought me "adult" selected poems, both of which I still own.

I got into "serious" literature through Hermann Hesse when I was 19.

the reasons children read are usually to do with suspension of disbelief / narrative intrigue (as with tv/games/films) - or for education

then it can become a more self-reflexive process

an eight year old might be able to read jane austen, and even enjoy it, but when does it become truly animated and take on the consistency of life rather than a diorama of period characters drinking tea and talking to each other -- when does it it start 'tbrr'?

An interesting question. As a gay man, most literature feels/felt distant anyway. I almost always must use my imagination.

"feels distant" i.e. heterosexual pairings/intrigue

I'm a hetero and that stuff feels distant to me too alfred

there are many things that will alienate particular people, and groups of people, from certain books

then again there will be some books than describe or even explain that alienation, which alienation would satisfy the sense of moving from a diagrammatic universe to a 'lived' one

i think it was edmund white who described his own early discovery of queer literature as an extremely powerful, formative experience.....several jewish people i know have described discovering an account of 'jewishness' in similar terms

for most people there probably isn't such an obvious epiphany

the idea of period characters drinking tea and assembling cavalry formations has clearly alienated me so much that i haven't even bothered to read austen or tolstoy

Yeah, see, that's how most other people's experiences feel like to me.

Watching straights out on the town, courting, etc = eating crumpets in Kensington.

The queerness of Hesse and Mann is what drew me into German literature. Pretty much all my favorite novels contain some sort of sexual transgression.

Reading the unsuppressed, frank depiction of a teen crush in "Tonio Kroger" at seventeen was my first real gay thrill.

the idea of period characters drinking tea and assembling cavalry formations has clearly alienated me so much that i haven't even bothered to read austen or tolstoy

tolstoys style is the reason to read tolstoy

xp I didn't read TK until I was 21 or so, but at the time I thought "god, I wish I had read this when I was 16."

eating crumpets in kensington is probably a less alienating experience than watching any of kensington's generally terrible inhabitants courting, which would usually involve copious amounts of braying laughter, high-end liquor and furtive toilet visits

tolstoys style is the reason to read tolstoy

― dayo, Sunday, 19 December 2010 03:15 (2 minutes ago)

and austen?

destroy and leave no survivors

Austen's one of the great ironists in lit: a master of understatement too. She's not a favorite -- I don't reread her often -- but I'm consistently surprised.

I was raised in a household with two teachers, one of whom taught high school english, the other of whom taught first grade, but her father was head of the English department of a local university. When I was in first grade and had "learned to read" I came home one day and declared to my mother that I was ready to read Moby Dick. She handed me a copy and let me take a run at it, too.

All this really did for me was to give me the general set of mind that literature was something of importance that serious adults concerned themselves with. My first exposure to writing of any literary quality was probably Mark Twain, whose books I began to read at about age 12. The next step up was The Grapes of Wrath at age 13. Then Crime and Punishment at about 15. This last one perplexed me entirely at that age.

I didn't really get my motor running on literature until I was about 20 and started reading Greek classics in translation as quick as I could lay hands on them, and then lots of Shakespeare and Elizabethans. That launched me in a big way. After that, all kinds of literature seemed like a sweet and natural place to stay and breathe the air.

I have slowed occasionally since then, but never stopped.

I didn't read TK until I was 21 or so, but at the time I thought "god, I wish I had read this when I was 16."

That's exactly how I feel about Stendhal. It's like an operating manual that I could have used then, but now it's far too late.

I came to literature around 7th grade. Early on I discovered an ability to step aside and hand the controls over to the writer, rather than stand up to him and argue as the other kids always did. From then on I could write essays just by checking what he would think. I know that sounds weird. My own tastes ran to trash (science fiction), but I had this knack of being porous to literature, and soon criticism became recognized as my "specialty", the way others went out for sports or theater. It wasn't that I was so interested in literature at the time. Teachers placed it in my hands and I dealt with it. By high school I was actually feared. But I had no depth of experience to draw on, it was all drawn from previous reading. I had very few opinions of my own.

ilx is the greatest novel ever written

Still waiting for it to happen.

18 active users on their keyboards

Still to get into literature (especially English Lit of Austen, Dickens and the like) but I've consistently read novels since first coming across lots of music crit (at about 16 or so). Then gradually started reading SF and so on.

read Eliot's Collected Poems and Fielding's Joseph Andrews at 16.

Vonnegut at 16
Orwell at 17
Joyce at 18

id say 13-14, for orwell, 'catch-22', and i guess 'the naked and the dead': the latter hasn't stayed with me so much, but it's a big, ambitious book and it gives you an idea of what's possible

literature, eh? well sit down and let me tell u a story, friends...

vonnegut was probably the first author I read to 'relate' to on a human level, instead of reading as escapism or w/e

Huck Finn @ age 14

Early on I discovered an ability to step aside and hand the controls over to the writer, rather than stand up to him and argue as the other kids always did.

this is a marvellous ability! i really regret the way that as i've got older i've found it harder to read books without arguing with them.

i used to read a lot of serious lit as a kid but sort of partly for bragging-rights, for the knowledge that my 'reading age' was super high - i used to tear through dickens/gaskell/sundry victorians with delight between ten and twelve, but nowadays i find it way too much work, possibly because i'm reading for more than plot and vague feel.

around fifteen i think i started reading properly. waugh, huxley, ts eliot, the metaphysical poets, ovid, lightly cruel young man literature. Alfred's point about distance is really important, i think - i felt the distance between the books and myself and tried to elide it, identified always with the authors, the ironic male viewpoint. there was a lot of female-written fiction in the house, and i read quite a bit of it (margaret atwood phase at 16/17, been trying to read 'pilgrimage' for as long as i can remember, etc) but it wasn't the stuff that felt formative.

oddly, at 17 i couldn't be bothered to read the books on my english a-level reading list - did the requisite close-reading stuff, but based all my 'general synoptic knowledge' on things my classmates had said in presentations.

i used to tear through dickens/gaskell/sundry victorians with delight between ten and twelve

wish id done this. can't account for those years at all. think i was reading about the WAR, mostly.

I was a bookish child but virtually stopped reading books at around age 11, mainly as part of a reaction against anything connected with school, which I hated. In my late teens I started reading bits and pieces of counter culture stuff in a very desultory fashion - Burroughs, Kerouac, Tolkien, some SciFi. But the writer who really got me into proper "literature" was Henry Miller. A girl I knew recommended him to me and I became (briefly) a big fan. But the important thing was that his books were stuffed with his enthusiasm for other writers - Dostoevsky, Lawrence, Nietzsche etc - and he got me reading those, too. By the time I was a couple of hundred pages into The Brothers Karamazov I knew that literature was going to matter to me. I'm sure I'd find Miller unreadable now (and I'm no longer sure whether I'd even like Dostoevsky) but for better or worse he turned me into a reader.

always, always, always been into books but first big book i read (and loved) was 'watership down' @ age 7-8. it took me almost two months, and i understood it very little, but i enjoyed it and went on to neverending story immediately afterward. 23 years later i haven't stopped.

when did you get out of literature :(

I'll be back. Just getting this phase outta my system. English Lit degree sorta killed it for me - books became a proscribed task rather than a chosen joy.

Was I ever into literature? Of course. Just never as much as I should have been. Always been into *reading*, my stock was always stuff like Wodehouse and Robin Jarvis and Redwall as a kid - 'intelligent' kids' stuff and comic adult reading basically - my first brushes with 'proper lit' were mostly poetic or Shakespearean (or classical) - anyway I read Tristram Shandy before university and that was inspirational. I always LOVE literature when I read it and have plenty to say, but it's a question of motivation to read it in the first place.

Just let the priorities settle...I did English Lit because I was confused and didn't know better...

I really have read any sort of fiction in the last 6 or so years. Just can't do it. Lots of non-fiction though.

have not

English Lit degree sorta killed it for me - books became a proscribed task rather than a chosen joy

Gonna add to this 'internet addiction' and the fact that whenever I am off the internet I mostly am socialising, playing/watching sport or attending poetry functions, not reading. The reading I *can* accomplish online is mostly poetical, or at the very most, skim-reading of literature in order to write one o' my accursed essays.

poetry is literature too

so i hear

English Lit degree sorta killed it for me - books became a proscribed task rather than a chosen joy

This and yeah the internet thing too. Am trying to make a conscious effort to read more but overall I read way less than I should these days.

*skim-reading of PROSE literature ty mayne

The internet has made me a more voracious reader, especially in history and politics. So many recommendations: footnotes, allusions in articles, etc.

Always read. First 'literature' probably kidnapped when I was ten.read house of the spirits when I was 11 and one hundred years of solitude when I was 12. Teenage favourites were camus and George orwell.

and one hundred years of solitude when I was 12

oh snap I read this at like 12 or 13 <3

is it literature tho? I guess

i have never understood this line:

I really have read any sort of fiction in the last 6 or so years. Just can't do it. Lots of non-fiction though.

as in, do you have trouble watching non-documentary films, too?

yeah i'm not sure where this confusion about 'literature' arose, perhaps xxyyzzyzzy__'s facetious statement that he has yet to encounter it despite being ILB's most literary person as far as i can tell!

though it fits in with my schema - the point at which literature ceased to be required reading of a canon of worthy eng lit staples and became a more personal undertaking

dog latin — isn't Dracula wonderful? I had to reread it not too long ago for a horror fiction class, and it was a lot of fun. (also highly recommend Franco Moretti's essay "Dialectic of Fear" abt Dracula, Frankenstein and Victorian capitalism... but then I would)

Started reading very young, but all high calorie/low nutrition genre fiction until late teens, early 20s. There are a lot of classic books I'd like to read someday, but I feel the steady diet of literary potato chips has made it hard for me to develop my palate, as it were. 18th/19th century novels are a tough go for me. I could develop better reading habits with a little effort, but I've gone from a slob on the couch eating chips (i.e., quick and easy genre fiction) to a dude in a coma with a feeding tube (i.e., mostly reading the internet).

I struggle a bit to see where 19th century novels can fit for me. I'd like to have read/re-read the big Victorian novels, Dickens to Hardy, but I can't see when or how I'd fit that in. It's the stuff I'm p confident I'll never get round to – Pendennis! – that makes me most sad.

this is the year im going to read 'moby dick'

should be every year

Glad you said that. Finally get around to moby dick sounds like the perfect thing to do when my finals are over.

xp (just kidding I've never read it, altho a cool 4th-grade teacher read parts of it out loud to us sometimes)

reading animal farm when i was 10 or 11 kinda blew my mind

my mom bought me a copy of portrait of an artist as a young man at that age for some reason and when i tried reading it i was like whats this fucking SHIT - still havent read that stupid book

the first time i can remember reading a novel and appreciating the author as a stylist as much as i did as a storyteller was when i read on the road at 15 or so - i'd been reading stuff that was a lil advanced for my age for a while, but that was the first time i actually got something out of it - not that i could stomach it now, but it seemed so vital at the time

now i just wanna be entertained when i read, gimme some relatable characters and a good yarn imo, am less snobby about genre fiction than when i was a pretentious teenager

haha I read on the road at 15 too, but only because some bad religion song had lyrics that alluded to it

I just remember dean hokum or w/e his name was banging a lot of chicks...wait it was dean moriarty, yeah he banged a lot of chicks and had to travel between hotels and it was rad

I find it difficult to like anything written before the late 19th Century tbh

even Tristram Shandy??

I've never read it because I thought I wouldn't like it.

jk, I'm interested in that, Laclos, Austen, Eliot and the Brontës, etc. I just haven't got around to them.

eliot is immense

'gullivers travels' rules

yeah swift is quality stuff. tryna think of some other OGs but I'm drawin a blank atm

I started reading Middlemarch this summer but was coming at the tail end of an English lit. marathon and I was burned out. It seems like angsty 20th C. moderns are my go-to reading.

Middlemarch is beautiful, just as a piece of architecture.

My first Serious Novels: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in the summer of eighth grade. WH is the one of the most savage novels ever written.

corey: go even further back!

parts of rabelais that I've read were pretty entertaining, but that's possibly a case of litcrit opening up books that might not have resonated had I taken them 'straight', as it were — the whole carnivalesque inversion yada yada bodies desire steeze has some truth to it

and duh, cervantes! if he's 'difficult 2 like' I will eat the helm of mambrino

middlemarch is my jam... thats some old timey shit i can get down with... i feel like i would be majorly down with some 19th century english lit if i read more of it

ive been meaning to read WH forever... mostly based off my love for kate bush tbh...

Bernard - I've admittedly hit a wall with Dracula. It is a great book, but some time after Van Helsing shows up I ended up losing my page and then reading something else. I am intending to pick it up again.

I kind of like the fake news report about the ship that sails itself into a bay during a storm. Since I understand Stoker was something of a journalist, I wonder if this was normal for the style of journalism of the time? i.e. it starts with quite a basic account of a storm, reporting windspeeds etc, then about the ship being spotted, and only at the end is the actual meat of the issue dealt with. Seems a funny way of writing a newspiece.

I would like to have a year of Dickens + Bronte C + Bronte E + Eliot G + Hardy + optional Thackeray, Mrs Gaskell. I haven't really read any of them in 15 years or so, apart from Dickens a bit, and remember so much being brilliant.

Then maybe a year of not reading Meredith and Trollope.

Probably end up in a pit of my own filth, reading Surtees.

yeah the media stuff in Dracula is pretty cool. there's actually a few different 'styles' of fake news report, from different sources — so there's the v.serious-sounding one yr talking about, but then also like sensational tabloid stories about animal attacks.

ah righto. i'll be picking this up over xmas again.

later on there are even telegrams and a transcription of records that a dude took on his personal phonograph thingy — it's a great example of that whole 'heterogeneous novel' idea

or was it more like a secret treasure that you inherited and jealously guarded?

It was a solitary experience, but not a jealously guarded treasure. It was like a series of doors into further rooms. Others could have come along, but they didn't and I didn't care much whether they did or not.

I did think I was moving into the adult world where everybody read literature. Ha!

gimme some relatable characters and a good yarn imo, am less snobby about genre fiction than when i was a pretentious teenager

yah in my late teens and early twenties i was sure that only 'serious' writing could be literary but ive come around to the idea that genre fiction has its own 'literary' qualities, that these works can achieve greatness on their own terms

i think the thread premise is dumm & none of the definitions of literature big or small l have really done much to convince me otherwise. p sure the privileges being granted certain books/certain ways of reading/certain canons is wrong or at least meaningless but w/e

but speaking of 19th century stuff trollope is great read imo & was the easiest way for me to get into some of the other, more 'serious' eng lit stuff. 'can you forgive her?' is just such a fun book ime

i read like a fiend when i was a kid and a teen, but almost only genre fiction—kids' mysteries and choose your own adventures, and then fantasy and science fiction. i think i had the idea that books that came in series, especially, were more attractive because then they weren't done with so fast.

i must have read a tiny bit of 'serious' literature in high school (stuff high-schoolers often read, like orwell), but it was rare, and the haphazard way i met my requirements meant that i didn't go through the usual forced encounters with literature in the classroom. (i did read all or part of 'great expectations' and 'julius caesar' and 'romeo and juliet' in junior high, but that was about where it stopped; i didn't get them anyway). but for my later english courses i substituted creative writing courses at a nearby university. the readings were standard short-fiction anthology-filler, and while i didn't get everything we were to read (i remember 'the metamorphosis' seeming endless and boring), i think that must have been one of the first major times that i thought there was a distinction between 'literature' in the sense of really good writing, and other kinds of (fiction, for example) writing. the stories i remember being really struck by were carver's 'cathedral' ('now we're really cooking with gas'), hemingway's 'hills like white elephants' (even though i don't remember totally getting what they were talking about in it), and salinger's 'for esme with love and squalor'. i read those all in the same course, whose teacher was a professional oral reader as a side gig, and i think it added a lot to hear someone draw the connections between the words on the page and the spoken word as well as he did.

(the other course was taught by jane smiley, and while i don't recall there being anything remarkable or memorable about that one, we all at least knew that she was famous, so that must have helped give me the idea that a kind of non-commercial literary success was possible in the present. i must not have got what that might mean, though, given that she was teaching creative writing at my school instead of doing whatever she wanted to be doing.)

i read in a very solitary way when i was younger, but my reading in college became a lot more self-consciously social. when i started college i took math and english majors, the latter probably more on the strength of the idea that i might become a writer, than from much of a love for 'serious literature'. when i realized how little of anything proper i had read, i asked my mom (who was working in a bookstore at the time) to send me anything classic that she could. i still have never read almost anything that she sent me. (too old-timey for my tastes then.)

around that time my friends and i started a running reading group—i can't remember our motivations, probably to make our own opportunities to discuss books more thoughtfully than we could in our classes. i remember 'the sailor who fell from grace with the sea', 'confederacy of dunces' (which i hated), 'invisible man', 'the plague', and 'gravity's rainbow'. the latter is probably the book that killed the group, just because we couldn't stay coordinated enough to read and get through it together. but it was also part of a trend, because i was really attracted to the 'difficult modernist literature' cultural narrative that entices people into committing the massive amounts of investment they need to totally get on board. 'infinite jest' came out around my freshman year, i think, and after i spent spring break and weeks afterward reading it my friends were eventually reading it too. after several false starts with 'gravity's rainbow' (i think i kept returning to it for a few years and eventually got through it one summer), i read 'ulysses'.

i had never been a very 'symbolic' reader and i didn't have a great feeling for the drama of human situations, so i was only sort of a superficial reader of many of the things i read even during college. (i remember being really into nabokov, but not seeing an awful lot of what was going on.) i think one of my attractions to these big novels was just that they were so symbolically overloaded (GR especially) that they encouraged my ability to see the 'multiple levels' stuff you normally have to be force-fed as an english student as a 'natural' way to read rather than a kind of decoding or a reference to material not in evidence.

at that age i was very into modern-day literature centered on the 20s-70s period and i had a huge animus against the presumption (mainly in academic circles) that of course classic old things were more important and anyway were required to know about even if new things were good too—i somehow imagine that canon debates were still going on and sided with radical reformers. i had almost no feeling for and no serious knowledge of anything written before 1900 anyway, so it fit very well. but somewhere along the line i developed a strong aversion to the cutesy super-irony or whatever it was developing around eggers and the mcsweeneys people (weird, because i never read either, just the mcsweeneys website) and was somewhat appalled that david foster wallace would be associated by people with that branch of contemporary literature. so i veered into a period of not ever reading anything contemporary, certainly not written in the past 20-30 years or so.

i did a lot of reading during grad school to try to deepen my familiarity with older, canonical writing, not necessarily because of the cultural capital or the rudimentary familiarity it gave me, but because i needed deeper experiences of things other people had read in order to connect them with deeper experiences of things i had read—to know how to locate myself and know where other people might be coming from.

Solitary experience and it has remained almost entirely so, and not for want of trying - despite attempts to share books, discussion just never seems to happen. I'm not even really sure how I'd like such a discussion to go, I realise - it'd feel like trying to discuss the inside of my own head.

Ismael, that's just how I feel. And it's not helped by the fact that when other people try to get me to read something they've loved, I always put it off because I have 17 other things I want to read first, so it's partly self-inflicted.

i would attempt to share the books i love but practically none of my friends would attempt say infinite jest or underworld based on length alone, or a sentimental education or the short stories of chekhov just on account of them being pretty old, or the books i'm currently reading because they're in spanish and one of them is a volume of poetry anyway, which rules it out on two grounds. ah well, not too upset about it.

and yeah I agree with doesn't necc mean "starting to read canonical literature/literary fiction" so much as getting into a certain style of reading — it's basically whenever you started to notice a certain luster around certain books, even if you couldn't quite understand why or how

― Egyptian Raps Crew (bernard snowy), Tuesday, 21 December 2010 13:52 (Yesterday)

right

i dunno, i thought that'd be clear

there is still some worth in 'literature' to describe that corpus rather than just 'books' imo

it's clearly a far more diffuse thing than 'literary' which has sadly become synonymous with booker longlist drivel in the uk, and mfa preciousness in the u.s. afaict

trollope is great read imo & was the easiest way for me to get into some of the other, more 'serious' eng lit stuff. 'can you forgive her?' is just such a fun book ime

― forGet (Lamp), Tuesday, December 21, 2010 1:43 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

totally! love trollope, totally breezy + endless + gossipy, everything i want from novels. can you forgive her? is great and a great title, too.

xps to James & Jim: There's a bit in Franzen's Harper's Essay where he tries to define the two types of readers - those who do it because they enjoy the habit, and those with the compulsion to read because to some extent they have a need to occupy an imaginary world. The latter group do pursue conversations about literature, but they're actually imaginary ones, with the authors of the books they read. I can relate to that, though I wonder whether it's with the authors or the characters.

No books at home so childhood meant comics: mid70s UK Marvel, Krazy comic, Roy of the Rovers, 2000AD. Loved writing and relished language, but had a hard time getting into books without pictures (though eventually around 8 got embarrassingly hooked on Blyton's Secret 7). Cliché that is, it was hearing the Smiths at 14 in 1984 that was the turning point/Narnian portal: reading Moz interviews, discovering Wilde, Delaney, Billy Liar etc; subscribing to NME, entering strange world of writing/politics/theory. Access to FE and then University libraries was key: did minimal assigned reading but raced through all the novels, poetry, philosophy that I'd hitherto only seen mentioned. Studied AmLit and became devoted to Barthelme/DeLillo/Nabokov, though only got Gravity's Rainbow, probably the great reading experience of my life, once I left college. Frustrated by scattershot modular Uni courses, embarked on Great Books once I started working, reading Dante, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth etc on lunch breaks. Wonder what became of that readerly dedication :/

Cliché that is, it was hearing the Smiths at 14 in 1984 that was the turning point/Narnian portal: reading Moz interviews, discovering Wilde, Delaney, Billy Liar etc; subscribing to NME, entering strange world of writing/politics/theory.

wonder when this started (and finished?). it wasn't nme that did it for me entirely, i had the (equally cliched?) g-d amazing english teacher, who had us reading waugh, orwell, forster (i didn't get on with forster but still); but it was the nme that got me reading counter-culture books in a big way, burroughs and the like.

NME/MM probably mostly responsible for my reading stuff that didn't really take: Hunter S Thompson, Burroughs, Kathy Acker, & more locally Martin Millar. Didn't like the Smiths/Morrissey cult in 88/89, so it actively put me off Wilde and Firbank for a few years.

im still not sure i read with the 'proper distance' this qn implies...

Wd say this is the case for me as well. Read a lot from an early age, w' strong identification (open tho - used to come down to breakfast dressed variously as Peter, Edmund, Susan and Lucy from the Narnia books, wdn't do anything unless my mum addressed me by my proper name). V strong fantasy life. Not particularly challenging science-fiction/fantasy/horror through to mid-teens. There were a few lit things during that time tho - MR James at about 10, does he count? Chandler. George V Higgins somewhat oddly (maybe on a Chandler kick - not exactly lit I know - but challenging, non-identification reading; style coming into it - Chandler atmosphere & Higgins' dialogue is superb. Dickens as well. Some poetry, Ozymandius is the one sticks out clearly from a v young age.

Big change came when I was about 15/16 I reckon, when I really started getting into music. There'll be groans from those who know me (and prob a lot who don't) because it's so tiresomely in character; I got into stuff via The Fall. Was lucky to have a lot of books in the house, so picked up Camus (Myth of Sisyphus) and everything shot out from there really - modernism - Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, Pound; existentialist philosophy - Nietzsche, Kiekegaard, Camus and so to Dostoevsky and Beckett, lots of Nabokov. Thing is, tho intellectual to a certain degree, a lot of this is still ident. reading. Beckett and W Lewis much less so, so there's some sort of sense of a reader coming out by this stage. Shakespeare because felt this was necessary, although apart from Hamlet (ident. reading) didn't really enjoy anything.

That's a pretty shop-soiled route isn't it? Moody teenager in black/world doesn't understand me stuff. Didn't make it any less exciting and transformative tho. Always wanted to push it into a discomfort zone. Liked difficult things I didn't understand, so forced myself to read Finnegans Wake, Beckett trilogy, follow satire backwards from Lewis to Swift, Pope esp., so then translations of Horace and Juvenal, then Ben Jonson, so came back to the Elizabethan stage and Shakespeare with more context. Always keen to jump to the next thing implied by what I was at that point reading, so started to see structures of lit. Was kind of not going to school at this stage, so teachers and syllabus passed me by until A-levels, but all this reading stood me in really good stead for university interview, so it didn't matter too much.

Should say poetry was a blank spot until quite recently (apart from maybe Blake, perhaps for reasons not really connected with poetry as such). Learnt how to tear it apart in a meaningful way at school and uni, but wasn't until Larkin that things really spread out to enjoyment of poetry generally. Was reading Ode to a Nightingale this morning, and thought how could I have ever not loved this? Probably would have at a young age because of the natural wonder, but the literal and figurative prosaic nature of my development retarded me in terms of responding literary song I think.

There's a bit in Franzen's Harper's Essay where he tries to define the two types of readers - those who do it because they enjoy the habit, and those with the compulsion to read because to some extent they have a need to occupy an imaginary world.

What's the difference b/w the two? I don't get it.

and how does occupying an imaginary world correlate with 'literature'? pretty sure you could do that with barbara cartland.

Reading because it's something you do for fun vs reading because you have to take time out from the real world, roughly. It doesn't correlate to literature as opposed to other stuff as such, I was just following on the thought I had upthread.

i don't know if those are two different things, entirely

I'm kind of into j's avoidance of anything written in the past 20-30 years (Bolano feels like something that could have been written in the 70s) and corey (and others) being all non-plussed at the 19th century English lit staples. Hopefully this is a period but I feel, especially over the last two years, many doors are opening but others are closing.

Which leaves much the rest of the 20th century (don't care for the modernist narrative that seemingly ties that stuff together) (mostly Western/Central European and Latin American) and lots of Renaissance/medieval work. Looking forward to checking out Njal's saga the Mahabharata next year.

Should acknowledge ILX a bit in the formation of some of my tastes, or what I would choose to read. I could never touch Perec again but I heard of many authors, asked about others which I checked out and got much out of. At a time when I was reading but not as much as I am now. Feels like I'm on a mission.

Started reading at a pretty young age, and my reading was all over the place. As a young'un, I read stuff like Ramona and Fudge and even the Babysitter's Club, along with books about sports, but I was also obsessed with my grandaprents' encyclopedia set, partly because of the song "We Didn't Start the Fire": I wanted to look up everything up.

When I went to middle school in fifth grade, there was a computer 'book report test' program that us kids would get on and take little pop quizzes about certain books for points. The higher the reading level, the more points you earned. I was obsessed with reading above my grade; I even took a whack at Moby Dick. Didn't make it past the first chapter (a wuss even back then)...but back then my real passion was comix. Mostly Marvel, though I got into Image too. My uncle was a HUGE comic book fanatic, and when Todd McFarlane hired Moore, Gaiman, Sim, and Miller to write an issue of Spawn each, my uncle was there to tell me who these guys were. I was really interested in reading Watchmen, and I think it was probably when I was 13 or 14 when my uncle gave me the TPB for Christmas. It blew my mind, and it gave me an appetite for more mature reading.

The stuff I read for class had some impact, like Tale of Two Cities in 9th grade (which I thought was kind of stupid; still can't stand Dickens to this day) and Romeo and Juliet in 10th grade (with phrase lifted directly from Shakespeare appearing in the song lyrics I was writing at the time), but by that time I was thinking about becoming a writer, and doing lots of extracurricular reading, reading through my teacher's college Modern Poetry textbook in 10th grade (I liked Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin) and stuff like Cat's Cradle and Catch-22 in 11th grade.

I read my first Faulkner novel at the end of my 11th grade year. It was As I Lay Dying and I didn't really like it. But I was still kind of strangely fascinated by him for some reason. They didn't have The Sound and the Fury at the H.S. library, and because to its absence, and its difficult reputation, I badly wanted to get my hands on a copy. My folks gave it to me for Christmas that next year, along with Light in August, and I read them both in three weeks. And I've been hooked on literature ever since.

The moment I entered college and changed my major to English. I've been buying books non stop ever since.

i read a lot, but it's mostly garbage. the obvious "satirical" boy stuff like martin amis, brett easton ellis, etc.

― carles II of spain (max arrrrrgh), Monday, 20 December 2010 01:16 (9 months ago)

lolled at this, miss max a