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Early Reading
I taught myself to read around age 3 or 4 because I had nothing better to do. We had no TV, my big brother was at school, and although I managed to escape from the apartment once or twice, I couldn't do that every day. -
Dad Reads Stories
My father, whose other hobby was reading the dictionary, enjoyed reading wildly age-inappropriate books out loud to his children. For example when I was 5 and my brother was 8, he read us Bram Stoker's "Dracula". He enjoyed horror anthologies and so I heard some Poe, as well as repeated readings of Blackwood's story "The Wendigo" and Lovecraft's story "The Terrible Old Man" -
Dad Reads Poetry
My father probably had a broader appreciation of poetry than I recall, but he read 4 poems to us repeatedly, and they became the basis for my appreciation of poetry: Poe's "The Raven" and "The Bells", Shelley's "Ozymandias", and his favorite, Service's "The Cremation of Sam McGee". -
Mom Reads Stories
Maybe Mom decided that Dad was getting a little out of hand. She started reading age appropriate stuff out loud, like "The Little House" series. -
My Early Influential Books
My influential books which I read to myself, starting in childhood and through the end of elementary school:
The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf (#1 best kid's book ever!)
I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew by Dr. Seuss
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Windigo by Jane and Paul Annixter
My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara -
Middle School Was Boring except...
We read boring stuff in middle school. The one significant literary event which happened to me during that period was, when I was 12 I randomly picked "Lord of the Flies" off of my parents' bookshelf, and realized that I really did like dark literature more than animal adventure stories after all. -
High School: The Good, the Bad, and My Favorite
In high school we were forced to read a lot. I liked Shakespeare, except his comedies. I didn't like Hemingway. I could make a long list of books I liked and books I hated, but there was only one I loved. It's still my favorite book of all time. "The Power and the Glory", by Graham Greene. I love it because it is morally ambiguous. -
I Learn the Cyrillic Alphabet and a little Russian
I took Russian class in high school. Which means I can read phonetically in Cyrillic, and I remember how to say maybe a dozen things in Russian. -
I learn to read Hangul (Korean Alphabet)
I have been working on my Korean since 2015. The first and easiest step was learning Hangul, the Korean Alphabet. While the English Alphabet evolved in a messy, haphazard fashion, Hangul was made up by ONE DUDE in the 15th century. As a result, the written language does not break any of its own pronunciation rules. Not one. Can you imagine? We should invent time travel so that we can ask that dude, King Sejong the Great, to fix English for us. -
Favorites I Discovered in Adulthood
My all-time favorite author is Joyce Carol Oates. Other authors I don't get tired of: Edna O'Brien, Peter Straub. My favorite poem I discovered in adulthood is Anne Sexton's "The Abortion"
