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I began reading the baseline level books when I was about 2 years old, though I'm not entirely certain whether that's exact. Eric Carle books are some of the earliest I remember - The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear were standouts for me. -
Around age 3 was when I started looking over my brother's shoulder as he read I Spy, and somehow got better at reading solely to read the captions. I also read several Little Golden Books at the time. -
Around when I was 4, the V-Smile consoles released by V-Tech were popular, and my mom got me a handheld console; the games were all educational, and included several reading games that I enjoyed. -
I started Kindergarten, and around then was when I started reading my first full-length books like the Magic Tree House series. -
It became a nightly tradition when I was around 5 for my dad to read us a bit of The Hobbit every night, which probably had something to do with the genres I would end up enjoying in the future. It was also how I started learning longer, more complicated words. -
My teacher noticed that I was spending my free time writing fictional stories, oftentimes with myself being the main character; she offered for me to read to the rest of the class, which I ended up doing, but it first required me to actually finish something rather than completely abandoning it. The work was heavily based on the Magic Tree House books I had read. -
For some reason I started reading Animorphs after moving here to Nevada, and I starting checking out a book weekly. This was probably the highest quantity of reading that I ever did in any given period of time in my life. -
I started writing when I was young - around 5 or so - but I definitely coasted through a lot of the more technical aspects in favor of just "doing what felt right." Starting around 2nd or 3rd grade, though, we did a program called Fast For Word, which solidified a lot more of the rules that I was learning. -
We had a massive project in 5th grade to write a narrative, and for a lot of students it was their first time. The teacher knew that it wasn't for me, though, and while I worked on mine, I helped others through theirs. My biggest inspiration at the time was probably the Legend of Zelda series, and through that I developed the first and only thing I could call a "book" that I've ever written. -
I think every kid has an era of their life where, if at any point they were a voracious reader, they began to slow down. The last book I read when I still considered myself such a voracious reader was Atherton by Patrick Carman. Many of his other books helped me get better at reading a young age, and shaped a lot of my own favorite qualities about fiction.