What age did you start reading literature? Why did you start?

I started reading around 3, and read anything I could get my hands on from then on. My parents took me to the libraries every week and I had a 20-book limit so they wouldn't lose track. They'd take me to old bookstores and give me a few bucks to buy some antique British schoolboy's book, or classic, or whatever. I had the most absurd access to books imaginable: my mother was working at a used bookstore, and then got her library science grad degree and bought books for a dozen public schools, so alongside our home library (which was sizeable) there were always new boxes of kid's/YA book for me to grab. As an adult I've bought books every week, never stopped reading, and have my doctorate now. I have no idea how many books I've read in my life to date.

What you gunna read, user?

Fuck I don't know, man, I had nothing better to do.

I learned how to read at 3.
I started reading books from my country and went into verne and shit when i was 5.
Then i got bored for like 8 years until i discovered Borges and started reading the spanish lit canon.

I just wanted to read because I wanted to know more stuff, but honestly i was more interested in math and sciences as a whole. Literature felt too 'subjective' for me.

The first book I read was harry potter when I was 6, I had read the Oddysey in its original translation by the time I was 11, finished Shakespeare by 14 then time to revisit Homer, the next few years were a blur but I read a lot of american literature, thats when I read Ulysses and Faulkner. I'm 21 now and trying to read as many epic poems as I can, its amazing the things you pick up on as you get older

Probably since when I could read on my own, had to wait for my parents to get off work by hanging out at a library so I read comic books as a kid from 1st-4th grade then started reading fantasy shit like Eragon and thought I was top shit for reading like 500 pages
Now I read sci-fi, philosophy and history shit, althought I like some fantasy now and then it just feels extremely lukewarm

I'm thinking something cyberpunk since that is easily one of my favorite genres. I'll probably start off with neuromancer from William Gibson.

At 15. Because my senile boyfriend got me into it.

29

i finally started treating my depression and i wanted to do things for once

When I was like 4, Treasure Island.
One of my earlier memories.

Er, with some help, mind you.

When I was 9
My dad gave me a Harry Potter book, it wasn't even the first, kek

I read A Confederacy of Dunces when I was perhaps 9, and loved it but of course did not understand half of it. Then read some Steinbeck and Hemmmingway (might have been for school) and loved that, although I now dislike Hemnmningway. Then I got sidetracked into philosophy when I was 11, and read chiefly the ancients and highly technical Analytical stuff, with some Kant and Hume thrown into the bargain. That lasted until 15, when I really became introduced to literature by picking up Ulysses on a whim because I had heard it was a hard book, not then knowing what beauty was or meant, of course (not to say that I now do). Now going through what is basically a comparative lit/great books course at a breddy good university, and hate myself everyday for not reading and writing enough, while loving the material. Some day I am sure I will write something of significance, although I shall still count myself a failure if that something does not turn out to be poetry.

And yet what of significance have you actually done? Woe to the one that has the skill and means to carve one's name forever onto the bronze face of time and yet does not.

I read stuff here and there. When I turned 11 I started reading literary works but I couldn't understand them. I tried getting 'serious' at 17.

Six, with a funny spanish classic book.

I was one of those people who didn't read at all during high school, to the extent that I would rather get a failing grade by haphazardly snipping together sparknotes excerpts than read for two god damn minutes To Kill a Fucking Mockingbird because it was -- is -- awful.

It was only after I took a year before college that I realized I had a passion for reading, but only reading certain things.

Coming from the public school system and being forced by a bunch of women to regurgitate the most emotion-driven, feelings-based garbage literature ever written really turned me off. There are very few high school aged males who can muster up the fucks to give about To Kill a Mockingbird or even Shakespeare, despite how much he's universally lauded. We need to confront the fact that guys just don't want to read this shit. It's overly feelings based and therefore boring to them -- and if you're on Veeky Forums you're obviously not the demographic I'm talking about.

Obviously no good literature class can be without Shakespeare. But it doesn't have to be ALL Shakespear, TKM, and The Scarlet Letter. Even the few dystopians they feed you aren't good enough. They need to start incorporating some philosophy and a lot more history, because that is what guys are interested in. They're captivated by it. This is true not just from observation, but from the long studied personality differences between men and women. And public schools are wholly female-centric with regards to schooling right now.

I don't want to go full MRA, but it does really bother me because I would never have pursued a philosophy degree if I didn't seek out philosophy on my own. I suspect it's the same for a lot of other guys who loathed high school English class.

sure I 'read' lit as required reading in school but the first time I independently read something that qualified as lit was when I was 17 and wanted to feel smart so I read Infinite Jest

I couldn't read before I was 9. So sometime after that.

22

The first piece of "literature" that I'm reading is Fahrenheit 451

I agree with you, for whatever that's worth.

The earliest memory i have of reading i was five years old and my little brother, a neighbor, and i had found a porno comic on the street, about this guy who loved touching his gf's asscheeks. I remember reading it out loud to them until my mom found us out.

Mostly just comic books until 6th grade where I read A Clockwork Orange (not in class) and considering my age and lack of general reading experience I'm surprised how well I was able to follow along.

I'm all for diversity in English classes, but this strikes me as broad. Isn't the whole point of language as an art to evoke feelings? It's great that your reading led you to philosophy, but that's not really the job of a lit teacher except in that it's good to give high-schoolers a little perspective.

My first exposure to anything resembling literature would have been in Latin class when I was 15. It got me paying attention to sound and diction generally, and then that same year I got assigned to Faulkner.

>Isn't the whole point of language as an art to evoke feelings?

While that's undeniably true, not many young guys are interested in discussing or feeling their feelings in such feminine ways -- mostly because of the way in which men, especially young men, are innately different in this respect. Sit outside a grade school book fair and watch how invariably the young boys will come out with sports magazines filled with football facts and the girls will come out 4 angsty YA novels richer.

English curricular could easily sacrifice some of the junk propaganda literature they feed their students and have them sit down and read something about history or philosophy that would be just as, if not more, beneficial to their reading ability and understanding. This would make it so that there is at least a balance in representation between what males and females are into.

First I will address your point, even though it misses the point of what user was saying

>Isn't the whole point of language as an art to evoke feelings?

Not really. Some 'language as art' is about how to control yourself so that you aren't too easily swayed by things that would evoke feelings. Take 'Meditations' as an example.

Now, I think you also misinterpreted what user wrote. I don't think he was talking about art that evokes feelings when he wrote "emotion-driven, feelings-based garbage literature". I think he means literature whose focus is the emotions people have in some situation, whether this evokes any emotions or not in the ready is irrelevant. For example, I might read about how someone felt in a romance novel, and myself feel nothing but then go on to read an entirely unemotional treatise on some mathematical concept and myself feel giddy.

>in the ready

in the reader*

Well put. I actually opted deliberately to skip the distinction you have just highlighted because I didn't have it worded so concisely, and wanted instead to ask about the purpose of English class.

I think the hypothetical mathematical treatise is also an excellent example of the sort of broader work that should be in English classes, probably instead of some British romance novel or other.

But are you going to tell me that Donne is an example of an author who is valuable not for the emotion he evokes in the reader, but for his instructional value? Because I suspect that there are very many church thinkers that we could but do not teach, and really I don't feel much better for reading The Flea.

I read a lot of non fiction books as a kid, and I read a lot of comic strips, but before the age of 10 or 11 I rarely read anything of literary value. But when I was around middle school age I was encouraged by a few male teachers and I started reading narrative fiction. I think my teacher in Grade 6 read the book Among the Hidden to our class and I read the rest of the series. I then read Redwall, Harry Potter (powered through the entire series just as the final book was about to be released), and etc.

tl;dr: Age 11 and some encouraging teachers.

My first 'adult' book was, I think, The Prince when I was 12 or 13 so. Around that time I also rred The Lord of the Rings, having recently rerred the Hobbit.
I had rred a lot before that but mostly children's books; in non-fiction about dinosaurs and later ancient Egypt.

As for why, I was a neoreactionary edgelord even back then.

I unironically started with Harry Potter. However, I was aware even as a child that it was mediocre. Yet still, I wanted to know how it ends.

If we're talking LICHRACHURE and not Redwall, then 21.

I started because /lit told me to.

Don't worry, I was once a spergy high schooler who secretly got off on Gödel, Escher, Bach, too. But you've got to be pretty closed off not to recognize the value in regular (i.e. not-overtly-philosophical) literature for high schoolers. We read Lord of the Flies, and it went straight over my class' heads.

Consider Vonnegut, who wrote perfectly great high-school-tier stuff. Consider Woolf and early Joyce. Hell, a lot of DFW's work (esp. the short stories) is arguably entirely "feelings-driven". Point is it's not a matter of "hurr, boys like sports and girls like romance trash." It's more a matter of "do we have a modicum of faith in our students to read up to the level of these works?"

I was reading a little before 3. Obviously it wasn't literature. That took a few more years. When I was 7 I was reading Twain and Dickens, turning 12 I was reading the great works of Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. When I was 18 I finally tackled finnegans wake and slayed the final boss of literature once and for all.

I don't read anymore.

Do Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and dumbed-down Bible stories count?

Cause they were my jam at like 2-3. Then came Aesop's fables and Great Illustrated Classics stuff.

I started just cause those were the things put around me, and I didn't really know the difference. I picked up junk later, but it also led to a really intense world mythology phase around 10.

>original translation