Were you indifferent or even hostile to reading when you were younger...

Were you indifferent or even hostile to reading when you were younger? I had some bad experiences with literature in school as a boy and it put me off on reading for pleasure for a long time. Why did school make literature so boring?

I was indifferent. I would read everything that was in front of me but ultimately I always had vidya (not that i saw them in opposition). It wasn't until i was 17 that i started buying and reading books on my own.

Of course everything related to English classes was nonsense.

I read mostly fantasy books and pulpy horror stories when I was young. It was only until the latter half of high school that I began to really care about more demanding literature. It would have been nice to have been exposed to a more classical education before that point but I'm not so sure my interest would have ever been as earnest were it forced upon me like that.

I had some bad experiences, but i thought that if there were awesome movies there had to be awesome books.
And then my mom brought me to local library and there was horror, action and everything. It was amazing to read about blood, guts and struggle after all those boring books.

I always did good in english, but the fact that I was FORCED to read really pissed me off because I was pretty edgy. Also most of the books that they made us read were boring garbage. After HS I picked up Don Quixote and since then I havent stopped reading, still havent started with the greeks aside from a few Plato dialogues. I read Homer, Aristophanes and Sophocles in HS but I dont really remember much about them, so I guess in my case it's "restart with the greeks" hehe

I was mostly just indifferent. I didn't have any bad experiences with literature, but I couldn't (or wouldn't make the effort to) find anything that interested me enough to read. In middle school I liked HP Lovecraft a lot, but it wasn't until I was in junior year of high school that I started actively reading on my own. It was mostly thanks to being introduced to Joyce in an English class, and then an older friend got me to read Yukio Mishima because he knew I was a fan of Death in June.

>I always did good in english

I read a lot of comic books at the time but I was nonetheless pretty hostile to literature as a child. Every now and then a teacher or other adult would commend me because 'at least I was reading something' but I would respond with a proud insistence that these were rotting my brain, not expanding it. By middle school I'd grown past that antipathy and started reading horror and thriller novels.

The list of books we were required to read in an American high school were painfully stunted and almost all would be considered average or terrible by Veeky Forums. I don't say this lightly either, we never even read Orwell or Salinger and instead read stuff like The Awakening and To Kill a Mockingbird. It's almost ridiculous how adroitly we managed to sidestep anything of value when Woolf and Invisible Man from Ellison would have encompassed the same themes better yet at that time no one was even made aware of their existence. The sad thing is that if I had read Portrait of the Artist or Catcher in the Rye in high school I probably would have liked them

I always loved reading, but I always drew a line between what I liked and had fun with, and Literature. Always hated English class.

not a single teacher of mine made a single reference to any kind of philosopher/philosophy in 13 years of public education

Mostly I really enjoyed school poetry. We had stuff like The Brook, Road Not Taken, Daffodils, Shakespeare sonnets, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and so many more at 13. I was really interested in poetry at the time. We had shit teachers as I'm not from a native English country.
Regarding books I used to read shitloads of Goosebumps as a kid. Then I really stopped reading much. When I was 16 I started reading again, classics now.

I tend to think that the reading component of english classes should have something like "here's the books we have in the library. Read one, write me something about it. Then do it again." Just get kids reading, thinking for themselves about what they read, and writing. Critique their grammar and expression, but don't treat a book as a puzzle to be solved, or as something that has a right answer.

I realize that if you have more than about 15 - 20 students in a class this will be impossible.

A lot of books assigned to me and my peers in school were determined by the vain and petty whims of my teachers. For example, one teacher assigned Ayn Rand because "muh capitalism" and another teacher assigned a few books based on the fact that they had movies coming out.

I was the same. We read nothing but white guilt trash lit for 12 years straight

>muh slavery
>muh holocaust
>muh indians

repeat until sick

No I always loved reading. Some of the English lit at school was pretty boring but I saw it as work that was separate from reading for pleasure.

I was kidnapped and forced into child prostitution ring that was using a bookmobile as cover.

Nah. I did read a lot of trash though.

it was actually an assignment like this that kickstarted my reading habit.

Why does everybody say to "read the Greeks"? Who cares?

Books were an escape from reality, from my education and the ignorance surrounding me, not that I was particularly smart but they were particularly dumb, I had freedom trough reading because there was no control over my reading choices, because they didn't know what I was reading, and fictions, mostly, offered me time to be elsewhere and someone else

But when I reached puberty those books were no longer useful, I found an escape in drugs, started meeting more interesting people and became rebellious toward education

Since then I never regain my liking for fictions, but I found pleasure in reading non-fictions, I guess I'll analyse that in 15 years

When I was a kid my mom used to bring me along with her friends in the uni library and I was just fascinated with and looking through illustrations at that time and they thought I was reading. I actually did though but only through captions, I used to read books with illustrations to stimulate my immersion, like encyclopedias and the like.