At what age did you start getting interested into literature and reading?

I discovered Veeky Forums when I was checking out other boards on this website. I used to only use /pol/.

After spending a week on here to get acclimated I got memed into tackling Infinite Jest as my first literary read. It was pretty good to be honest, but the more I have read since then (early last year), the more it goes down in my personal rankings of books I have read. Favourite category of literature = Russians.

At around 14 I was taken by a historical work on marco polo. Prior to that I had read your hunger games and harry potters; I wasn't really interested in anything substantial until my 17th birthday when my mom gifted me a book which included a list of "classics". Now I'm 18 and it's philosophy which has me(anything from more recent syntopical figures like sellars or brandom, to classic figures like hume and kant).
Oddly enough I'd consider a collected works by Carl Jung to have had the most influence on me, and that isn't for any intellectual reason, but rather for the practical reason of serving as a remedy for my OCD.
Sellars "empiricism and philosophy of mind" is my biggest intellectual influence.

19 or 20. It was Siddhartha, Crime and Punishment, and Sabbath's Theater by Roth.

18

Slaughterhouse-Five made me first think books were cool after I read it in one sitting.

Sabbath's Theater is one of my favorite books. What do you think of his other works? I've only read Portnoy's Complaint and American Pastoral so far.

>Reading
Whole life. I firmly believe my reading habits are what make me such a good speller and intelligent person.
Books include harry potter, alex rider books, percy jackson
>Literature
yet to happen. I'm just not in love with books like I used to be. It'll happen soon enough, I'm certainly trying.

>16
Loved Julius Ceasar in 9th grade then The glass menagerie in 11th
and by the time I was in senior year
I loved every poem, short story, play, novella, novel the AP Lit teacher gave us
(Sort of got ahead of myself at that point).

18 or 19 I guess. before then, though, I was already reading a good amount of books ever since (by your regular '0-books-a-year standard), but mostly trash. at that point, I was already lurking /b/ for 1~2 years, when I first entered Veeky Forums. lurked it for a while, decided to buy the divine comedy.
always had a strong interest in religion (though I was an atheist for 2~4 years, and at that point was an agnostic) and pretty much anything related to religion, specially when 'mixed' with history and "conspiracy" and mysticism (hate me if you will, but the da vinci code movie is a good example, all that shit about da vinci, the blood of christ...it has me thinking tb h)

I loved the divine comedy deeply, and ever since it has made me study literature, philosophy and theology

12
Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces
Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End
Gore Vidal's Julian, and Burr
Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean, and The Renaissance
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
U. K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed
Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian
Lots of others.

16

Started with Stephen King and later fell into the "start with the greeks" meme

>17

Dubliners by James Joyce is what really got me into analysis. Like when you're in high school and the teacher is saying "Well why are the curtains blue?" and in your head you're thinking "Because they're just fucking blue you dumb cunt."

Dubliners is the book that changed my mind about all that. I finally realized that there can be a great attention to detail and symbolism without being over done.

The Sun Also Rises was a book that really changed my world view. Just be cool man.

>trap to gather ages of 4chin users
I started reading at the 90th echelon and then transformed to literature by the 135th, by the time I hit 160 I was beyond literature because it's fake shit
Now I just write and research for myself

>13
dad gets me to read 1984 and slaughterhouse-five. my first introduction to real literature
>14
take mbti test which comes back as INFP. read that INFPs are all writers and musicians, so i get into like neutral milk hotel and stuff. But i also order a bunch of stuff by INFP authors
read Camus the stranger
try to read Kierkegaard fear and trembling and fail
get into romantic poetry w/ shelley and keats. prefer shelley
also read heart of darkness for some reason dont know why
>15
reread fear and trembling until it made sense (maybe three times i think). also starting to get into existentialist phase so i read sartre and start watching greg sadler videos also read war and peace (still my favourite book) for the first time
>16
google how to be read and scrap together a reading list from a wikihow article. ask parents for a bunch of books for my birthday. over that summer read works by homer euripides virgil chaucer beowulf (heaney translation) melville don quixote kafka dickens dostoevsky
>17
discover Veeky Forums
unironically stop reading nearly as much

fml;

pretty much this, but at 20. i think the last time a read a book before then was in secondary school, and that was more the teacher reading it to me

meditations or utopia maybe

Got into Hemingway and liquor at 15.

I loved Goodbye, Columbus, but wasn't a huge fan of The Great American Novel. I've read no others besides Portnoy's, which I enjoyed. Sabbath's is definitely in a league of its own tho, imo

at age 16/17

like a lot of edgy teens it started with the stranger

I was 19. After years of sci-fi fantasy and genre shit, I stumbled upon Veeky Forums

Got memed to the moon and back convinced the only way to start is with the greeks. First with Homer, then to stoner, then meme tomes followed and now two years later I'm in the midst of Ulysses

I could thank you guys for a good habit but I won't because for all that I've gained I've definitely lost more esp friends and ambitions, and everyday I feel more fearful and alone and less and less intelligent too. Or at least my social skills have deteriorated to the point where I'm genuinely ashamed to be who I am and now I have nobody but you, user(s) :'(

>take mbti test which comes back as INFP. read that INFPs are all writers and musicians, so i get into like neutral milk hotel and stuff. But i also order a bunch of stuff by INFP authors
Is this bait?

Since i was a kid i spent most i time trapped in books or the computer, an adolescence defining book must have been 1984 and Neruda's and Maria Luisa Bombal's the mist.

somewhere between 19 and 21.
the greeks

are you from chile? it seems that those books were given to you at school. At least they were given to me around that time.

Yeah i am, chilean's literature is so expressive, i love that. In my school i had some dope teachers in literature, i think that what defined my love for books. Read Frankestein thanks to her, just like demian and siddharta, as well as 100 years of solitude. Some good movies too, le tambour and les miserables (the first one) are some that stick to me to this day.

I read a lot as a kid. My most vivid memory is taking home a picture book version of The Bottle Imp by Robert Louis Stevenson that had all of the text intact. Trying to decipher what some of the words meant as an ESL second grader was tough, but I made it through and I've loved reading since then.

>age
22 literature
Notes from the underground

>2012 (Aged 24)
1984
Animal Farm
Hackers' Tales: Stories from the Electronic Front Line

>2013
Cypherpunks : Freedom and the Future of the Internet
A Brief History of Time

>2017
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Started recently)

13
Schopenhauer

Used to skip recess to read The Egypt Game in 3rd grade. The teachers thought I was a brainiac or some shit, but I just found the setting incredibly interesting. Unfortunately I only remember bits and pieces of it.

age 10: Plato/Epictetus/Aurelius
^most influence

age 13: Stephen King's IT and The Stand, Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods
age 15: Crowley
age 17: The Dhammapada
age 25: Homer, Kipling, Scott, Vonnegut, Palahniuk, Campbell, Eliade, Jung, etc
age 35: Plotinus, Hegel

I started really reading when I was 15, in about sophomore year, and I recently read a book which had probably the biggest influence which was [Spoiler]The Death of Ivan Ilyich[Spoiler]

parents read to me most nights when I was small, alledegly, I don't remember shit. The first book I can remember loving is pic related. The gradeschool library allowed even the youngest children to check out books, provided you were able to read and write. A classmates mother worked at the real library, she sometimes watched the two of us, the same with my mom. Having advanced to Chapter Books, the most difficult form of books, my parents would confinscate lightbulbs and flashlights from me trying to stop me from reading into the night and sleeping at school.

forgot

age 4-6: reading bible with parent unit
age 6-8: russian fairy tales mostly bout witches and other mean grownups

18 when I read the Stranger

The Sailor who fell from Grace with the Sea

Robinson Crusoe was the first real book I read, I was about six. For years afterward I carried around the SAS survival guide, in anticipation of living off the land.

20, the Watermethod-man by Irving was the book that did it

Since I could read, really. It all began with comics and magazines back when I was 5-6, then it stepped up with some choose your own adventures books and later on proper books (not that I don't have a soft spot for choose your own adventure, mind).
One of the earliest books I remember reading were Robinson Crusoe, Ivanhoe and Treasure Island.

As soon as I could read. Didn't start getting into "literature" until late middle school, but I grew up reading. Parents are both avid readers, read to me a lot as a kid, and it was my entertainment before bed all through elementary school.

Really glad I started early. Even if I just read kids stuff like Harry Potter and shit, it made me really love reading and made it easy to jump into literature.

When I was later in elementary school I read Flowers for Algernon on my mom's recommendation and it was really beautiful. I can't say for sure what book had the biggest impact on me though, I read through stacks that my mom brought home from the library.

Siddhartha deeply changed my life senior year of high school though, made me really look at myself and who I was under all the bullshit I piled on in highschool. Introduced me to Buddhism which really changed the way I dealt with and responded to problems and felt about myself.

Flowers for Algernon got me into sci-fi in grade school

Age 7 2nd grade. Fly guy is still the best book, captain underpants can fuck off.

How come there is such a big gap between 17 and 25?

When I saw "Short Circuit" as a lad of five or so. Johnny Five has that bit where he's fallen in with some bird and he goes mental demanding all that info, reads through dozens of dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc in fractions of a second. I imitated that immediately, demanding more info from me mum (though now that I think on it, there's good chance it was a nanny) like what's on the tele innit. We had loads of books of course, me father had acquired enough sets of volumes in various subjects that I didn't want for tomes to read. I developed a knack in my elementary school years for defining words without having to reference back to a dictionary as a result. Fun times them were.

holy shit is that that movie with mechanical spiders that have like syringes on them?

16: I read The Gulag Archipelago accidentally, as I was edgy and into that kind of stuff. Before that I had only read pulp fiction and I was pretty impressed, as I had never really expected anything more from a book before.
18: I was a neet for 3 years after high school and went on a hard fiction binge for the first part of it, Dostoevsky/Tolstoy were by far my favorites during that time.
20: I started to feel like all fiction was the same, and moved on into reading philosophy. I had no idea what I was doing so I just went for the names I had heard before which led me to Plato/Nietzsche/etc.
24: Eventually I got around to reading The Bible, as well as a few history books. Now for the past few years I have been getting my philosophy from the Bible, while I have more casually interesting reading material than I could ever read in my lifetime through my taste for history.

No, it's about a plucky military robot that shorts a circuit during a demonstration drill and develops a personality and intelligence that transcends his singular purpose.

I started reading Heinlein around 15 or 16.

Reading 1984 in 10th was a great experience and the first time I really enjoyed reading a more literary book. Taking AP English Literature in 12th grade exposed me to a bunch of books that were hard to read but were great and that was really the first time I started liking books and poetry.
Then for a year after high school (as an unwilling STEM student) I didn’t read any books (practically every book I’ve read was for school) until I realized that I was wasting too much time on the internet, so I decided to start reading books. I found a copy of Paradise Lost in my house and I read it and loved it. Then I thought I should read the Iliad and the Odyssey, since I loved Paradise Lost so much. At the same time, I started going on Veeky Forums and thought I should start with the Greeks, which is what I was doing anyway. Now I'm reading more Greeks.

I was harcor Buddhist in this period. I had no incentive to explore western alternatives. Working towards the good was enough for me. Now, at 35, I'm reading Plotinus and guess what: the good and the beautiful is still the goal.

>read Nietzsche
>later getting philosophy from the Bible
You're either lying or stupid

My Mom would read me the Giving Tree and other stuff by Shell Silverstein every day before I was school age. She gave me copies of the Hobbit and Harry Potter as a kid after she took the family to see Lord of the Rings and the Sorcerer's Stone in theater. For a couple of years from like 10-13 I hated reading and just wanted to be a lazy fuck watching television, movies, or playing video games all day. High school literature classes really reinvigorated my interest in reading after we read stuff like Kesey, Shakespeare, Steinbeck and Miller. After that I splintered off in every direction and have been reading every day for the past eight years or so. Although it's more of a collection than an a "book" in the sense your probably asking for, I always keep a copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends on top of my desk. The most recent formative book I have read would probably be Siddhartha when I was 20 years and old going through a really difficult time confronting personal issues and dealing with past trauma.

I'm 29 now; got properly into reading around 17. I was scientistic until then and only read fiction for school and hated it. Then took a look at Camus and Ellis and went from there.

Somebody doesn't understand Nietzsche. At all. Eat shit dumbass.