Summarize your reading history
Here is mine
>read orally stories as a kid in school, learn about the Greeks this way
>read Harry Potter, Tolkien, Le Guin, Series of Unfortunate Events as an pre-teen young teen
>Standard North American high school literature mixed in with lame local Canadian stories
>mostly just read non-fiction and internet philosophy after high school
>decide to check out /lit/ and pick out what I thought were the popular books here at the time, The Stranger, Picture of Dorian Grey, Divine Comedy and called it a day after that
>couple years later at 22 decide to check out /lit/ again since I realize its also the philosophy board and read No Longer Human
>another two years later and I've already burnt through around 150 books
>primary school
>think books are for nerds
>middleschool
>think books are for fags
>highschool
>think books are cool
>post-highschool
>study english
>Redwall
>fantasy
>fantasy sucks - Sci-fi
>sci-fi sucks - Hor...
>no, horror is unbelievably awful
>cherry-pick anything that looks like genre-fiction from the classics
>enlightenment lit, but it gets repetitive
>take a look at what adults read now
>fuuuuuuuck, they have shit taste
>stop reading
cut to 10 years later
>pynchon
>surrealism
>medieval literature <<< now
>???
>be 3
>learn to read from comics
>be 5-10
>read more comics, harry potter, kids books, narnias, local kids stories etc.
>be 13
>read genre fiction stuff, pratchett, LotR(only thing from these I still enjoy immensely)
>be 16
>start with the obvious, easy classics, twain, hemingway, dostoyevski etc.
>16-19 read everything I can find from writers like gogol, tolstoy, mishima, kawabata, coetzee, naipaul, rushdie, bulgakov, dickens, etc. etc. etc. basically /lit/'s recommended reading list, didn't know about it though back then though, got here when I was 19
>20-22(now) all kinds of nonfiction; politics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, arts, biographies, introductions to scientific fields etc.
Nancy Drew.
Phantom Tollbooth.
Goosebumps.
King/Crichton
Tolkien
Nothing for a while.
Heinlein/Dick/Clark
Murakami/Bukowski/Magical Realism
>>7854038
>think about reading
>think more
>must start soon
>start in 9th grade
>fail to keep up
>give up in 12th grade
>just fucking give up
>get a gf
>lose her in 2 years
>fail twice at sudoku
>learn pottery
>fuck this
back to books
Just Hold Me Please.
WOW! That was cathartic.
When I turned 14 I read many of the classics from gutenberg.
i started with fantasy and sci-fi in my early teens, then read some postmo american authors and now i'm going through italian and irish literature, mainly stuff from the past century
>>7854254
ups, i meant modernist not postmodernist (faulkner, pound, hemingway etc)
>>7854221
this is also me.
got a kindle. wanted free books.
>7-8+ years old: Enid Blyton, Jack London, R.L. Stevenson, Lemony Snicket, the Bible
>10-12+: Miscellaneous pleb fantasy
>14-16+: the Bible, the Koran, Tolkien, Shakespeare, Dumas, Zizek, some Sufi lit.
>18-21: Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Tacitus, Herodotus, Chuang Tsu, Virgil, Horace, Goeth, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Chekov, Dosto, Gogol, Italo Calvino, R.H. Tawney
>read most of most days until 6th grade
>try to be less of a social reject
>get bullied a lot for trying to be cool, keep trying to be cool
>depression
>start smoking plenty of pot
>barely graduate
>friend asks if i want to go shoot dope
>was gonna just kill myself anyway, so yeah sure
>become heroin/crack addict
>year later try getting off it
>in my third rehab read Kafka's short stories by complete mistake
>find God
>one more crack bender after that
>sober ever since
>go to college, get straight As
>now read most of most days
shoulda stuck to the straight and narrow, brothers. this board was instrumental in guiding me through the world of literature.
>grew up exclusively reading the bible by force
>only read what was mandatory in school as a kid and thought it was a waste of time
>8th grade English teacher in huge public school pulls you aside personally and gives you your own extracurricular curriculum of books because he "sees potential"
>The Odyssey is included and fall in love with it
>get really interested in the Greeks
>skip ahead to Existentialism for some reason and read most of the canon by 16 in lieu of a social life
>briefly get into deconstructionism but decide to go back to the pre-socratics and work chronologically
>from then on have a permanently messy backlog of philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory
>primary to middle school
>national classics; no motivation to read whatsoever. skim most of them due to ADHD. couldn't grasp the ethical complexities, if any, involved in the stories.
>middle school to high school
>read nothing
>high school
>feel guilty about not reading
>read a few books, Catcher in the Rye, among them
>enjoy it
>during the 2 years post high school read nothing
>2 years after post high school discover philosophy
>order a bunch of philosophy books: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Durant's "Story of Philosophy", etc
>overwhelmed by the impenetrable jargon; nearly give up
>manage the jargon over time; discover Fregean and post-Fregean analytic philosophy
>re-discover mathematics through analytic philosophy
>keep an eye on philosophy but largely put it aside to focus 100% on mathematics
>>7854325
nice
>>7854038
>0-10
patrician children's books
>11-14
spy/military thrillers by Vince Flynn, Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, etc
>15-18
more serious lit... Dumas, Conrad, Fitzgerald, some Plutarch, assorted historical books about WWII, Soviet Russia, a little bit of Plato and Aristotle, Marx, Hitler, Edmund Burke
>18-20
Evola, Spengler, FP Yockney, other reactionary writers
>21-currently
more fiction. Moby Dick, the Bible, Shakespeare
>>7854397
forgot to add.... Call of the Wild by Jack London was my favorite book for like a solid ten years.
>>7854397
these are really good to read /lit/
let me have more
>read Treasure Island and thought, "Hey, Reading can be fun!"
>read Eragon
>read the Harry Potter series
>read Twilight
>realized that reading had just wasted a good chunk of my life and never picked up a fiction book again
Fantasy
Beats
Pomo alt lit
Lit
It's been lit tbhfam
>>7854038
>0-10
Mostlycomics (Simpsons, Mutts, and all Asterix and Tintin)
Philadelphia Chickens
Hippos go Berserk!
Mad Libs
Warriors (Cat books)
Famous Five
>11-14
Maus
Pendragon Series
Harry Potter
Bone
Percy Jackson and Olympians
American Born Chinese
I am Number Four
Samurai Shortstop
Hitchhiker's Guide
Hunger Games
>15-17
Some programming Wikibooks
PHP and MySQL for Dummies
GEEKS
Battle Royale
Macro and Micro Econ Textbook
Moby Dick
The Complaints
The Rise and The Fall of the Third Reich
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Little Brother
Ecological Economics
The End of Hong Kong: The Secret Diplomacy of Imperial Retreat
Music: In Theory and Practice
Shakespeare
Voice and Speaking Skills for Dummies
C# in a Nutshell
commiefesto
Some art books from /co/ draw-threads
>18Current Year
Professional Assembly Language
CCNA Security Official Cert Guide
Mystery
Suspense
Philosophy
That's about it excluding Lord of the rings and Harry potter
Grade School
>A Series of Unfortunate Events
>Marvin Redpost
>Wayside School
Middle School
>Youth in Revolt was pretty much the only book I gave a shit about
High School Freshman-Sophomore
>Hunter S. Thompson
>Bret Easton Ellis
>Rock star/durg addict memoirs
>A Confederacy of Dunces
Junior-Senior
>Get into /lit/core
>le greeks
>Joyce's first two books
>Kafka
>No Longer Human-core
>Dostoesvyky
Now
I just read whatever I feel like reading t.b.h
>>7854039
Decent recent read count. Well done.
>>7854317
Impressive undergrad years.
>>7854327
Jelly of this early start.
>>7854511
Impressive.
Some of you guys have impressively precocious early relationships with lit. I rank among the plebby youths who only flirted with books during high school, and even then only in the form of harry potter/YA content. It's awesome that you guys managed to read in your teens stuff that I never even touched until I was 21 (Greeks, Russian lit, Moby Dick, etc.)
>>7854221
Does anyone here randomly pick a Gutenberg book to read out of curiosity?
>be 5
>learn to read from video games
>read in elementary school
>spend middle and high school playing video games and watching anime
>discover /lit/
>begin reading again
My mum reads 3 books a week and has done since the age of 11. She is now 60.
She's my motivator, I try and keep up with her and read what she recommends. We went on literature holidays when I was wee, like to Haworth of the bronte sisters.
British classics, then learnt German and read German classics and got into poetry. Modernism next. Then learnt Russian. Then existentialism through Russian novels- then French stuff (only in translation sadly). Then uni- medieval stuff and the enlightenment. Just getting into contemporary lit now.
>>7854540
how do you pick a random one?
Elementary school
>Goosebumps, Animorphs, Bailey's School Kids, Harry Potter, anything with dragons
Middle school
>RPG/tabletop tie-in books, books about mythology
High school
>start same as middle school
>lotta manga, particulary FMA, Hellsing, and Berserk
>by end, love Vonnegut, William S. Burroughs, Hesse, and Camus by the end. also dabbled in typical angsty teen philosophy
college
>history major, so mostly assigned work
>read Cormac McCarthy
>drifted away from manga, drift into comix
>get left and start reading zines
post-college
>end up working simultaneously at a bookstore and a library
>currently a mix of darker modern classics, literary horror, weird fiction, post-apocalyptic lit, weird/arty comix, critical theory, radical political works, some history, some memoirs. I try to read some current well-reviewed books for work and dabble
tl;dr i suck
>read kids books as kid
>read adult books as adult
did i make it?
Pre-adolescent me was a smattering of non-fiction, diagrammatic books for kids and cheap paperbacks detailing ufology, cryptozoology coupled with the standard kids series (Harry potter, magic treehouse, goosebumps, series of unfortunate events).
I had a good transitional year that was around 7th/8th grade that consisted in reading high school lit and the odd assortment of Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, Plato, etc. I didn't understand a thing of it all.
High School was essentially /lit/core as I discovered Times' best novels list, Le Monde's, etc.. Love of modernism thoroughly established.
First couple years of college were a regression unfortunately. Hardly read outside of classes and what I did read was insufferable radical anarchist lit. I don't even think I read anything substantial during my 3rd year. Didn't need to--I was in love.
Lost the love my last year of college and gained the friendship of an older, angrier Nietzschean. Much talk of Nietzsche and Heidegger and Benjamin went on.
Continued my grad school theory reading for a good year and became more and more politically radical. But I was philosophically radical--more messianic than revolutionary.
And then last year I finally got around to reading Marx's Capital. Haven't looked back since.
27 y/o
Beverly Cleary
Goosebumps/Animorphs
Harry Potter
Stephen King
These days I don't read as much, but when I do it's mostly nonfiction related to finance/daytrading. I did read the Stormlight Archives, they were phenomenal books.
>High School
The Hero and the Crown
Half of LOTR
Broken Sky series
>College
The Catcher in the Rye
Sherlock Holmes
>Graduate School
The first chapter of Lord of the Flies
Why do I come to /lit/? I have no idea.
>toddler years
no fuckin clue
>elementary
started reading comic books in 4th grade
>middle
Tolkien, then went into GRR Martin and Ray Bradbury. 8th grade was Edgar Allen POe and Robert Frost
>highschool
pretty much every major poet of the 20th century, as well as Whitman and Blake
>college (now)
same thing
>>7854038
>Elementary school: Shit like My Side of the Mountain and other comfy children's books. 4th grade teacher was a g and had my class read and write poetry every week
>Middle School: Almost exclusively Stephen King and Tolkien. Also read a few classics like Treasure Island and The Odyssey.
High School: Decided literature was what I wanted to devote my life to and went out of my way to read hard shit like Joyce, Pynchon, Gaddis, Hawkes, and, near the end of my senior year, McElroy. The only poets I really read were Pound and Crane.
>College: Discovered my favorite author--William Gass. About half of what I read now is supplementary materials.
>>7854785
I'm a language major and I can see where you're coming from. I was also obsessed with Burroughs, Hesse (especially Steppenwolf) and Camus' The Stranger during high school. Actually I think those changed me for the better. Hopefully you haven't end up without any social competences like me. Anyways,
Elementary school
>read shitty comics and Verne, London, Twain, some Busch, Harry Potter, Kästner, Lagerlöf and Astrid Lindgren.
Middle school
>start taking German as second language
>manga, Harry Potter, books about skateboarding, Dan Brown (I kid you not, all of them), Gripe's Tordyveln flyger i skymningen
>assigned books: Strindberg's Hemsöborna, Söderberg's Doctor Glas, the Bible, Greek mythology, Hauptmann's Bahnwärter Thiel
High school
>Swedish as primary language, German as second language
>Kafka (huge influence), Camus, Hesse (Steppenwolf, Siddhartha), Kerouac, Burroughs (Junkie and The Yage Letters), Gogol, more Söderberg and Strindberg.
>assigned books: Kehlmann's Die Vermessung der Welt, Shakespeare's primary works, Boye's Kallocain, Hoffmann's Der Sandmann, Almqvist's Det går an.
>Start to enjoy poetry
College
>majoring in German
>various novels ranging from Dostoyevsky, Dahlström, Gide and Mann to Beckett. More Söderberg and Gogol.
>Also discover poetry outside of assigned poems in high school, currently loving the works of Harry Martinson.
>assigned books: Böll's Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, Schlink's Der Vorleser, Becker's Amanda herzlos, etc.
I've read everything by Orwell and Ayn Rand. Other than that the only things I've read are Fahrenheit 451 and Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.
>>7855518
Why are you here?
>primary school
read a lot of book for kids and excelled in grammar and
actually wrote a few short stories
>high school
depressed, hardly read anything but school books
>college
reading the classics like a champ, scoring a book a week
No matter what I do from now on, I'll always know I wasted golden years of reading during high school
>>7855518
Disgusting.
>>7855506
They made you read Strindberg in middle school? What the fuck?
He's an even more rabid misogynist than Schopenhauer and his plays surpass bergmanian levels of psychological torment.
>>7854038
Age 3: successfully read Dr. Seuss aloud to own mother for a sustained period of time (they may still have the tape, dunno)
5-10: Books that dad would check out of the library for me. looking at science books, gifts of books from grandparents. Solar system book dad bought me, never read all the way through but learned of Venera probe, multiplicity of Solar Systme moons, Voyager program. HUGE collection of basic comic books from grandma's basement, primer on all basic comics properties/franchies from 60s forward (Archie, Donald Duck/Scrooge, DC/Marvel/The Phantom/Shazam/War of the Worlds Classics Illustrated edition)
10ish: Lord of the Rings, remembered essential plot details but I was skimming over lots of words without looking them up. "ere", "oliphant" etc
11-15: ALL John Bellairs I could get my hands on (Edward Gorey illustrated covers, a notion of catholic culture, foreign to me), Goosebumps, encyclopedia entries for school, first experiments with the internet in school (finding "links" to "anime shrines")
15-18: Start becoming away of "true" :^) /lit/. Check Finnegans Wake out of library multiple times and skim through it for a laugh, understand nothing, read art history. Start buying big hardcover art history books for myself, full weeaboo, lots and lots of manga (Ranma 1/2, Rumiko Takahashi, Gun Smith Cats gives fictional-feel of Chicago, other late 90s period stuff)
James Thurber project for class. Read first third of ancient history textbook on own initiative to get a basic feel of the various tribes/babylon/hittites/egypt etc. CD liner notes and endless newspaper funny pages I'd deliver.
17-18: self-initiated Dostoevsky phase. Crime & Punishment/Brothers Kzv/Notes. Self-selected lass project on Crime & Punishment, stayed up all night to complete paper. I remember actually literally reading The Grand Inquisitor for the very first time in Garnett's, late at night and instantly recognizing it as the heavy shit. I was later vindicated. Moby Dick the whole thing, Silas Marner, Kafka stories.
cont
The last 5 books I read were Tom Clancy novels although 1 was a Lee Child Jack Reacher novel
>>7855558
>the below is a general regression, continuance, and degeneration.
Teenage years cont.
1984 (re-read a bit later on own initiative), Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet. Still the only two Shakespeare I've ever read. Read Great Gatsby just once for class and wasn't impressed.
18-24 College years: multiple math textbooks, a few Chemistry textbooks and bits of art history. A la carte philosophy: tastes of Plato, Descartes, Hume, Locke (2nd treatise govt), Kant (Prolegomena), Marx (manifesto), nature readings. Eye deep in hell: detailed, legitimate history of WWI trench warfare, parts of modern history surveys in general. Wills' book on Lincoln at Gettysburg, Mao's little red book, basic China information. Annotated info (historical notes, the front part of Heath's book) of Euclids elements on own initiative for a few weeks but I abandoned it. Books on the history of childhood in the modern period, part of Tocqueville Democracy in America (didn't finish). Took time off due to stupidity, went back and finished later.
24-28 or so: took a factory job at heights of recession and committed to long hours and making money as best I could, did not make time for reading during this period, felt dirty about it. squeezed in Lyotard's "postmodern condition" once for some chi-chi culture. blogs, 4chan, more blogs, hm, breaking bad..... whoops neckbeard MANOSPHERE blogs. Alt-right, the spearhead, roissy, jack donovan, half sigma, dalrock, mencius moldbug Taki's mag, etc etc etc. Set aside the time to read "Watchmen" before the movie , and I remember kinda liking the layers of the text. As for the previous, shitlordery for an idle mind, incredibly entertaining prose at times, though you don't know that. simmer in this for a bit...
Present: NEET-dom and savings allow me to actually read books again. Edgelord period. Interest in occult. Have recently completed an edgy selection of brief screeds, broadsides, and shorter texts: both Invisible Committee items, Lavey, part of a Crowley bio, book of law/book of lies, re-reading historical circumstances of Communist Manifesto in a student edition hinted at above. Wisconsin Death Trip (dad had a copy, on far back burner right now). The phony "Necronomicon". More generally, have been haunting bookstores for less edgy/more interesting meme-mateiral I've never been to before. I need to complete a "long" project of some kind.
I have the original short story inspiring "The Thing" movies, in anthology hard-copy. I really need to do that, maybe now...
>read books for class
>met a teacher in college who asked me if i liked reading
>after mulling it over i said yes, since i generally did enjoy analysing and looking into what makes a story
>asked him for recommendations one day during the summer
>read something by an author we studied in class instead
>start reading sporadically but constantly have in my mind the idea that i should try to read more for some reason for like two years
>become addicted to it as of around last october?
I really only started reading a year ago but I've decided to do the a book a week challenge this year and I'm at 15/13 books, so I'm doing well. I've never actually read anything harry potter, I think I learned early on that only canonical authors were worth reading, or rather, its the idea that youre guaranteed a good read. I've read some modern shit, its a mixed bad, NYT bestsellers usually tell me its a turnoff though.
