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[the_rck]

First book you can remember reading? (for silverr)

The first books I actually remember reading were in school. I can't remember if this was kindergarten or first grade. I suspect first grade because I don't think, in those days, they started kids reading in kindergarten. The books were thin, little paperbacks, tan with pictures on the front. I don't remember the pictures clearly, but I think they were anthropomorphized animals or at least not precisely human looking. The characters were named Matt and Sam, and they had adventures in words of one to five letters.

I didn't read very fast or well in those days, but I had a friend who sped through those books and read other books. I wanted to do that, too, and set out with determination to make it so. I don't think I ever looked back because after that the books blur together, and I don't remember very many of them clearly or with any certainty as to when I read them. There are things that stand out in my memory because they made an impression, but when I read them isn't generally part of that impression.

I know there must have been books before the Matt and Sam books. I remember going to the public library regularly, and I know my mother got us library cards as soon as it was feasible. I'm not sure if the limit of six kids' books per card was library imposed or my mother's idea. I just remember that as the limit for a very, very long time. It's still a little hard for me to check out more than six books at once. I can do it, but I feel like I'm getting away with breaking the rules.

Comments

[zhelana]

My mom imposed 10 books a week, and only 5 of them were allowed to be Babysitters Club or Sweet Valley Twins. I always wondered why mom limited the number of books I was allowed to have. Shouldn't she be encouraging her kid to read? But she was always like "go do something besides read" and bought me a bike and roller skates and a jump rope and later some water guns. Apparently I was supposed to make friends? But there was no one on the street my age.

[the_rck]

We did have other kids our age in the neighborhood, but we were only allowed to play with them when all the daycare kids had gone home. While there were still daycare kids in the house, we were expected to be there and play with them.

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

And my first (remembered) book was a science fiction paperback, published sometime before 1959, that I read the winter I turned two (which is why it had to be published before 1959, because I was born in 1956). I recall lots of details about it, but not the name or author, and I've never been able to find it again. The next book I really recall I read when I was four, in kindergarden -- H. Rider Haggard's "Cleopatra". That one I have found again, and it's really turgid prose. Wow.


I didn't have a library card for a long time, because my father wouldn't take us to the library, so the few times I DID get a book out, it became overdue and I got yelled at. When I was around 9 or 10, a small one-room branch library opened near my great-grandparents' house, and I was allowed to walk there and get out books when I stayed with my great-grandparents during the summer. Such luxury! I got out Albert Payson Terhune's dog books, "Christy", "Mein Kampf", my first Georgette Heyer.... I'd take mounds of books, read them, then return them and take out more mounds -- I would make daily trips since I could read all I wanted when I stayed there.

[the_rck]

I wasn't a particularly early reader. I think my mother simply didn't have a lot of time to read to me (she ran a daycare in our house). I also suspect that there weren't any books that stayed around long enough for me to know the story. We went to the library a lot, but my mother believes that buying books is foolish when the library has so many, so we didn't actually own many books. We also had to be really cautious about library books so that the younger daycare kids didn't destroy them.

I remember it being a big deal when a family friend asked us to keep a bunch of books for him. (He never reclaimed them. I don't know why. There were some expensive and gorgeous art books in the collection.) Those went on our shelves and were available for me and my sister to read. I was beyond thrilled.

Going from the Ann Arbor library to the Paw Paw library in seventh grade was very, very hard. The Paw Paw library was so much smaller. The science fiction section, for example, was only four shelves. During middle school and high school I read a lot of things I wouldn't touch now just because they were available. I scrounged for used books (the Goodwill store had a few shelves, and the bus depot sold bought and sold used books).

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

I didn't get to buy many books ever as a kid/young adult (this was not a priority for my parents -- they didn't read themselves (my mom had dyslexia and never finished high school and my dad just didn't care afaik) and actually they though it was weird that I liked books) so I was a big rereader of whatever I had around. And I had a lot of weird stuff around, like my great-grandfather's propaganda books from WWI about Germany's war crimes in Belgium and a whole set of ancient encyclopedias and the Standard Book of Facts (which dated to, I think, 1890) on my Dad's side, and one book that I vividly recall about the brothels of New Orleans that I discovered in my mother's father's house (I found that one again later in the UofM library and it was just as I recalled). I did occasionally talk my parents or my grandparents or my Aunt Teter into letting me pick up a paperback or some cheap book, so I know I got a book on the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt at Rink's and I got Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber at the Big Bear grocery store rack, and um.... oh yes, I got several books at school, at the library book sales. I got Tennyson and a couple of SF books and my cherished copy of La Mort d' Arthur (the Sir Thomas Malory version) Of course, when I was in high school, my father caught me reading a Kurt Vonnegut book and it said "fuck" on one page, so he had me burn most of the books I had at home and so I don't have a lot of my older books. I did have a cache at my Aunt Teter's so that means I still had my Malory.

As you can see, I didn't have a whole lot of encouragement for reading. So I have no idea why it was my thing so early -- where did that come from?! Of course, I used reading as my escape from reality/my life, so it became really important to my sanity.