Childhood reading influences?

[Rob_Royale]

Writers tend to be big readers and big readers are usually that way from a young age. I certainly was.
I loved animal stories as an early reader and was a big fan of Gentle Ben, Black Beauty, the Black Stallion, White Fang, and the like. But I picked up Edgar Rice Burroughs's, Tarzan at age 9 or so at the school book fair and it was stories of high adventure or nothing after that. Burrough's Tarzan, John Carter, and his tales of Pelucidar, Robert E Howard's Conan, and Solomon Kane, John Norman's Gor series, plus the classics like Treasure Island, Moby Dick, and pretty much everything by Jules Verne. By 12 I'd found my way to Narnia and Middle Earth and all points in between.

I can honestly say those stories of heroes and villains, strong men and weak helped me understand the kind of person I wanted to be. They were very formative. Traits that we don't see on a daily basis, I found in those books. Honor, courage, nobility, integrity, and a fair amount of romance, I learned from those stories. Sadly, I found dealing with the fairer sex a bit more challenging than, "Me Tarzan, you Jane." But then again, I suspect that Burrough's understood women even less than he did Africa.

Anyway, those are the writers and stories that helped mold young Rob, back in the days of disco, new wave, and hair metal music.
How about you? Who inspired you; who captured your imagination, who made you feel something back when you read late at night, under the covers with your flashlight?

 

[HordHolm]

The first book that really opened my eyes was Stig of the Dump at about age 8 or 9, I can't remember exactly. Then, of all things, I inherited an Early English Text Society folio of Hundred Years War chronicles at about the age of eleven - a mixture of the Chronicles of Jean le Bel, Jean Froissart and Enguerrand Le Monstrelet. A hugely influential book for my interests.

 

[AchtungNight]

Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Neverending Story, Tolkien, Eddings, Heinlein, LRH, Dumas, Stephen King, Jules Verne, Salvatore, Gygax, Greenwood, Stevenson, Kipling, Monte Cook, Clancy, Cussler, Laurell K, Janet Evanovich, Anne Rice, Suzanne Collins, Rowling, Laura Joh Rowland, Conrad, Orwell, Gaiman, and so many more. Not to forget Stan Lee, Bob Kane, Greg Weisman, Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon, Jim Davis, Lauren Faust, and other cartoon creators. Also JJ Abrams, James Cameron, Marti Noxon, and other TV & Movie creators. Too many influences to list them all.

 

[SimonDoom]

I read a lot as a kid, and my views on many things have been influenced by what I've read.

If there's one book that's been most influential I'd pick Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, which I read when young and whose mix of dark humor, fantasy, and sardonic but hopeful view of human nature resonated with me and influenced my tastes and views ever afterward. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had many of the same themes.

Books like Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm reinforced and developed my views about human nature and society, which have pretty much stayed with me my whole life.

 

[MrPixel]

I was reading seriously at 6, but it was mostly science anthologies geared towards 7th and 8th graders. I specifically recall one book, a collection of "easy electronic projects", and I built most of them. At six. I scared the bejabbers out of my 1st grade teacher bringing an electrical "science project" from the book for show-and-tell - a telegraph key and sounder made of tin can strips, nails and wire - and she sent me to the principal's office to demonstrate to him that it wasn't dangerous. It wasn't, of course. But here's to you, Mrs. Touchstone.

There was also a similar book about atomic energy for my seventh birthday, and learned the difference between U238 (common uranium) and U235 (fissile isotope), neutron chain reactions, D-type particle accelerators, and basic cross-sections of nuclear reactors and weapons. There was no way a seven-year-old was going to build a bomb, of course, but my early childhood was basically a Sheldon Cooper (Big Bang Theory) prototype, but without the advanced mathematics.

I was reading voraciously through 2nd and 3rd grades, child-friendly fiction like Hardy Boys, eventually The Jungle Book, Jules Verne, and Tom Sawyer. My 2nd grade teacher was an absolute saint, recognizing my early reading comprehension skills, and worked with me after school beefing-up my reading speed. I maxed-out the SRA speed reading trainer.

My 3rd grade teacher drilled the idea of formal "book reports" into us, and the drudgery of the implied obligation of a report for every book I read seeded disinterest in reading for enjoyment's sake. Simon reminded me that Animal Farm and Charlotte's Web were somewhere in there.

For casual reading, I would spend hours in the pages of Collier's Encyclopedia, jumping from topic to topic.

I burned out on serious literature in 6th grade when some well-meaning parents (including my mother) thought the handful of advanced placement students needed a challenge. We were pushed into Beowulf, A Tale of Two Cities, some Chaucer, and Shakespeare. 6th graders. Really? It was the Dickens that saw the end of my appreciation of reading; I got about 20 or so pages deep into Two Cities and my mind went shut.

I think I've read one novel in adulthood, some sort of thriller by a minor author. It wasn't very good. I have full bookshelves, but mostly of references and academic history tomes.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Alice in Wonderland, but even more so, Through the Looking Glass, must have been early favourites. The Narnia books, even though I knew nothing of the Christian allegory and was brought up in an atheist household; lots of sci-fi as a teenager: Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, J.G.Ballard.

A school mate and I read Catch 22 every year during high school, and would recount the scenes to each other. I remember impressing an early girlfriend with the existentialists, Camus and Sartre, aged about sixteen. I read my dad's copy of Candide, Fanny Hill and the Marquis de Sade, at the same age.

I'd walk down to the city pool reading a book. Voracious reader, still am.

 

[Thefireflies]

Anything by Roald Dahl, but my favourite was Danny the Champion of the World. Dahl's stories are still relevant and loved by kids to this day.

Another book that I'll never forget is Susan Cooper's Dawn of Fear, about three English school boys growing up in the second world war, trying to be normal kids, but each night their city is bombed by the German's. I'd read it again in a heartbeat, and can still recall the imagery the story produced in my head and feelings it induced.

And of course Tolkien's The Hobbit, where again I loved the imagery that came to mind from his writing. I recall seeing the movie many many years later and thinking it didn't do the book justice. Strangely, I never made it through LotR as a kid and never picked it up again.

 

[onehitwanda]

I was six when my mum started reading the Hobbit to me. So it's all her fault.

by no means exhaustive:

Danny the Champion of the World, BFG, George's Marvellous Medicine and the Twits
Ender's Game
Where the Wild Things Are
Catch 22
LOTR
Tailchaser's Song (Tad Williams)
Neuromancer
Lord of the Flies
World Book Encyclopedia
Tinker the Hole-eating Duck [mainly because the artwork is so surreal, steampunk and amazing]
Most of Pratchett
The Sandman graphic novels
Dragonlance
the Riftwar Saga by Feist
and lots that I am just too old and forgetful to remember but would remember in an instant were I to open the books again.

 

[jsmiam]

I’ll retread something I said here before: the writing guideline, find alternatives to, “…,” Frank said. “…,” Joe said. The hardy boys came along at the same time in my life (you know, my thirties?) as my English teachers trying to teach this lesson. So, “Chet chortled” is forever in my memory.

Thanks, multiple ghost writers!

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I’ll retread something I said here before: the writing guideline, find alternatives to, “…,” Frank said. “…,” Joe said. The hardy boys came along at the same time in my life (you know, my thirties?) as my English teachers trying to teach this lesson. So, “Chet chortled” is forever in my memory.

Thanks, multiple ghost writers!

I recall a 'Joe ejaculated' which confused me for a moment when I was about 12. I think there was a 'Frank expostulated' in almost every book.
Were there any Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew books where someone didn't get tied up by the baddies? The Three Investigators had the same problem. I recall a Three Investigators one which had a poem in Cockney leading to some buried treasure, which I read (mid chapter 1) and was then very surprised that the rest of the book was all about trying to 'decode' each verse!

 

[MajorRewrite]

My parents subscribed to some kind of book club for us, so we’d get a book or 2 a month. I got a small allowance that was enough to buy a couple of comics every week (I think they were 25 cents each at the time). I was nuts for comics.

My mom read mystery and suspense novels constantly, and eventually I started reading those just because they were available. John D MacDonald‘s Travis McGee books were my favorite! Deep Blue Good-Bye, Nightmare in Pink, Empty Copper Sea, etc. Such great titles

 

[HordHolm]

I was six when my mum started reading the Hobbit to me. So it's all her fault.

My dad did the same, but I never picked it up for myself until well into my teenage years, after I'd done the LOTR. Nevertheless it was formative for my young mind despite the fact that I was listening instead of reading (and at a slight tangent, the first film I remember being taken to see, age 5, was The Three Musketeers - the Oliver Reed, Michael York, Charlton Heston version. That was equally formative, but my mum is responsible for that one).

 

[Laodice]

Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, Joseph Farrel, Anne Desclos (Pauline Réage), William Somerset Maugham, Georges Gabriel Picard, Elizbet Anne Horney, Eric Clutton, Xaviera "Vera" de Vries (Xaviera Hollander), Henri Mignet, Henry Ford, Carl Duede, Samantha Josephine duPonte, William Least Heat-Moon, Robert Wiene, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Cheveux Blancs (as dictated to Réne Saint-Mémin).

 

[SimonDoom]

I'm sure we're all biased about our own tastes, but I think it's a big boon to the development of one's imagination and love of reading to read fantasy and science fiction when one is young. I recall having a collection of HG Wells stories and reading them when young, probably around fifth or sixth grade. Then I read LOTR and was blown away by that. The Amber series by Zelazny, which I read later in middle school when I was ready for something darker and more cynical. Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. I watched old sci fi and monster movies from the 50s and 60s constantly on shows like Creature Feature on a little black and white TV. If you get a habit for reading and watching that stuff as a kid I think it opens your mind to a wider range of things later when you are older.

 

[Euphony]

Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Shanghaied Sybian.

 

[djrip]

Tolkien, Piers Anthony (sorry), David Eddings (sorry again!), Robert Jordan, William Gibson, Neil Stephenson, Stephen king, Alfred bester, Greg Bear, Greek mythology anthologies, Beowulf, Homer (not Simpson), Milton...

 

[KeithD]

C.P. Snow, the Strangers and Brothers series on the machinations in the UK government and academics. It turned me to political science.

 

[SeraphNocturne]

My favorites: Edgar Allan Poe, Anne Rice, George Orwell, Anne McCaffrey, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Stephen King, Oscar Wilde, T. H. White, J. R. R. Tolkien, Brian Jacques, Nora Roberts, and poetry by William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Silvia Plath, and Maya Angelou…

This isn’t a complete list, I’ve read thousands of books, but you’ll find all of these names on my bookshelves.

 

[FantasySharer1]

My reading list is actually present elsewhere under my real name in a real place so I can't give that list but one thing I'll say is that the fact that King Arthur had sex with his sister Morgana - is a deep-seated fact that kicked off my fetish for sibling incest and has kept it going strong ever since.

I also include the Greek Myths and the fact that the gods are often the spouses of their own full siblings.

 

[nice90sguy]

Alice in Wonderland, but even more so, Through the Looking Glass, must have been early favourites. The Narnia books, even though I knew nothing of the Christian allegory and was brought up in an atheist household; lots of sci-fi as a teenager: Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, J.G.Ballard.

A school mate and I read Catch 22 every year during high school, and would recount the scenes to each other. I remember impressing an early girlfriend with the existentialists, Camus and Sartre, aged about sixteen. I read my dad's copy of Candide, Fanny Hill and the Marquis de Sade, at the same age.

THAT IS UTTERLY UNCANNY! Ditto, to everything you wrote. "Through The Looking Glass" is the key story for me. But I was quite a bit younger when I read Catch 22 and the Olympia Press stories - my first foray into Erotica -- maybe twleve or thirteen years old.

The four "Winnie the Pooh" books were a huge favourite with me (and with my kids thirty years later).

I''ll also add the "Phantom Tollbooth", and "A Wrinkle in Time" as big influences on me as a kid.

My father, a writer, inroduced me to "Dimension of Miracles" by Robert Sheckley (who mostly published in Playboy) when I was eleven, telling me it was a "grown-up Alice in Wonderland". It predates the "Hitchhikers Guide" books by ten years. Douglas Adams was shocked at how much it resembled his stuff, although he'd never read it before writing his stories.

The Molesworth books by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle are still on my bookshelf. If you want to know where JK Rowling got the name "Hogwarts" ffom, read the Molesworth books, which are damn funny, subversive and very sharp. Willans, Like Lewis Carroll, and Roald Dahl, really understood and empathised with children and young people.

 

[Smuttyandfun]

I could read before I started school. So my clever teacher decided to use me to help teach the other kids how to read. Some of the kids barely spoke English, which meant I spent a lot of time translating as well as helping them to learn how to process the words. I picked up basic Italian pretty early that way. And I enjoyed it, too. Otherwise, I think I would have been bored out of my mind having to sit and watch her struggling to teach them on her own. I helped out till sixth grade. And I loved working in the library, helping the librarian, surrounded by books.

 

[onehitwanda]

David Eddings (sorry again!)

I squinted at this, and had a horrible thought, and went and read up on him.

Ugh.

 

[Seadog777]

As a child, I read a lot.
No, I don't recall everything I frakking read.
I do remember "The Indian in the Cupboard" series, "Island of the Blue Dolphins", "To Kill a Mockingbird".
Then as I got into MS and HS, I stopped reading, and chased other pursuits. (AKA sports and sex)
Now, I read more often.
I'm mostly into history books now.

 

[yowser]

I''ll also add the "Phantom Tollbooth", and "A Wrinkle in Time" as big influences on me as a kid.

I was utterly gobsmacked to discover that Juster's 'Phantom Tollbooth' was once banned. In Boulder Colorado!

There is apparently no book in the world (in the US anyway) that can't be considered subversive/inappropriate by someone.

 

[offkilter123]

Pre-teen I read the usual, Hardy Boys, Edgar Rice Burrough, along with a lot of boys sports/adventure books by now, long forgotten authors like Wilfred McCormick (Bronc Burnet, anyone?) and the Tod Moran series by Howard Pease. Very soon after that, i started reading much more adult novels. I had Catch 22 confiscated by a substitute teacher in the 8th grade (1973) because, although she knew fuck-all about the book, she knew that the movie had an “R” rating.