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STILL ALIVE at 104!

I'm thinking that I read several Henry Huggins/Ribsy books in the 1st grade timeframe.

6th Grade. Was offered an automatic A on the book report if I wrote a sentence or two on each chapter. Done and Sister Margaret was true to her word a got that A :)

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2nd grade, I think.

Mrs. Burnette was worried about me because there were actual Nazi soldiers on the cover.

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Sometimes I rhyme slow sometimes I rhyme quick.

Had to read it between 7th/8th grade in order to take Algebra a year early for the private high school I went to.

What I took from it? Rabbit scream loud. I learned that it was true when I was 19 and our family dog caught a warren of kittens (ok, I learned two things from the book). We took all 9 to the emergency vet and 7 of them survived.

Outside of that, I had read most of Stephen King's catalog pre-1992 to that point, because my mother was a huge fan and had them all, but my favorite to that point were the Vampire Chronicles.

I distinctly remember that from school. Read so much outside that I can’t recall specific ones. We would always buy a lot of books at the book fairs at school.

Not a big reader. I know, you all are shocked LOL.

Wait, do game plans count? Maybe I am "well read" hahahahaha

I read Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer pretty early, too, so maybe that came first. I read kids editions of Gulliver's Travels and Ivanhoe around the same time. It's all kind of a blur.

so I was brought on ~weekly trips to the library from basically the day I was born. Couldn't even begin to tell you when I switched from children's books to novels or novellas or whatever but it was very young.

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For Christmas one year as kids, my brother got Tom Sawyer and I got Huck Finn. My brother is older than me. The books should have been switched. One is a hell of a lot deeper than the other as likely most of you know, and I really didn’t get what was going on until it was assigned in freshman Comp and Lit at ND. Quite a different perspective then, I have to say.

There was a scary illustration that I'm pretty sure made me cry.

Looking it up now, that's like a third-grader's book! I must've been a great kindergartener. My how the mighty have fallen.

Great question, btw. The first book I remember reading was Custer's Last Stand, which I checked out from the school library in grade school because I thought the cover looked cool. If you think Dr. Seuss was bad, imagine this baby, copyright 1951...

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At night, the ice weasels come.

Also The Hobbit/LOTR, and any John Bellairs books I could find in the library.

Factory.

I'm not really sure.

I was really into the Prydain books (rather than Narnia or LOTR).

I have no idea why those have not yet become movies. (Probably bc the animated Black Cauldron failed in the eighties.) It's *substantially* simpler than Narnia, because the characters are constant throughout the series, and there are no overt religion allegories to embrace or skirt.

It also has the archetypal "hero's journey" from Assistant Pig-Keeper onward, like Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter. And the characters age at a cadence that would work for movie production. They could cast 16 year olds, and by the time the final movie came around they'd be 22 or so.

Loved The Westing Game and Phantom Tollbooth, bought early edition hardcovers of both for my son.

grade 3 or 4. That book wrecked me.

But before that, I was reading the Moby Illustrated Classics which were illustrated, abridged versions of classics that came in sets.

I also loved "Brian's Winter" by Paulsen.

Others I was really into when I was nine or ten years old:

- Matt Christopher books
- Bios of Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth and Knute Rockne
- The Hardy Boys
- Where the Red Fern Grows and Shiloh

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Throw em out Marianne.

First "grown up" novel(la) (assuming Narnia doesn't count) was probably Animal Farm.

Maybe Little House on the Prairie series?

Other early ones:

Three Investigators series
The Littles
Watership Down
Chronic(wut)cles of Narnia

I then read through all of the Spinelli books and other similar pop young adult novels.

If we're talking plausibly adult literature, there's probably a line that can be drawn between the Asimov YA-targeted series and something like Foundation or I, Robot to make a claim for one of them. Then that turned me on to the entire genre so I went off to read Douglas Adams, who I adore to this day, which is certainly a valid "non-kids" series of books.

or maybe From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler or James and the Giant Peach.

or possibly The Hound of the Baskervilles. I also had formative reading experiences with Poe's Eight Tales of Terror and Rouse's translation of the Iliad.

As a kid, I had no real sense of the division between adult and children's fiction, or between high and low culture, so I just read whatever looked interesting to me. My first novel written for kids was probably something from the Hardy Boys series, but I can't remember which one. I was also obsessed with Olivia Coolidge's Trojan War and Song of Roland books, but I think those came a bit later.

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