2 -- it's a fine, fine line...
I can't beat Levy with my reading list, but I did dress up as a barrel of oil for Halloween when I was 11 in order to protest the first Gulf War.
and I should add, this was in Texas and my parents are republicans.
(The first "major literature" I remember reading it A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I was either 5 or 6; but that is certainly not an achievement to put up against Copperfield or Friedman(!).)
I read Crime and Punishment when I was around 9.
Then, I confessed to stealing my baby sister's piggy bank.
Les Miserables (unabridged, though I skimmed parts) in 7th grade.
I don't think that beats Levy. More embarrassing is how many of the songs from the musical I still have memorized.
And I think I read Walden and some of Civil Disobedience when I was less than 12.
This is what sucks about being raised in an evangelical household and going to the trailer-park elementary school -- I've got jack shit until high school.
I did dress up as a barrel of oil for Halloween when I was 11 in order to protest the first Gulf War.
Now that's awesome. My childhood protests were moments of refusal: wouldn't say the pledge of allegiance in fourth grade, refused to read the bible in English class freshman year of high school. (I have a feeling there were other, more embarrassing episodes that I'm now happily forgetting.)
11- got you beat! I didn't read a real book (non-textbook) until college. I think the first was Homer's Odyssey.
I read a whole lot of stuff stupidly early, and didn't understand most of it. Moby Dick at 9 or so -- I was fascinated by all of the extraneous whaling scenes and random stuff, and just puzzled by the actual plot. Grendel, by John Gardner, when I was around five. It scared the bejeezus out of me.
It's moments like these that make me wish I could travel back in time to beat the crap out of Young Ogged.
I read Siddhartha and Steppenwolf at 13. Mostly missed the point, but I read them. Also, I carried around a copy of Ulysses and pretended to be reading it, though I never got past the first 20 pages or so.
I read a lot of Kafka in middle school. I think I read some other weird stuff when I was younger, but I can't remember any of it right now.
I read Siddhartha and Steppenwolf at 13
Hey, me too! Also Narcissus and Goldmund.
Did not get to the pretending-to-read-Joyce thing until late high school. But I'm pretty sure I read Portrait of the Artist in the summer after 9th grade, which I think would put me at 14 years old.
I read The Odyssey between bouts of The Hardy Boys in 4th grade. The copy I had was heavily footnoted, though I now remember absolutely nothing about what was in those footnotes. Explanations for kids? Historical factoids? Translation notes? No clue. I don't remember much of the story itself, either. It was some heavily academic edition I dug up in the public library. Everything except for "killing weird monsters is awesome!" sailed right over my head.
When I was 11 I read Dracula and instantly got that it was about sex and cooties. It's my favorite novel of all time, to this day. I am currently almost done re-reading it for what must surely be the gazillionth time.
9: Guilty on both counts, although I did go back and re-read later (when we read the abridged version in class ) to try to pick up the history.
Read Lovecraft and Poe in early grade school, like ages 7 through 10. Plagiarized one of Lovecraft's stories for a creative writing assignment in 4th grade.
I read all kinds of ridiculous stuff as a wee lass, but the one that I actually remember was being in a bookstore at about age 10 or 11 and thinking, "Hm, I've heard of this 'Finnegans Wake' thing, and I read all kinds of grown-up books these days, maybe I should try it." Then I took it off the shelf, opened it up somewhere in the middle, discovered that it did not seem to be in English at all, and quietly put it back.
The best I can remember was reading the collected works of H.G. Wells ca. 13 or 14. In 5th grade, though, I wrote a poem about televangelists having sex.
Picked Naked Lunch off my parents' bookshelf when I was 13 or 14 and read about a quarter of it (including plenty of "dirty bits" before my dad found out I was reading it and took it away. I blame Burroughs for my perversions.
Damn! insert close-paren after "dirty bits".
I read The Plague when I was about 10. It totally didn't stick - I just thought it was a strange book.
One book to beat Levy would surely be Das Capital - in German, no less. Alas, I just read The Communist Manifesto.
Illuminatus trilogy and Promethius Rising at 10-12 or so. Those books at least have a "coolness" factor though, so I don't think they quite fit the precocious nerdosity factor.
13 -- I remember comparing the Doors to the Stockton/Malone era Utah Jazz in that what made both of them successful and hated simultaneously was their ability to do the same thing over and over again and never got bored. It works, but it can be excruciating.
I read Simone de Beauvoir's The Marquis de Sade and Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land when I was about 12. I understood neither, especially all those words in the Beauvoir work [I read it in French] that I somehow couldn't find in Larousse [and, frankly, wouldn't have meant anything to me if I had.] It did, however, make me feel terribly adult, as I had to sneak both past my mother and read them late at night.
But the most seminal novel I ever read [at about age 7] was Elsie Dinsmore, an uplifting Xtian message book written in the 19th century. Elsie made Pollyanna look like a juvenile delinquent and inspired me to aspire to a life of hedonism and dissipation hitherto unthought of since the days of John Wilmot.
I remember picking up my aunt's copy of Death in Venice once at my grandmother's because I was looking for something to read; I think I was maybe 10. I stayed up all night to finish it. The next morning my aunt saw it by my bed and asked if I had read it, and if I had liked it; a definitive "yes" to both.
26: I read all of my parents' copy of Naked Lunch when I was 12 (in bits and pieces when no one was noticing) and was alternatively titilated and horrified by the "dirty bits".
Does reading Freud's Interpretation of Dreams at 15 count?
Tangential factoid relating to Milton Friedman: His son is member of the SCA and an "anarchic capitalist".
I'm guessing I don't get too many intellectual kudos for reading my mom's copies of Flowers in the Attic and Kane and Abel at the same age Levy was reading Friedman?
25: care to share?
I keep reading the thread title as "Neo-Nazi Achievent" and thinking Oh fuck, now -gg-d's gone over to the other side!
In the well-it-amused-me category, in 7th grade my class had to read Bridge to Terabithia, which I hated. Our assignment was to write a diary from the perspective of one of the characters and I chose the dog, who spent long weeks detailing how incredibly stupid he considered the human children around him.
Yeah, how dare he abandon us old skool Nazis?
It. 10. Ew. Probably not precocious unless it lead to serial killing, right?
36: I would, but some years ago it was stolen from a fire safe (actually, the entire safe was stolen). All I have left are slight memories. We were asked to choose a theme for a packet of poems. I chose "humanity," and wrote about sex, divorce, and hypocrisy. J--H-- told teacher; teacher called mom that night; I had to pick a new theme the next day.
I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but my great claim to precosity is having read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight at about seven. I somehow didn't notice my mom's college edition was in Middle English.
I give you: the music of Matt Johnson | The The. "Infected" was the first CD I bought (was 14 at the time). Took around twenty years before I could begin to relate to the man's experience. Which is to say it's only just happening now.
(actually, the entire safe was stolen)
By the Pink Panther?
I agree with #1. It took about a year and a half. After that I was forced to memorize the "to be or not to be" soliloquy. Shortly thereafter my dad stopped using "drilling" methods and just trusted me to read what I wanted to read, since I wanted to read all the time.
I read most of Camille Paglia's "Sex, Art and American Culture" in 7th grade after finding it in the high school library (looking back...WTF?). Also, by that point I had read just about everything by Robert Benchley, and a lot of stuff by James Thurber, S.J. Perelman, Clarence Day, P.G. Wodehouse, Mencken, and other pre-1940 humorists.
Never tried to readeither serious novels or intellectual philosophical stuff like Marx and Nietzsche as a kid. I never liked reading slow-moving things where you had to read every single word or you would get lost. The exception being books about languages, especially those by Mario Pei.
I read a bunch of the usual stuff stupidly early too --- but one in particular I remember was finding a copy of `fear of flying' and reading it at around 8 or 9. At the time I thought it was a weird novel that didn't make much sense and some racy bits (which also didn't make much sense). I read siddartha around then too, which worked out ok as a story but tried to follow it with steppenwolf and missed the point entirely.
Oh, and I think it was 1985 or so when I found a dog-eared paperback of The Story of O lurking in a box in the attic. Might as well have been crack (had been making do with Penthouse since about the age of eight). Took it to school a few days later; never saw it again.
Then again, ogged was shaving when he was like 4 1/2, so reading Nietzsche reflects a developmental delay, if anything.
I read: Fear of Flying at 9 or 10 and I mostly remember the scattering of the ashes and the getting stuck with the handcuffs bit…
I read Madame Bovary at a very young age and hated it - I reread it several years later and enjoyed it a lot. I also had this summer (think I was 14) in which I read all the Russian lit (trnslated into English of course) that my parents happened to own (including W&P, The Brothers K, C&P, a few plays by Chekov, and some short stories by Gogol).
It helps if there is lots of this sort of stuff on the bookshelf.
As for Friedman or Nietsche, fortunately for me my parents mostly had fiction. I think if I had tried to read that kind of stuff at that early an age it would have been drastically harmful. Especially Friedman.
"reading Nietzsche when he did," that is.
I got into Asimov's Foundation Trilogy in third grade. I also got my lunch money stolen.
43 -- We were asked to bring favorite songs in to our 5th grade class and I brought think again. It didn't have much of an impace since nobody else could follow the words through his accent, but I don't think it was what the teacher expected.
55: I read Asimov's giant joke book in third grade. I also told lots of horrible and unfunny jokes in a boring monotonous voice.
Had J--H-- been either 46 or 47, he might have been less of a thorn in my side in 5th grade.
Oh well, if science fiction counts, all bets are off.
Oh well, if science fiction counts, all bets are off.
My thoughts exactly. Really, let's not count SF.
It helps if there is lots of this sort of stuff on the bookshelf.
True. Most of the stuff I read as a kid I found by just looking through my parents' bookshelves.
I read a book on The Ring of Fire! at about eight years old and spent the next six months awake under my blankets with a flashlight.
Robert Anton Wilson's Schroedinger's Cat at 14. I'm a piker compared to some of you.
The collected works of Dorothy Parker at eight or so.
I'm sure it mostly has to do with the bookshelves you had access too. I'd have a go at pretty much anything at that age. My parents didn't have a particularly broad or deep library, but there were some interesing surprises.
William Blake changed my life forever at about fourteen.
Story of O at 13.
That was an eye opener.
My dad tried to get me into James Joyce when I was about 13. He handed "Ulysses" to me. I read teh first couple of pages. I never looked at it again.
He also was unable to get me into Faulkner. Or Thomas Mann. What a failure.
When I was five, my grandparents used to trot me around to their neighbors and have me demonstrate how I read the NYT. Perhaps my greatest achievement was in not reading Milton Friedman at 11 or 12, or indeed at any age since then.
Doors fandom cred: I was singing Light My Fire when I was two.
#71: I was unable to get my 15 year old to admit that the Doors are great. I thought he would love "people are strange." Like Dad, I failed.
The collected works of Dorothy Parker at eight or so.
That explains everything.
71/72: PK is a blues fan, thank god.
72: I've never figured out how I was exposed to Light My Fire in the first place, because I've always imagined The Doors and my parents as existing in separate universes.
68: I was wondering where my copy ended up.
T. S. Eliot at 3.
Also, to contrast, the first time I heard of Nietzsche was when Eddie Murphy's character mentioned him in Coming to America.
We may have a winner in 76. It depends on which Eliot -- Four Quartets, say, or the thing about the cats?
It was Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. When I eventually got to The Waste Land, I thought it must be by another T. S. Eliot.
I loved the Odyssey starting at age 8, but didn't read the original (in English - Fitzgerald) until, dunno, 14. But around age 12, I found my parents' copy of Ulysses, checked it out, and replaced it in disgust - nothing to do with Greece!
I read 1984 at 10 & then again at 12, before New Years '84.
The Milton Friedman reminds me that I read William F. Buckley's Up from Liberalism at age 10 or 11. My dad had several copies on the shelf from his college days, when he had apparently bought a carton or two of them and sold them at Econ Club or whatever at his extremely conservative religious university.
And of course I'd read all the Sherlock Holmes stories several times by that age. But no Nietszche.
Oh, I must have read the Sherlock Holmes stories young too, because I remember being completely puzzled by the references to America -- I didn't really have a concept of 19thC America, and anything before the present was kind of either Laura Ingalls Wilder or Pilgrims.
My biggest problem with Sherlock Holmes was the incomprehensible English monetary units.
Oh, I skated by those without worrying, once I got them in order as penny, shilling, crown, pound/guinea. Had no idea what the relative amounts were, but I could get a sense of not-much or lots from context, and that was all I wanted.
81: Re Ulysses, wow! I had the exact same reaction! Like you, I also read a book full of synopses of the Greek stories that I loved, when I must have been around 8.
81: 1984 contains a scene that will speak to any ten year old; the part where Winston recalls being horrible to his long-suffering mum.
And war poets seem to have something to say to thirteen year olds. I had access to the original Decca recording of Britten's War Requiem on vinyl, which I listened to through headphones.
Oh, Animal Farm! I read that at six or seven under the mistaken impression that it was a children's book. I cried like anything about Boxer.
I read 1984 at a pretty young age. Brave New World, too.
88 and 89: Regarding 1984, Animal Farm and BNW - Yes, me too, at about 10, I think. But I was sort of considering the dystopias a branch of SF.
Oh, man, Holmes. Totally. I plowed through all the Holmes I could get my hands on at a very early age. Half of it didn't make sense, and their money? Pah, clearly make-believe. And I read 1984 when I was 9 or so after seeing a skit on some comedy show that spoofed it and asking my parents what was being spoofed.
But I was sort of considering the dystopias a branch of SF.
A lot of people seem to do this, but it's never made sense to me. Those dystopias take place in the future, but otherwise they don't really use any of the typical SF tropes; they don't fit the conventions of the genre.
My high school girlfriend interpreted my liking those books to mean I was into SF, so for my birthday she gave me some wretchedly schlocky SF paperback. I never read it.
One of the first books I checked out from the adult section of my local library was "On Thermonuclear War" by Herman Kahn. Perhaps not the ideal choice. I was about 10 and it made a big impression on me at the time.
I read Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" when I was pretty young -- maybe nine or ten. I hated, hated, hated it but couldn't express why.
I also read some of the fire-and-brimstone sections of the Bible. Some illustrated edition -- I don't know where it came from, because we weren't a very religious family. I don't remember discussing it with anyone, but I do remember having some very judgmental thoughts about God.
To pre-empt Farber: Aaargh!! This is like having baa say about Harry Potter that it's not like normal fantasy because it has a sense of humor. Erm, I should suspect that unless you've read an awful lot of SF, that your sense of the conventions of the genre is unfairly limited.
93: A severely weird science teacher gave me a copy of some survivalist-lite manual called "How To Survive In The Coming Bad Years" when I was in fifth grade, telling me that I was a smart kid and it would be useful. Advice on hoarding silver coins and canned food.
I found both the book and having had it pressed upon me disturbing.
I wasn't the one who excluded SF from consideration here.
94: I had to read the Lottery for school at about the same age. I was very disturbed by it and still remember it, which must mean that it was a pretty damned good story for someone of that age to read.
95: If we are counting SF/F, then I read the LOTR when I was 8.
94: Really? "The Lottery" was always one of my favorites when I was a kid. That and the one where the people in the concentration camp eat someone's brains.
100: Do you remember the name of that second one? I musta missed it but it's never too late!
92: teo, that's an old argument, but it's bullshit. People who don't like the idea of genre fiction can always come up with criterion to exclude books they like.
Any useful definition of `science fiction' includes a lot of things; ou have to take your L. Ron Hubbards along with your Orwells.
I'm just saying that when someone asks you what you like to read and you say "Well, I liked 1984" that doesn't mean giving you a paperback with rocketships on the cover is a good idea. I don't have anything against SF, but I think the very arguments you guys are making for it's breadth support my contention.
(Keep in mind that I read essentially no fiction, science or otherwise.)
101: I *think* it was by Cynthia Ozick, who wrote "The Shawl" (which is also an excellent short story, btw). The last line of the story is about it being interesting that brains can be eaten raw.
fair enough, teo, but I think with the exception of `classics' this is a general property. If you pick a book you liked, it would surprise me if people couldn't find a bad one that superficially resembles it.
100: I think it was a developmental mismatch. I was old enough to understand the story as a set of words, but not old enough to understand what it was trying to say. As a result, it evoked the same kind of furious impotence as having mutually assured destruction explained to me -- I just couldn't believe adults could possibly, possibly be that stupid, and I was torn between confusion that I was missing something logical, and terror that there was no logic there.
I loved Roald Dahl, though. In a creative writing class in college I bonded with a couple of the precocious h.s. students when we three were the only ones in the room who understood why comparing a classmates's writing to his stuff was such a compliment.
Oh, man, that story with the swans? I wanted to have been older before I read that one.
I think like other genres SF includes a minority that is genuine literature and a majority of schlock. (I like schlock and read tons of it so this is not a criticism.) I could make the same argument of the mystery genre. So Teo only likes the SF lit, not all of it.
107: Do you mean the one with the bullies? Yeah.
I still remember the run-over-by-a-train one, too.
Oh, speaking of swans and bullies, "The Scarlet Ibis" was one I wish had not been in my school reader at the time.
So Teo only likes the SF lit, not all of it.
I don't think I've even read enough SF (by any definition) to know if this is true.
109: Oh, I agree, it's mostly schlock. For that matter, so is most `non-genre' fiction. But that wasn't my point; my point was that the minority of good stuff *is* there, and any attempt to play with definitions comes down to `oh but that *can't* be , it's a good book'. which is silly.
A short story I was too young for was - I think - an O.Henry one about an old woman who went for a bus or train ride and overheard some young people sneering at her. But then again I have never grown too old to read O.Henry short stories without getting teary eyed.
I read the Gift of the Magi when I was pretty young. Maybe 7 or 8. I also remember the one about the girl who thought she was going to die when the last leaf fell.
I think I read O.Henry at just the right time, actually -- old enough to enjoy the surprise endings, not old enough to have heard all of the criticisms.
111 - I just looked up the summary. Yikes.
There is an ongoing debate in the YA field about the value of assigning "problem" books to young people. I don't think there's a simple answer, but it is depressingly true that more and more assigned reading seems to be *limited to* fiction that explores a particular Issue.
I'm sympathetic to David Mamet on this one. Has anyone read Three Uses of the Knife?
but my great claim to precosity
A late bloomer you clearly aren't.
116: That debate bothers me. I read a lot of "problem" books as a kid, mostly because they were (1) good and (2) interesting, being about what it's like to be x or y person in x or y time. Where the Red Fern Grows, Roll of Thunder Hear my Cry, I Want my Sunday Stranger--all really good books. God knows there's a lot of didactic shlock out there, but exploring historical or interpersonal conflict seems to me a perfectly fine thing for fiction to do.
99 I am reluctant to equate disturbing and memorable with good for you.
118: But with the sock-you-in-the-stomach short story that is totally the whole point. In other words that is what O.Henry and S. Jackson are aiming for so, mission accomplished.
I guess not everyone would agree with me that this is a good thing to be trying to do, but like B., I thought if it makes you seriously think about stuff in a new way then it is good for you. Even if it upsets you at age 10 more than it would have at age 20.
The Idiot at 10, Ulysses at 12
I checked out a couple side-books for Ulysses. At the naturalist level naturalist, Ulysses ain't that hard, it just takes the concentration and memorization kids can be good at. Kids are good at memorizing chess openings. The schema isn't all that tough, either.
As far as understanding what the two books mean,
I didn't then and I don't now.
Sorry I mean 119.
I would emphatically not put O. Henry and Shirley Jackson in the same category. The Lottery is social commentary; O. Henry is doing (very good) parlor tricks. But I have read very little SJ. Am I being unreasonable?
O. Henry does social commentary -- it impresses us as less sophisticated because it's terribly familiar, but it's not solely parlor tricks.
123: No, I am probably just showing how much I enjoy schlock *and* literature. But seriously, I'll argue that some OH short stories are more than parlor tricks. Really they are. Also, I am now wondering: Do you consider Richard Cory serious poetry or is it a parlor trick as well?
And my uncle had Kaufman's first volume laying around, but I only remember reading Zarathustra. Somewhere before 15. Mostly I read the intellectual Science Fiction, Dick, Lafferty, Ellison, Delany, 60s Brunner, Russ, LeGuin, the Terry Carr crowd.
Sometimes I don't know what reading means. I read none of this stuff like SEK is currently reading Keats. I don't think. But very early on, I seemed to accept that I wouldn't understand everything of what I read, completely, so what the hell. I just read it.
`johnny got his gun' probably falls into the disturbing to read in primary school camp too, but I got a lot out of it.
I don't know how it works now, but is was inevitable in the 60s. You read Leiber and Conan and Skylark and Lensman, and somewhere in the early 60s Man in the High Castle and Stand on Zanzibar were next and what scares a bright 13 yr old after that?
A:Those dystopias take place in the future, but otherwise they don't really use any of the typical SF tropes; they don't fit the conventions of the genre.
B:I don't think I've even read enough SF (by any definition) to know if this is true.
Uh, Teo, it would appear that statement B renders you unqualified to make statement A...
The Idiot was a horrible book for a kid to read. I think it may be the worst. I never looked at "goodness" or "good people" in the same way again. And remember, we are not talking a hypocrite or guy with feet of clay. We are talking about a saint.
The lesson I learned was that normal people become evil in the presence of exceptional virtue.
That may be a bad interpretation, but it is what I remember.
109: Apropos, from Ted Sturgeon: ""When people talk about the mystery novel, they mention The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. When they talk about the western, they say there's The Way West and Shane. But when they talk about science fiction, they call it 'that Buck Rogers stuff,' and they say 'ninety percent of science fiction is crud.' Well, they're right. Ninety percent of science fiction is crud. But then ninety percent of everything is crud, and it's the ten percent that isn't crud that is important. and the ten percent of science fiction that isn't crud is as good as or better than anything being written anywhere."
111 gets it exactly right. Luckily the next week we read "The Girls In Their Summer Dresses" and I forgot whatever horrible things happened that summer with the disoriented hurricane birds.
129: True. I'm just still bitter about the birthday present.
I desperately wanted to read Finnegan's Wake as an 10th grader, because it seemed like the hardest thing you could read. My cousin laughed at me in a worldy way when I said so. I tried it, really I did, and pretty much resoundly failed.
I think if I'd taken a shot at Ulysses, I might have gotten farther. If only I'd known it had dirty parts.
133: Whatever you do, don't tell us the name of the schlocky novel. It's probably a beloved classic of the genre that we'll all want to beat you to death for dissing.
I don't even remember the name of it. I'm pretty sure it's not a beloved classic.
Three of the toughest books I ever picked up were Delany's middle period...remember I grabbed these along with a Doc Savage and a Heinlein on my trip to the store...Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, and Nova.
The beginning of the review of Babel-17 at Amazon.
Babel-17 1966, in an ACE Double :)
"Inside, around, and terminally intermixed with this nominal space opera is the quest to define the relationship between language, symbol, object, and thought process. A quest that flows around surgical body-form manipulation, the senses of the discorporate, succubi , the revival of the dead, love triples, starship pilot wrestling, a society and personality types split between Customs, Transport, and military. All told with Delany's inimitable sense of the English language, with the admirable support of excerpts of Marylyn Hacker's (Delany's then wife) poems."
Sapir-Whorf as a plot device and bi-sexuality was...I guess you can't understand the sixties unless you lived them.
I wasn't a particularly precocious reader of non-fiction at all. I think I read the Communist Manifesto when I was about 13 but I can't think of any other intellectual non-fiction 'classics' I read before my late teens. I certainly didn't read any philosophy until I was approaching university age, for example.
Novels, I just read whatever grabbed me at the library or on my parents shelves. That meant no systematic reading preferences and I was mixing up juvenile kids stuff and adult fiction from a pretty young age.
So, I read Lord of the Rings when I was about 6 or 7, but was still reading Dr Who, Roald Dahl and Hardy Boy's novels right up until I was about 13. I read Solzhenitsyn's 'One day in the life of ... ' when I was about 11, 'Lolita' when I was about 12, I think. I didn't really get 'Lolita' until I read it again as an undergraduate -- not the subject matter, but the literary style, I mean. I read the complete works of George Orwell one summer when I was about 13. I'd read all of Raymond Chandler and all the Sherlock Holmes stuff when I was about 11 or 12. There was so much, I can't really remember. I started haunting the adult fiction section of our local library from about 7 or 8 and just reading whatever looked interesting. My tastes remain the same -- any old genre crap (good or bad), mixed up with classic literary fiction, whatever.
125: I don't know Richard Cory's work.
I love genre fiction, though, and I bristle at people who think it's all schlock. Of my 1500 books (I whittled down the collection when I moved), probably at least 27-28% could be considered genre.
LB's point about what we consider a parlor trick is interesting. I read ~40 O. Henry stories when I was a kid, but have reread only two as an adult. Because I read them as a child, I don't have a good sense of how startling his themes might have been to his audience.
Has anyone read any of Ray Bradbury's autobiographical essays about writing?
139: No, the poem Richard Cory by E.A. Robinson.
If you know the ending, you can't re-read those stories really completely objectively, now can you?
137: Then there was Dhalgren. I read that going back and forth to work on the subway in NYC. Somehow, the surroundings fit the atmosphere of the book.
I named one of my cats after Chip; they had the same haircut at the time.
I love genre fiction too, and am on record as despising most* of the 'tediously over-examined inner life of the middle-classes' genre -- i.e. what passes for 'respectable' fiction among a lot of people.
* but not all ...
Yay for schlock! Off to read one of Lawrence Block's "the burglar who..." books now.
This is a great topic. Variously:
1. David Copperfield?! Is no one else impressed by this? One of my friends was into Dickens at the age of 7, and tried to get me to read Nicholas Nickelby and Oliver Twist. The subsequent failed attempt to get hrough Oliver Twist (wrongly) put me off Dickens for 15 years.
11. It's moments like these that make me wish I could travel back in time to beat the crap out of Young Ogged.
You know, I had the same thought (I ain't reading your frickin' Bible, man!). Then I remembered how annoyingly contrary I was at that age, and realized that with any justice a time travelling FL would kill me with a crowbar. Is there anyone who didn't do something to deserve death in 8th or 9th grade?
35. Just in case someone reads "anarcho-capialist and member of the SCA" as equivalent to "lunatic" I quick googling reveals that that Friedman turns out to be one of the most thoughtful anarcho-capitalists one could imagine. (see also here) Other notes: He also, I am told, had the reputation as a young man as a ferociously good Diplomacy player.
95. LB, don't you think majority of fantasy is humorless? As a genre, it's just distinguished by taking itself seriously. Maybe this is why the heavy metal guys like is so much. Also: The death of Boxer? Total childhood trauma. We can now duly consider each other a version of ourselves gone horribly wrong.
140: Ah. I just looked up the poem. I don't think I have a strong opinion about it one way or another. If the author was born in 1869, then it was probably surprising to his contemporary audience.
If you know the ending, you can't re-read those stories really completely objectively, now can you?
No, although I don't remember all of the stories with the same level of detail.
What struck me on rereading was a much greater sense of -- well, not quite pathos, but just the deep sadness and bittersweet melancholy. Much more heartwrenching to me now.
133: Teo, if it were me, I'd have been most upset at the indication that my beloved didn't know me well enough to know that wasn't my type of book.
That was pretty much my objection, actually. There was more to it than that; she was pissed off at me for not telling her what I wanted for my birthday, so she gave me that book and some socks. She really did think of me as liking SF, though.
134: As I remember, Anthony Burgess can first, somehow. Clockwork Orange 1962 as just another Sci-Fi book, and then Rejoyce. I guess not, Rejoyce was written in 1965, and I had worked on Joyce before that.
Yeah, Joyce was the most difficult, and really dirty, and very famous. I read all the dirty books in HS, from Lawrence to Miller to god help me Our Lady of the Flowers. Which I liked. I hated Studs Lonigan Does anybody remember Studs Lonigan?
I was determined to not be defeated by a book. A very stubborn, isolated, anti-social kid. With no guidance or company.
I've run into conservatives like that disturbingly often. There's an alternate universe this close where I grew up as Alex P. Keaton.
On fantasy, I think you're just wrong, or rather that you're talking about a limited sub-genre, what I think of as Tolkein by way of D&D. Someone like Peter S. Beagle is straight up fantasy, and humorless is the last word you'd use to describe him. There's a whole lot of fantasy out there that's not all elfy-questy-stuff. (Not that some of that isn't good too, but if that were all there was, I wouldn't be arguing with 'humorless'.)
It's never too late, LB. I am a convert; and the benefits of the Alex P. Keaton lifestyle as superb.
So maybe I just read the wrong fantasy as a youth. But when you go to that section of the bookstore, it doesn't seem like a laff-a-minute riot. Piers Anthony, I guess, would be a counter-example; but I try to contain those memories under 1000 tons of concrete.
Richard Cory, the man who shot himself with a loaf of bread. We read that poem in high school and I will always remember it.
I read most of O. Henry when I was very young. I remember the "Gentle Grafter" section.
Piers Anthony, I guess, would be a counter-example
Mmm. Not so much what I was thinking of. Although I did read a number of them. Ugh.
The fantasy I liked as a kid was L. Sprague De Camp, Randall Garrett -- a lot of writers who went back and forth between SF and fantasy.
All the harder stuff I read when I was young was fiction. Tolkien, Jack London, etc. When you're 9 the idea of a dog that will attack people who fuck with you is awesome. I had my own copy of The Anarchist Cookbook when I was 12 or 13.
I had my own copy of The Anarchist Cookbook when I was 12 or 13.
I read Helter Skelter and The Satanic Bible at 12. And just look how I turned out.
When you're 9 the idea of a dog that will attack people who fuck with you is awesome.
I loved Jim Kjelgaard.
Genre fantasy is like genre horror...I really think you reach your limits in quests or ancient evils fairly quickly. Genre mystery and hard-boiled...I am right now looking at probably a thousand paperbacks, it lasts longer, but still the writers aren't quite good enough to keep human character under stress endlessly fascinating.
Don't we overread types eventually go for style? The unique expression of craft?
What keeps Keats, Shelley, and Byron readable isn't their stories or ideas...it is their voice.
SF, good or bad, is about concepts and word-play. Chip Delany starts his book with a sentence from a mediocre Heinlein:"The door irised." And SF isn't poetry, it lacks that, you lit-crits have better words, oracular ambition, that desire to communicate an extreme but real human experience. SF is about having fun with words, for the sake of the fun.
How could it not lead to experimental fiction?
When I was 11, my mom was studying for her boards in forensic pathology (she'd been in clinical path up to then), and she had a copy of Medicolegal Investigation of Death, a standard textbook, lying around all the time. Naturally, I flipped through it. Some of the photos were burned into my brain for good.
160:I can beat that. My mom was an ob-gyn Registered nurse. Color plates for diagnostics hidden in the closet. I snuck in at 6 or 7 or 8. Somewhere around there. I knew how to prep for delivery before I reached pubescence.
160:I can beat that.
Bob beats himself.
160 s/b 159
Funny. Forget the diseases, that stuff was really weird. But the black & White drawings of the prep. I remember that you used a safety razor, and they showed how to install the blade, and there were arrows showing how you should do the strokes.
I guess knowing how to shave a pussy before you had any hair yourself likely beats Ulysses.
At least on some blogs.
I read The Recognitions at age 9... no, well not really. But that would've been cool...
I read The Count of Monte Cristo at 8, and pretty much all of Michael Crighton's and Stephen King's novels during elementary school. Let's see: I read every book Salinger had plublished by the end of seventh grade...
Oh, re: 159/160. My Dad was in surgery residency when I was very young, and he had these surgery text books that came with ViewMaster rolls (I guess the publishers thought that would be an easy way to present stereographic images cheaply). I found those at four or so (pre-kindergarten, at least). Mmmm... neck dissections...
163 reminds me: I did read a few John Grisham and Michael Crighton books when I was, maybe... 14? So my 14 isn't really correct. Close enough, though.
John Grisham when you were 14? You're younger than I thought.
I was horrified at 163 for a second..."You read The Recognitions at age 9?? Then you're...13 years old??? Oh wait, you're not serious....but why did you say age 9?"
then realized that I thought gea was referring to The Corrections.
Then I remembered how annoyingly contrary I was at that age
I can't believe no one's responded to this yet.
Then I remembered how annoyingly contrary
That reminds me of something I used to do to annoy my lifetime Democrat parents. In high school for a year or two, every day I'd come home and turn on Rush Limbaughs television show. Drove my mom nuts.
I'm pretty sure that 13 was the year that I read War and Peace (we were studying Russia) and Feynman's QED (as well as every other book in the physics section of our dinky public library). I bet my mom even has somewhere a list of all the books that I read that year (from my yearly portfolio required for homeschooling in PA).
I just read through the thread once, and am really close to a bunch of you on a number of books and years. But a good one, which I have a really vivid memory of, as an example of being annoyingly contrary and precocious: I independently invented skepticism* in 6th grade, and got annoyed when I was told some Greek guy had done so and named it thousands of years ago.
*In the sense that I realized I could deny the truth of any claim and at some level of abstraction provide a reason for this. I don't see why I should believe that just because my senses say so being the most common reason, but I was able to deal with people being non-sensory claims as well, though I think I must have been cheating somewhat.
This memory might be confused (I think they may have offered to explain and I said no), but there's some chance that I asked my parents to explain sex to me after reading some fairly strange portion in one of the million terrible Wild Card novels. I would have been 10, give or take. Also, I'm an only child and am not sure at what age (and I know for a fact that for some people it's never) other people had a "birds and bees" chat. I also consider reading Wild Cards the opposite of precocious, I'm not sure I've yet recovered.
Mmmm... neck dissections...
Funny you should mention that. My mom did her residency in Rochester (NY), and sometimes I'd hang out at the morgue and read while she worked. The path from the waiting room to the bathroom took me by the doorway of the autopsy room. Of all the autopsies I saw in progress, the neck dissection was the one that really caught me off guard, and the one I remember most vividly. A few years later, she was describing the procedure to my high school physiology class, and one of my friends fainted and fell off his chair.
171: You haven't met my ill-raised son.
172: Yeah, gettings scooped like that sucks. That happened to me in 8th grade with logarithms.
OK, I'm feeling good about my chances here...I invented the color problem when I was 6! I used to lie awake in bed trying to think of ways to verify that the colors I saw were the same as those that other people saw, rather than just a random reassignment or even some different kind of thing, and I couldn't think of any way. for a little while I hoped that associations such as warm/cool could help but then I realized they were maybe parasitic on the things we see the colors on (red is warm, blue cool etc.). I found this deeply upsetting.
I read hegel's phenomenology when I was 14. I actually made myself read the whole damn book, because I thought it was important to understanding marxism! it's difficult to describe the extent to which I didn't understand at all anything I was reading, but nonetheless I soldiered on. I just wouldn't be capable of that now--the reading incomprehensible stuff thing. this is why, despite being all fired up about ulysses when I was 16 I have never gotten even 30 pages through finnegan's wake.
so, how'm I doing, fellow nerds? and how can we make brad delong participate in this? I make him for a JS Mill-type prodigy.
I invented the color problem when I was 6!
That's funny, I think I was around the same age when I had that realization. It was during a broader "what is reality?" phase that I was going through...my strongest memory of that period has to do with my trying to figure out what the pre-Big Bang universe was like, when it started, how long it lasted, and so on. Freaked the hell out of me when I settled on "eternal nothingness" (especially since I was also pondering some sort of reverse Big Bang, in which the universe would collapse).
The main "grown-up" book I remember reading as a kid was Great Expectations, in 4th grade. My family had just moved the summer before, and the curriculum in the new school district was essentially a repeat of third grade in my old school. Being therefore incredibly bored, I grabbed it off my parents' bookshelf and read it over the course of the year in class. Don't know how much I really understood it, though I do recall thinking that Miss Havisham reminded me of a kinda creepy great-aunt of mine.
My dad also had Mark Twain's collected works, which I managed to get most of the way through by the end of middle school.
165- Hmm. I just looked at the publication date of "A Time to Kill" and realized I couldn't have been 14 when I read that, although I would have sworn I did. I may still be younger than you thought--I don't know how old you thought I was. But I'm apparantly old enough to be senile.
I invented the color problem when I was 6!
Same here, around that age or close to it, only I think it started with tastes: when grown-ups say that they like things that I find loathesome, like say beetroot -- this memory is very strongly associated for me with school lunch beetroot chunks -- are they lying, or does it have a different taste for them, or do they have a different reaction to the same taste? How would anybody know? (And oh god, what about colours, for that matter?)
It's a fairly common thing, isn't it?
I came up with the color problem sometime in elementary school as well - age 7 or 8, I suppose. For some reason I recall thinking about it in the little library we had at my school.
I guess my most precocious stint was getting into the occult in elementary school, based on library books I'd picked out, and drawing pentagrams on my sneakers. You're not supposed to do that until you're a sullen teenager.
I think the colour thing and the problem of evil are pretty common things for kids to come up with.
My little brother told his teacher he didn't believe in God when he was about 5 for straightforward 'problem of evil' reasons -- and he'd come up with that on his own.
I invented the color problem when I was 6!
Not as cool, because I'm sure it's even more common than the color problem, but I can distinctly remember trying to explain to my mother (or my kindergarten teacher? I'm not sure) my intuition that one can never be sure whether or not one was dreaming something as opposed to being actually awake at any given moment at around age 5.
I was reading out of encyclopedias at that age too. Just would walk next door to our cousins' home, plunk down in their living room, pull out one of their World Books, and start reading. I remember really liking the entry on World War II.
I saved up my money, and bought a complete set of Will Durant's Story of Civilization when I joined some history book club at age 13. I would read through it like the encyclopedias, just dipping in here and there. It's still a prized possession; they're all packed away in some box somewhere, along with a copy of Churchill's History of English Speaking Peoples and a biography of Lord Baden-Powell. I was quite the little Anglophile, I guess.
159: Dude, my wife has that book... I'm not squeamish, and it makes me shudder.
Oh- when I was in kindergarten/1st grade, I would go with my mom to her paramedic training-classes. I learned how to do CPR, interpret EKGs.
Huh, and to think I spent all those years from 7-13 reading all the mystery and classic horror I could find, and now they're genres that interest me very slightly indeed. Doesn't it seem as though a great deal of the best mid-to-late C19 literature in English that people have mentioned is written with an eye toward ensnaring the precocious reader? I'm thinking of Poe of course, but also Twain and Dickens (sort of) and O. Henry and similar. With the C20 stuff, most of it I read the first part, realized that it was probably going to lose me somewhere, and put it aside for later. I do wish I'd pressed on with some of it, but I don't think I would've gotten so much out of actually reading 1984 in 1984, at the age of 8, as I attempted to do. I read The Hobbit that year too, but I still haven't found the fortitude to slog all the way through the LOTR, given that they're not novels, but sagas created as an excuse to elaborate a pretend language.
I should have read more Chekhov when I was younger.
177:"I just wouldn't be capable of that now--the reading incomprehensible stuff thing"
Is anybody else following Scott E Kaufmann on Keats? Are SEK and his commenters understanding the Ode, or rearranging its pieces into pleasing new collages, with postits and Elmer's glue and...
I spend a lot of my time thinking I don't understand, and really worrying about it. Being embarrassed, and shy, and covering with false bravado. And wondering what combination of talent, labor, confidence would...what? Give me "wins" in blog comment threads?
"Magister Ludi" is another dangerous book for kids.
When I was 7, I got a babysitter to read A Brief History of Time to me as a bedtime story.
I also independently discovered the color problem at some absurdly young age (though I don't remember exactly when), but I'm red-green colorblind, so it would almost have been difficult for me not to.
"...but sagas created as an excuse to elaborate a pretend language."
If that is even all of what Tolkien was doing, who he was, what his field of study was, it is not necessarily a small or valueless thing,
Fuck man, that is what every, every writer does. Including me, here, now. I'm tired.
I remember picking up Tolstoy's (ha) The Coming of the King in 6th grade, during an Arthurian obsession, and not being able to finish it.
I was vastly relieved when, in college, I picked it up again and did not even get as far (I know this by the dog-ear). Man, what a turkey.
Holy shit, this thread reads like a critical mass of geniuses. Seriously, I don't care what you did or didn't understand at age 8, the sheer attention span alone you all exhibit! I'm dazzled.
I told Jammies about this thread, and he says, "I shot beebee guns in the back yard and covered grasshoppers with sand to see if they could dig themselves out. From ages five through eighteen."
Me: "Can I quote you on that?"
Him: "Don't leave out the part about ages five through eighteen. That's important."
TNR at 9 -- of course that was in the 1950s before the Reign of Peretz.
One problem with reading a lot of stuff young is not being as creative. I remember thinking about the color problem and the dreaming or awake? question, and a couple of other similar things like what if I'm the only real thing in the world and the rest is just something I'm imagining? as a grade-schooler but I'm pretty sure that was coming from stuff I had read, like most likely science-fictiony stuff, rather than of my own invention.
184 again, such things send me off and out, questing
"given that they're [Tolkien] not novels, but sagas created as an excuse to elaborate a pretend language."
"Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them" ...from JRRT's Wikipedia entry. Not just the obvious Proper names & places, and the (re)created languages in LOTR, but every word in LOTR, the "simple" text style, was weighed and considered for its...mythological utility. Hobbits think and act differently than dwarves, and therefore talked in a slightly different, tho etymologically related language. In the English text. Rohan was philologically between the dwarves and hobbits, and Rohan exists because JRRT felt a philological gap that needed to be filled.
And LOTR is deliberately written in a heroic proto-Christian English variant. Alien in ethos to both Christianity and modernism yet comprehensible to 20th century readers. Every word. Al least that was the intent.
Tolkien and Iceland The Philology of Envy
...Tom Shippey 2002. Seems very good on Tolkien and language.
...
"Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them" ...repeat
This is what I want to understand about economics.
Look, all I meant was that, when I read a novel, I want to read a novel, not a saga. I didn't expect a sort of Elvish Inquisition.
Nobody expects the Elvish Inquisition!
194:Whoa dude, did you think that was, like, all about you? Directed toward you?
It was about "precocious" about what is children's literature and what is adult. It was about how we define "difficult" literature. It was about language and discourse, about the minimum wage and liberalism, about "arguments" with supportive evidence. It was about strawpersons, and hobbyhorses, and taking all threads "meta" with a vapid and lazy tendentiousness. It was someone who knows nothing insulting people who "know stuff" About someone so delusionally arrogant that there is no blogger worth of him. It was a cry for help with an accompanying backhand. Engagement disguising loneliness disguising misanthropy. It was a waste of bandwidth, and an abuse of hospitality. It was a bore, boring, bored. Could this be "anomie"?
Golly. But not even amusing.
It was about wearing out my welcome with a passion. But nothing personal. Bye.
Oh, alright then, cos for a second I thought you were taking the piss. And we can't have that, can we?
It seems that everyone here was way more precocious than me. I read a lot as a child but it was all Biggles books and the like. I do remember walking home form school and imagining that my whole life was the dream of some old man who would soon be waking up. But it looks as though that everyone did that too, so that I have no claims to distinction.
When I was a kid, I liked Dickens a lot. Now, not so much.
My godmother has me beat: she was reading Oscar Wilde at 6. I, on the other hand, tried to read 1984 in 1984 when I was eight. I didn't get very far.
When I was a kid, I liked Dickens a lot. Now, not so much.
This was how I felt until I recently read Bleak House. Now I am thinking damn, I need to seek out some more Dickens (well OK, I was thinking that. Having sought it out, I am now thinking I need to read it, specifically Dombey and Son and Copperfield.)
A good thread to mention that young Sylvia is now reading her first-ever serious literature solo, viz. London's White Fang -- and to expand a bit on "serious literature". Many books I have read to/with Sylvia that I consider s.l., from Grimm to Lewis to Juster, and hell for that matter Seuss; these are also (like London and Twain) authors that I would see nothing particularly unusual or precocious about a youngster reading them. (Though of course Lewis has written, in addition to the books I'm talking about here, some stuff that I would be surprised to see on a kid's bookshelf.) People were talking above about not including sci-fi in this thread and I can see where they're coming from; though I would certainly raise my eyes at hearing about somebody reading Gravity's Rainbow in grade school, I understand that the sci-fi being referenced is of the I, Robot variety.
I would kind of like to catalog authors that I think of as great, important writers and also as easy enough that it is no biggie for a kid to read them. Much of this will fall into a "children's lit" rubric, like the Little House books, and Carroll, and Juster; but some non-"children's" authors I would include are Salinger, Vonnegut, London (is he a "children's" author?), Asimov, Dickens...
Anyway -- I am rambling. If you find this line of enquiry potentially useful, well you know what to do.
"It was a cry for help with an accompanying backhand."
Can this now be my personal motto, Mcmanus? I will take no response as a "yes." Also, this--"taking all threads 'meta' with a vapid and lazy tendentiousness"--should be the scroll over text, at least for a day or so.
I agree with 202. Except that the word "Dickens" should be removed from that list for any child born later than 1900. Seriously, I derived no joy at all, and very little understanding, from reading "David Copperfield" at age 8.
Seriously, I derived no joy at all, and very little understanding, from reading "David Copperfield" at age 8.
Right but there are books by Dickens which are fine for the kids -- Oliver Twist and An Xmas Carol spring to mind.
Oh, I still like "A Christmas Carol." I got through David Copperfield when I read it. Great Expectations is the one that I thought was great and then didn't like so much later on.
I'm thinking that I, too, missed a lot in the books I read when young. In particular, I'm thinking it might be time to revisit House At Pooh Corner. I expect there were depths and subtleties which went over my head 50 years ago.
For one thing, all the Pooh books are deeply racist.
Stop trying to stir the shit, Teo.
Deeply racist? I must have missed that. Does this mean I should purge my everyday speech of phrases such as 'a useful box to put things in' and 'how cold my toes, tiddley-pom'? I could become speechless, but I wouldn't want to continue offending people.
This is more worrisome than discovering that The Wizard of Oz apparently had a subtext.
"Tiddley-pom"?!?!? How *can* you bear to say that?
I don't know how many of the Pooh books I even read; I think just one or two. I did see most of the cartoons.
Hmm, now that you bring it to my attention, 'tiddley' is a euphemism for inebriated, and I think I recall that 'pom' is an derogatory term for a particular ethnicity. How, how could I have been so blind?
Yes, seeing the cartoons isn't the same as reading the work itself in the original language. Not that the cartoons weren't an inventive re-interpretation, but some of the fire and passion of the original was lost in the post-modern sange froid of the cartoons. And some of the oak and berry notes were lost.
Absolutely. And the emotional nuances of Eeyore and Tigger, *completely* lost in the, um, literally cartoonish versions.
I don't doubt it. What about the racism?
Sure, but is he worse (or better) in the book?
He prefers to be called Tegro, B.
For one thing, all the Pooh books are deeply racist.
Sometimes a bear that wants honey is just a bear that wants honey.
He prefers to be called Tegro
Or, preferably, Feline-American.
Christopher Robin is just one big caricature of Mexicans.
229: "bear that wants honey" s/b "Tigar"
Perhaps she means that as demonized outsider races, the Heffalumps and Woozles are representative of the Krauts and the Nips of a bygone age. The connection must be much subtler than it was in those Warner Bros. cartoon, I guess.
Tonight I had a discussion about authors and/or works that I hadn't read but wished I had. Everyone had a list. My list:
1). Anything by Dostoevsky.
2). Anything by Tolstoy.
3). Anything by Hemingway.
Everyone else had lists, too. It seems we're all inadequate.
Oh, my comment is redundant within itself. It was still an interesting conversation.
hadn't read but wished I had
A condition easily remedied, no? Am I missing something?
Wishing to have read is not exactly the same as wishing to read.
But reading is so much more fun than having read.
When you are older, you will find it but an irksome task.
Tigger always reminded be of the "not a gentleman" cads and bounders in XIXc literature. I never was able to figure out how the Victorians made these judgements with such assurance. The beastly declining-aristocrat "not a real gentleman" types I could figure out, but the cads and bounders were normally upward mobile and didn't usually seem so bad.
Of course, I sort of liked Charles Bovary too.
jesus, mcmc, read some dostoyevsky! and then some tolstoy! and then some hemingway, but it'll be OK if you don't get to it right away, although Hemingway is in fact an excellent author. you could always go short with some notes from the underground and some short stories. also, apo's 228 made me laugh.
Al, it's actually Stanley who wishes he had read those authors -- mcmc is just complaining about reading in general
Wishing to have read is not exactly the same as wishing to read.
The solution is simple: obviously, I read something from each of the authors in the intervening time between the original discussion and my commenting about it on unfogged. Um, yes. That's it.
I've been waiting to use that line from Johnson for years, and this is the response I get?
Sorry, mcmc. Now I wish I had read some Johnson, too.
(Speaking of precocity...)
Isn't there a line in Through the Looking Glass where the White (IIRC) Queen asks Alice a question and her answer includes the phrase "to be exact" or maybe "exactly", and the queen scolds her about the excessive precision?
Ah yes, here it is -- `You needn't say "exactually,"' the Queen remarked: `I can believe it without that.'
I first lied about precocity at the tender age of six months.
Wow! that's hard to believe!
At the age of 8, I checked a copy of Einstein's paper on Special Relativity out of the library. How the librarian restrained herself from leaping the counter to give me an atomic wedgie, I don't know.
Like a lot of you, I read various classics such as Dickens before the age of 10. There was an old pocket hardback edition of Treasure Island in the house and on re-reading it recently I realised how much the Preface by RLS had been a part of the novel to me. Somewhere around the age of 9 I realised that "abridged" meant that they had cut out bits of the story and insisted that any books bought for me were not to bear that horrible word. So for my 10th birthday I got an unabridged edition of Gulliver's Travels and valiantly slogged through it. Like someone else above I read a lot of books for adults and was used to not comprehending vast swathes of them. I think though the book that made the biggest impression on me at that stage was Watership Down which I found in an old pile of books when I was about 8 1/2. It did seem to be within my grasp, just. And I completely internalised the idea that all proper books will have quotations from other books as epigraphs for each chapter.
257 has the wrong email address and the typo conceivably contains some identifying information. If a kind person could possibly redact it I would be most obliged, feel free to delete this comment too.
I have you all beaten.
When I was about four, I got hold of my mother's college textbook on psychology. She recalls being able to tell where I was up to in the thing because I displayed the symptoms of each disorder in alphabetical order.
Apparently the switch from the Oedipal complex to paranoia was particularly amusing.
And I read her copy of Ovid's Metamorphosis before I was five, under the impression it was just another fantasy book.