For years I have been asking my Rockfiend buddies what album, song, or artist they feel or can point to as having pushed them across the threshold from music listener to Rockfiend. I want to use that same question and ask all of you readers and writers out there:
Was there a book, author or story that pushed you over the line and got hooked you into the life of a reader (or writer)?
Me, I can tell you exactly which records pushed me over the edge to becoming a Rockfiend, but I am less sure of which books. I think it was Where the Red Fern Grows and My Side of the Mountain in the fourth and fifth grade that really opened my eyes. It might have also been that when I was in the second grade my reading level did not improve over the course of the year and my parents had me held back for a second run at that grade. My birthday is in September, and they really should have kept me home another year before kindergarten. At any rate because of the lack of improvement and that I was subsequently diagnosed as Leaning Disabled, my reading education got a lot of attention and that, along with the fall out of have been held back, pushed me towards books as a way to escape an increasingly chaotic life at school and home.
So enough about me, Too Much Coffee Man says Addiction is unavoidable, choose your wisely.
What were your gate away books to the reading addiction?
2 comments:
As a young child I enjoyed reading, but sometime around 3rd or 4th grade I became bored with the material given in school. It wasn't until 6th grade or so when I raided my brother's bookshelf and started reading the books he was assigned in high school that I became a reading fiend. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" and Bukowski's "Tales of Ordinary Madness" are the two titles that come to mind as pulling me into the literary world.
In terms of crime fiction, I had read Hammett, Chandler, and Cain in high school - but they didn't draw me into the world. It was Mickey Spillane's "Vengeance is Mine" that dragged me in head first, and ever since then I've always had a crime novel by my side, even if I'm reading something else at the same time.
Maude Hart Lovelace's Betsy and Tacy books; Nancy Drew, All of a Kind Family books, Five Little Peppers. I bet these are all new titles to you guys.
I took five books a week out of the library (the most allowed) and read them by the next week.
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