Inquiring
What was the first book you read that opened the floodgates to the delirious possibilities of literature?
Made you near tremble with glee to discover what words could do and do to you, a brilliant mind in the ink slamming open the doors, more in love with a fiction for those few days than with anything real, and hungry for more, more, more…
When I was little, I gobbled down the Hardy Boys, pure trash like The other side of midnight, any dumb adventure tale involving horses – preferably off to save the world or transported to Medieval times – and ludicrous (ludicrous!) amounts of comic books. I consumed them like jelly beans.
But when I first read Camus’s L’étranger, I was floored. Recruited. I mumbled wow for days – sensing I’d entered another realm, and breathless for more, more, more.
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- When I was in sixth grade, I read “So The Wind Won’t Blow It All Away” by Richard Brautigan. It was the first sans pictures book I think I’ve ever read. It’s easily one of the more “comfortable” books I’ve picked up…
— phillydad Jun 26, 11:00am # - Science fiction – Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Asimov, although I don’t remember which one, Jane Yolen’s Dragon’s Blood series, Tolkein (my father read to us every night)...I’m not sure what else. I loved the fact that I could curl up with a good book and nothing else would matter – I could become totally immersed in someone else’s world, care about the characters, let them become a part of me for a little while. I didn’t have one specific book, but my love affair with reading started very early.
— Wendryn Jun 26, 11:06am # - at eleven, at the farm i found stendahl’s the red and the black. everything changed.
— steve Jun 26, 1:15pm # - For me it was Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Orwell’s 1984, both in my sophomore year of high school. The Secret History was kind of a rite of passage for students in the humanities-oriented track at IMSA
— Chris Tessone Jun 26, 1:40pm # - My Dad used to read the Sherlock Holmes stories to my brother and I as bedtime stories. Nothing like “Hound of the Baskervilles” when you’re seven years old. Early on, t’was Gordon Korman’s “Who Is Bugs Potter?” followed by Kevin Major’s “Hold Fast” in seventh grade. Then came the slacker void of high school where I didn’t care much about anything (gasp – high school? not caring?) outside of playing in a band and cheesy American music mags. I turned over a new leaf with JG Ballard, Burroughs and Clive Barker. Now, it’s all about anything that appears interesting.
— gord Jun 26, 4:04pm # - Funny you should post this… there’s a thread in I LOVE BOOKS about “What book do you wish you could read for the first time again?”
(http://ilx.wh3rd.net/thread.php?msgid=4777050)
My very first book was “The Monster at the End of This Book” which had my favorite Sesame Street character, Grover. The next time I was just floored (as I’ve mentioned before) was Pearl S. Buck’s “The Good Earth.”
— roggey Jun 26, 4:15pm # - James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan.
11. 1960.
A friend of mine’s brother was in college, he left it lying around in the room they shared. I was already reading Heinlein and Lewis and Bradbury. I picked it up and wouldn’t let go. They had to pry it out of my cold, dead, hands. Almost.
— msg Jun 26, 5:26pm # - My father started foisting long fantasy novels on me when I was quite young, and so I read pretty voraciously from as far back as I can remember.
But as for opening the floodgates… Two books: Frankenstein and, more importantly, To The Lighthouse. Those were the books that really introduced me to serious literature.
— Scott Jun 26, 8:48pm # - For me it seems to have been a continuous process of always reading just outside the limits of understanding. Probably the nearest thing to a breakthrough moment was when I stopped speedreading. Boringly, I think that might have been during my first pass through Shakespeare. I speedread “Julius Caesar”, but “King Lear” wasn’t amenable.
— Ray Jun 27, 9:59am # - Oh, “Frankenstein” – I read it when I was 13 and it scared me to no end…
— roggey Jun 27, 10:02am # - When I was 14 they were reading passages from “The Stone Diaries” by Carol Shields over the CBC, and I would listen to it as I went to sleep. I bought the book as soon as I could find a copy. It was my first experience with real literature, and my first experience with CanLit.
It’s still one of my favourites.
— August Jun 27, 2:57pm # - Maybe Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in high school, although it was slightly spoiled by the fact that I wrote a paper about it.
Interestingly, I read The Stranger in college, dropped out, and spent the next seven years reading. Ha ha, didn’t have to write that paper.
— eric Jun 27, 3:27pm # - Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch
— egoexmachina Jun 27, 5:02pm # - It all started with “johnny lyons’ rubber boots” My father taught me to read with that book. I remember mouthing the words to, “and the dog ran away. zip zip zippety-zip.” Zip zip zippety-zip to a five year old is like candy-covered lip-smacking goodness.
I’m sure there were times he regretted teaching me to read. For example, when there was an age discount for children at museums I, or my sister, would mouth off and tell the cashier that we were certainly over twelve. Poor, poor papa.
After the initial tutorial, the first books that made me an “accro” were Nancy Drew. My brother read the Hardy Boyees.
— amelia Jun 27, 10:18pm # - Without a doubt, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (sorry to duplicate), read at 16 in my Yorkshire boarding school a long way from home & during my only religious phase. I lay awake at night in a cold sweat, being Stephen Daedalus. The novel reached deep into my inner world, making me aware for the first time that, through the pages of world literature, we are not alone.
— Dick Jones Jun 28, 12:24am # - For me it was Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I was nineteen, & didn’t understand the half of it, but I was awestruck even so.
— misteraitch Jun 28, 4:50am # - Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Not fiction, but after reading that I never wanted to read junk again. The year after that I read widely and deeply, something I’ve not been able to do since.
— Luke Jun 28, 7:28am # - Almost like an opening chapter of an Umberto Eco novel: While doing a schoolpaper on Flemish novelist Johan Daisne’s “De trein der traagheid” (about time), browsing through an omnibus of his works , chancing upon a reference about a short story “Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius” by Jorges L. Borges (about language). Being sucked into what seems like a casual conversation of a peculiar Encyclopedia Britannica entry; Gradually discovering a world and its language with unexpected powers of expression.
And Eco himself (about a flower of lanuage) has plenty references to Borges. Coincidence ? Etrange…
— Raf Jun 28, 8:44am # - I’m ashamed, but one of the first books to really shake me down was, by the authors own admission, one of his lesser works, Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.
I was in 9th grade and had discovered debate. One of the students in my debate class had it and I snuck a read of a few pages. I instantly went to the public library and devoured it. Then I proceeded to read everything I could by Vonnegut, and following the aforementioned title, I’d highly recommend Cat’s Cradle.
— blurbed Jun 28, 9:31am # - For me it was Donald Barthelme’s Great Days, a collection of his short pieces. (i would say “short stories”, but not all of them were precisely that.) The dialogue between Cortes and Montezuma, especially, and “On the Steps of the Conservatory” – i’d read nothing like them.
If you’d like an introduction to Barthelme, there’s a comprehensive page at http://www.jessamyn.com/barth. Some people compare him to Brautigan and Pynchon, and to me he seems a little like Italo Calvino. But BETTER.
— Amy Jun 28, 9:54am # - The book “Catcher in the Rye”, the year 1987—a visiting journatlist gave it to me as gift. I was corrupted by that book in more ways than one, so much so that I even started writing letters to friends as if I were Holden. What a book? What ever happened to Salinger?
— Derrick Jun 28, 11:01am # - It must have started earlier but the first two books that I can remember that had me mesmerized were Wuthering Heights and Sons and Lovers (Lawrence). I remember being absolutely captivated by both, so much so that I read them more times than I care to remember. Funny thing is, when I reread Wuthering Heights as an adult, I found it altogether too precious. Still, the reread disappointment could not take away from my memories of enraptured teenage awe.
— amanda Jun 28, 12:07pm # - I think it was probably Watership Down, which I read when I was about ten. I was amazed by the epigraphs at the beginnings of chapters – the feeling that this book and its universe belonged to a much larger groups of books and their universes. I reread it recently and still love it. Turns out it was inspired by Adams’ experiences in WW2, which makes sense. Also I love quest narratives with charismatic yet flawed leaders. The formal structure of Watership Down rivals Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, if you ask me.
Other memorable first reads: Just So Stories and the Alice books, which my Dad read me when I was small; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, James Thurber’s The Wonderful O and Jean Merrill’s The Pushcart War, my introductory texts on anarchosyndicalism; and at about sixteen, Pride and Prejudice – I know, how predictable – but it felt like the narrator was talking to me, about the things I was obsessed with: having an embarrassing mother, not knowing how to make a living, making a horrible first impression on people whose good opinion I craved. Plus. it’s hilarious. Still one of my favourite books.
— Rachel Jun 28, 12:50pm # - i’ve read voraciously since i first started at age four, but it wasn’t until the mid-90’s when i discovered “still life with woodpecker” by tom robbins that i realized that i had no idea of what words could really do.
— heather Jun 28, 4:26pm # - I’m not sure which was the very first book that opened up and pulled me inside itself. My entire childhood seems now to have been one total book immersion after another.
We had a set of books in cheap bindings: Tales of Wonder or something like that. Each volume focused on a different era or cultural tradition, and this was where I first encountered the legends of Greece and Rome, the Norse myths, Grimm’s tales, Hans Christian Anderson etc. They were illustrated by Rackham and the other greats.
I remember going back years later in search of one particular image: a prince trying (as all princes do) to rescue a princess from some dire fate and thus win her hand. This prince was trying to reach his princess by climbing a mountain of solid glass, and kept failing, and was in despair.
I remember that he’d caught an eagle and had tied its claws to his hands to obtain a purchase: I could see the blood red against the glass, the gradual ascent. But I discovered as I leafed through the pages once again that the image had come from words alone, vivid enough to have stayed with me ever since.
— Michael Jun 29, 12:32pm # - I grew up with the matched set of Andersen’s and Grimm’s. The green and red ones. With the Arthur Szyzyk illustrations in the Grimm’s. But they were there before I could read so it wasn’t epiphanic. Heinlein’s “Have Spacesuit Will Travel” was. Based entirely on its steady expansion into a dimensionless infinite universe that was inhabited.
— Lance Boyle Jun 29, 1:39pm # - It’s a toss-up between Boris Vian, l’Écume des jours or René Barjavel, La nuit des Temps. I was about 17. I was blown away.
— céline Jun 30, 5:06am # - I was in grade school. It was intimidatingly thick and didn’t have many pictures, very grown-up looking, but one page and I was hooked. Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster. Wonderful line-drawing illustrations by Jules Feiffer. I still re-read it every so often.
— wizmo Jun 30, 8:14am # - Oddly enough, given the disparate nature of the stories themselves, the books that blew me away were all short and dense: Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness;” Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights;” and Timothy Findlay’s ‘The Wars.” I learned that every word counted and that big wasn’t better!
But the first piece of writing that opened up the world to me was Lewis Carroll’s “Japperwocky” and other poems – including “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” My grandfather would read these poems to me when I’d visit and I loved the way the words sounded and felt on my tongue. I still, to this day, am known to exclaim O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
Oh, yes, and the “Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot!
— GMR Jun 30, 11:26am # - Nights winged horses no one can outpace
Midnight is no moment, midnight is a place.
From some book I took out of the library in elementary school. I can’t for the life of me remember the title or author, but I can still picture the front cover. And recite the epigraph. I doubt it was high literature, but it certainly made an impact.
— cmb Jun 30, 12:40pm # - The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill. When it was first described to me—an epic poem, the bulk of it dictated through an Ouija board—my first thought was, “How the hell would that work?” After reading it, it opened up the possibilities beyond anything I had previously thought.
— sjc Jun 30, 1:35pm # - Midnight is a Place – it’s by Joan Aiken, a British author, a favourite of mine when I was a kid (I got my first big library fine for her All And More).
There’s a wonderful scene where a French girl speaks to Lucas and he replies to her, also in French, without even realizing how well he knew it. He understands for the first time that his tutor is a very, very good teacher.
And there’s the factory where they make cheap carpet by having a giant piston stamp on surplus wool and glue, and the children have to run under the piston to get dirt off the carpet without getting crushed. And there’s a magical chase scene in the sewer…
God, I loved that book. Thanks for reminding me. I thought all books would be that memorable and exciting…
— Rachel Jun 30, 1:58pm # - I’ve always been a book worm ever since my early childhood, reading through children’s books and then longer and longer ones.
The ones that touched me the most in my childhood were Charles Dickens’ books and Sherlock Holmes.
I couldn’t stop reading those.
Another turning point was George Orwell’s 1984 which I only read recently and which relit the desire in me to not only read more but also write.
I’ve had a lot of ideas for books in the past, but never really put together the will to do anything with them. Now I have a new idea, and I’m excited about it, I just hope I do something with it.
— Subzero Blue Jul 1, 3:59am # - The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter. The most amazing book I have ever read. We were made to read it over the summer holidays as a school assignment at 13, and it changed the way I saw the world. There are passages and incidents from the book that have shaped my beliefs and 11 years later I have yet to come across a book as meaningful as this one. During the week it took to finish the book, I read it non-stop for eight hours one day, totally freaking out my family.
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand is also a must-read. You can’t not read these two books.
— bluecheese Jul 2, 1:03pm # - My God, someone else remembers “Bugs Potter” and “Hold Fast”.
As a child I was surrounded by books but hobbled by a nearly autistic temperament, so I read voraciously without really understanding most of what I read. For some reason I really liked Harold Pinter’s plays. “The Caretaker” was a favourite of mine when I was eight, but when I finally watched a performance I realized that I had no memory of it other than a single line. I also read a lot of Graham Greene and V.S. Naipaul, with varying degrees of comprehension. C.S. Lewis, on the other hand, was easy to digest.
— palinode Jul 3, 3:56am # - Heh. You made me smile with ref to “The Other Side of Midnight.” Suprising, at least to me, was that I didn’t fully appreciate that it was trash until I saw the (even more awful) film version years later.
Gotta love old Sidney Sheldon. (He also created “I Dream of Jeannie” for the tube.)
— Russ Jul 4, 5:59pm # - It was the Phantom Tollbooth for me too. It must’ve been second or third grade. I got hit with the Beatles White Album the year after and I’ve never recovered.
— barnes Jul 5, 12:04pm # - I didn’t read much before I was 12, but I distinctly remember the impact Stuart Little had on my when I was 10 or so. When I was 14, I discovered the Oscar Williams anthology of American poetry, with poems by Cummings, Pound, Eliot & others. I loved some of the early Ezra Pound pieces in that book, especially “The Ballad of the Goodly Frer” but I was immediately drawn to Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I still have the battered gray paperback that opens with this poem, The Wasteland & Other Poems, though it took me longer to get around to understanding the other poems in the book. It is odd, perhaps, that a kid from the lower-middle class suburbia of California in the 60s should be attracted to this poem—but despite its Briticisms, its horror of American suburban emptiness resonated very deeply with me. A couple of years later I read The Stranger & then went out & got Camus’ collection of essays, The Rebel. Hey, it was 1968. I’ve been an existentialist ever since.
— joseph duemer Jul 6, 7:13am # - It happened a few times. The earliest was with the Tales of Narnia, in second grade-I don’t remember for how long, but I would just start back with #1 after #7. I think it may have been 15, 17 times. This was when I really went into it as an alternate world more true. Fifth grade, Beowulf, and king arthur . . . seventh grade, vonnegut (to repeat, Breakfast of Champions was it—it showed me this alternate world could have a moral structure) and poetry via Pound & Auden . . . in tenth grade, on vacation I read Crime & Punishment in one night-I remember turning back to the title page, and seeing the copyright date and realizing that at some point this monumental thing did not exist, that a person who was once alive wrote it in living, and that that was something I could do. Then Kafka later that year, and then in 12th grade Joyce (& found my wife as well!)-in college, Stevens. I know that’s a lot, but really its not so simple as one time; each time was a first time.
— Stuart Greenhouse Jul 6, 9:21am # - Definitely “I am the Cheese” by Robert Cormier. I’ve read it at many stages of life and it has never ceased to capture every emotion.
— lady quicksilver Jul 7, 3:07pm # - I don’t remember which was first. In fifth grade my teacher read “Where the Red Fern Grows” by Wilson Rawls aloud to us. The whole class elected to skip recess to hear the end and we all cried at the end. Not sure when I read “Bridge to Terabithia” by Katherine Paterson, but it was magic.
— Kelly Jul 7, 3:35pm # - I don’t recall what book first excited a literary thrill in me, but I do remember one reading experience very clearly. In the last year of high school and again at various points during university, teachers tried to get me to read Jane Austen. I think I had Emma assigned in three different courses over the years, and never got more than a chapter into it. Then, at the age of 25, I picked up the neglected and avoided Pride and Prejudice again, and was entranced. It remains my very favourite, much re-read novel. Reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time is the experience most closely associated in my mind with the realisation that I had grown up at last.
— John Hudson Jul 8, 10:36am # - Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. I read, and reread, and wondered what was happening to me, and why I felt like I knew the characters better than my family. I was inside them, talked to them on my way to school, lived with them.
— Julia Jul 14, 9:13am # - Kafka’s The Trial.
— beerzie boy Jul 14, 12:23pm # - 7th Grade…Tolkein Ring Trilogy yes but even more so Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund. I was a 14 year old girl in Rhode Island but I escaped into a beautifully imagined world of 2 medeival monks in Germany. Every line seemed like it was written for me. True Magic….
— Christina Jul 28, 10:52am # - Steppenwolf. Which led to Siddhartha. Which led to a flaky hippy-buddhist phase. While in that flaky phase, I was blown away by sections of Tropic of Cancer. This introduced me to the idea that a book could just be fascinating talk, just voice, just language.
Slaughterhouse-Five. Which led to Brothers Karamazov, which set the bar pretty high on what makes a great novel.
Albert Angelo by B.S. Johnson blew me away. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller became my favorite book for a long time. I was also blown away by City of Glass until I read Beckett, and thought Auster was indeed as a professor put it, “Beckett and water.”
Down There On a Visit (the story) by Christopher Isherwood. That taught me that you could be as crazy and self-absorbed as Henry Miller, but with proper education, attitude and technical mastery, make your weaknesses of personality strengths of narrative.
The Golden Notebook nearly caused me to fall in love with the narrator—very weird experience when I put the book down. Missed the narrator for a day as if I’d lost a friend.
The Sot-Weed Factor took smart-assiness to a new level. Lost in the Funhouse (the story, along with Night-Sea Journey) were pretty good, too.
— IB Bill Jul 28, 3:05pm # - For me, it happened in three stages: The first was my reading of Poe’s The Telltale Heart at the age of 12, when I learned that there was a lexicon far beyond my understanding, and narratives more chilling than those I had previously imagined. Next, four years later, came Goethe’s Faust, which opened wide the doors of language, figuration, and an entire world of obscure references that I systematically hunted down like a madman, and in which I discovered the potential of a life’s work. Finally, about two or three years following my discovery of Goethe, came Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, which seemed to put everything together; a complex narrative about narrative itself, a book of books, writing that still makes me laugh with inspiration. There are others, of course, but these are the milestones, the beginnings of my evolving love of literature.
— rdees Aug 3, 11:41am #
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