Reading History
Whilst writing the Snow Crash post I started to wonder why I hadn’t found any cyber-punk to read until I was in my mid 20’s. I think the answer to this is partly I learned to read at the age of 12 and yes I know that’s really late but that’s when I learnt to read – I learnt to read becuase I knew books contained stories and information and I was desperate to part of those stories to experience them and I wanted to be able to use information – to find it myself rather than having to wait for an OU programme in the middle of the night of for some eaves dropped programme.
So I started my reading life with the help of my friend Nikki who lent me Point Horrors and then there was the school liberary and then the town libary. To be fair my Dad spent ages reading me stories and making stories up and it was his fault that I was kept awake at night by nightmares of tripods blasting London to smitherins. I then had access to his books which comprised of Alexandar Kent, Asimov, Aurthor C Clarke, Anne McCaffery and a multitude of random books about war or cave people – Reindeer Moon was one that sticks in my memory.
The libaries offered me teenage fiction more point horror, Deep Water Black and then Jumped to the Adult section where I read Stephen King, Stephen King and more Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Clive Baker, Christopher Pike, and James Herbert. I also found Stephan Lawhead in the School Libary along with White Fang and Call to the Wild which entranced me just as much.
I found Duncton Wood and was scandalised!
At 13-14 yrs I found a book that took me almost a year to read and that affected everything I wanted to write. It was called The 8 (Eight) and I locked onto this quest for the Elixar of life that dragged you through centries of history and involved hidden maths in chess and music and caves hidden and secret groups hunting, dreams and accidental adventure. I remember picking the book up I literatry walked into the second hand book shop and plucked it from the pile of books – I needed the book the complusion was so strong.
Later on when I met my husband it turned out that this was one of the few books we had both read – I thought of it as a geologist based fiction he as computing!
By the time I was doing my A’levels I was reading Anne Rice though witches not the vampires at first. Along with some stupid notion that even though I’d finished my GCSE’s I was going to work my way through the entire set reading list! I started this when 14 and erm… I am actually still working my way through it but things like Empire of the Sun where just so compelling I still feel I want achieve this!
I then desided to give the books my GCSE Chemistry Teacher Miss Scudder had suggested and that was Terry Pratchett but this was mainly due to the fact I was being accused of copying him which I wasn’t but I thought I’d best check him out – this was the end of my A’levels.
At the beginning of my Undergraduate degree I apparently had the reading age of a 12 yr old – this was up on the 8 yr old reading age I’d had at the beginning of my GCSE’s I read slowely but I am always reading!
Interestingly the educational psycologist informed me that my vocab was amazing and out stripped pretty much everybody – just as well really as I was starting a degree with a reading age of 12 and a spelling age of erm… about 8 maybe :/
I had also been ranking up the reading time on anthropolgy, genetics, geology, milatary history and the like but now at University I sank into reading pretty much – well kids books – Redwall, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials and I had the whole of Imperial Colleges Scifi, Horror and Fantasy libary at my disposal – sigh!
I got married at the end of my Undergrad and have been working my way through my husbands book collection ever since so thats Greg Egan, C J Cherryh, Peter Hamilton and the like… Maybe its a good job I’m a slow reader this way there are still loads of good books to read!
But I am always looking for more suggestions 🙂
This is a long waffly post – sorry about that!
Posted: Thursday, December 17th, 2009 @ 10:19 am
Categories: Uncategorized.
Subscribe to the comments feed if you like.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.