My History with Reading
I have to admit, I am not exactly an avid reader. Not back then and certainly not now. But I have gone through my fair share of books, both intentionally and by requirement. Fun fact, I was reading before I could even speak. That sounds impressive at first but I didn't learn to speak until I was 5 years old because I had problems with muteness and being unable to speak. That's another topic I should talk about another time. But I am not going to go through every single book that I had read but I'll mention those that left an impression on me.
Since the very beginning of my indoctrina....um I mean education, my schools all implemented a program called AR (Accelerated Reader not Armalite Rifle sadly) where we had to read a certain amount of books that were approved in the school library system and once we had finished reading each book, you would have to take a quiz to see if you were paying attention to the plot and vocabulary from whatever we picked out read. I absolutely hated this system with every fiver of my childhood. But I got through it by picking up some of those non-fiction picture books about wildlife like insects, arachnids, and aquatic life since I thought those were pretty cool back then and still do. I had to read a bunch of them because they didn't count for a lot of points after reading and quizzing on them, so eventually, I had to pick out some novels once I was a bit older in Elementary. Usually, I would try to pick out a novel based on it's cover and hope for the best. I would come across some interesting books to say the least.
One of the strangest ones I picked out was some novel about some coming of age story about a girl and one of the chapters has her freaking out because she starts having puberty and bleeding all over the place. I don't remember the title of that novel but it really ticked me the wrong way and confused me back when I read it so that's mostly what I remember from it. I guess I was fooled by the cover or the title of the book back then to not realize it. But on a better note, I did read a book that was my sort of thing called "Hatchet" which was a youth survival story. On another note, I did manage to pick up the same survival rifle from the book as my first firearm ever and whenever I look at that rifle now, it always makes me think of that novel. I also read "Little House", "A Day No Pigs Would Die", and "The Secret Garden". Surprising a lot of rural or old fashion stuff for a kid like me but I suppose those books were tolerable.
One of the books that I did go out of my way to read as a kid were the Bionicle novels. I even went out of my way to buy them as a kid and I basically read all of them up to the Metru Nui saga and kind of stopped after that because I was growing out of Bionicles at that point. These books weren't part of the AR program so I couldn't use them to bump up my AR points which were necessary to pass my class. But later on during the later years of my elementary years, I did come across some of the Animorphs and Goosebumps books which were certainly some of the more entertaining books I read up to that point that would help me maintain my good grades. Somehow, the Captain Underpants comics and a bunch of cape shit comics were part of the AR program but not the Bionicle books. That was baffling to me back then.
Moving on to middle school, I didn't really recall any interesting novels other than some Shakespeare plays and stuff about le ebil nahzees which in an ironic twist, not only introduced me into stuff like Hitler and WW2 but got me idealizing it to the point where I would draw swastikas in my notebooks and make WW2 German music videos on my old family PC with Windows Movie Maker where I would upload them on Google Videos and eventually YouTube. I was bullied at the time so It was easy for me to sympathize with Nazi Germany back then and probably contributed to me being an edge lord too. Other than that, there was one interesting book I absolutely remember reading and liking a lot and that was "The City of Gold and Lead" which was a post-apocalyptic trilogy of novels based on Humanity being enslaved and reverted to a pre-industrial society ran by tentacle ayys. It was one of those rare novels that really had me invested when I was reading it in middle school and I went out of my way to look for the other two books in the series.
High School somewhat eased up a bit with the AR program so we weren't required to read and quiz on books. However, because I was part of the Pre-AP and AP programs since middle school, we would get summer reading assignments that we had to do...in the summer of course. Then we had to work on some kind of creativity project based on what we read. I had to deal with that shit in addition to engineering summer camp and marching band practice which meant I couldn't fucking relax and play some Battlefield 2, The Sims 2, or Unreal Tournament 2K4 like I wanted to. The two books I know off the top of my head that I didn't bullshit my way through were "The Great Gatsby" which is considered a classic but I thought it was okay, "Of Mice & Men" which I swear to God I couldn't count how many times I laughed whenever my classmates would make retard jokes about the book such as "HURR CHUCK NORRIS CHUCK NORRISSSSS TEND RABBITS CHUCK NORRIS TEND RABBITS", and "Kite Runner" which while engaging portrayed the Taliban as boy lovers even though it was the Taliban that outlaw that shit while it was thriving during the US Occupation but I digress. Outside of that, We did a few plays in my Literature classes where we would actually act out the plays in class which was kind of fun. The one class where I had my crush as a classmate even though she was a grade above me, I had to play Judge Harthrone when we covered "The Crucible". I think I did fine with my acting considering my timid nature. We also quickly covered some cool stories like Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, and in French class we covered the play "En attendant Godot" and read the novel "L'Étranger" so that was my two introductions into French literature apart from some poetry.
As for Novels, I was really into Michael Crichton's works. I really wanted to read "Jurassic Park" since I heard it was better than the film but they never had it in my school library. I did read "Airframe", "Congo", and "The Andromeda Strain" which were all very good even if they weren't "Jurassic Park". I also read "All Quiet on The Western Front" since I was at that point in life when I was developing an interest in World War 1 and historical military stuff in general. Around that same time, I acquired an encyclopedia from my uncle who was a WW2 enthusiast too (He had a collection of documentaries, model kits for ships, tanks, and airplanes) and it had all sorts of stuff about WW2 to even more obscure topics like experimental weapons, the first usage of helicopters.
I didn't do any reading while I was in college because I was trying to go for an Engineering degree and apart from my Ethics course where I had to read some Philosophy stuff. There was also a communities class where we had to do community service in the city my uni was located at and we had to read som boring ethnic-based novels I couldn't even care to remember because they were so boring and lame.
After college up to this point, I had some extra time when I was NEETing to read a few books like "Stoner" which I didn't like because the main character was acting like a proto-boomer, I read some works by Yukio Mishima, a couple of non-fiction stuff including a history book about my state called "Lone Star: A History Of Texas And The Texans" which was excellent, "The Storm of Steel" which was a WW1 memoir, "The Prince", "Neuromancer", and "The Ultimate History of Video Games Volume 1". Currently, I am reading some other books and novels which I'll mention on the literature blog page.
Otherwise, my reading repertoire isn't that impressive to be brutally honest. But I'd like to read more. It's just a matter of setting time for it. So far, I try to read a few chapters at least twice a week, usually before I head to bed. I'll also take an E-reader with me if I am going to be waiting at the doctors office or whatever in public. It's a lot less pathetic than just browsing 4chan on my phone with images disabled.