![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomySee here, here, etc.
1. My parents claim that they didn't know I had learned to read until I sounded out "electrical appliances" in the hardware store at the age of four.
2. This may well have happened, but I have a clear earlier memory of asking my mother, "Does this say this? Does this say that?"--I would've been four and a half at the time; it was a Christmas book about a moose(?) who wants to be one of Santa's reindeer.
3. When I lived in France, my relatives shipped up a great crate of books: nearly all of Roald Dahl, and all of Little House on the Prairie. There was also Harriet the Spy, and Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door, and more I can't remember. I loved all of it indiscriminately until we got to some of Roald Dahl's more adult and disturbing short stories, which I have grown to like very much.
4. These were books that were read to us at night; but during this time, I was so anxious to find out the ending to Danny, Champion of the World, that I snuck into my parents' bedroom and finished the rest of it in one evening. I felt tremendously guilty.
5. When in elementary school, I had the hideous habit of picking books off my friend's shelves and reading them while I was over at her house.
6. My middle school had a reading-points program where you could get things if you read a lot. I earned a walkman that lasted me for many years--pretty well above most of the other people in my class, I think.
7. I didn't know then about the studies that show that if you reward someone for doing something, they'll likely stop doing it when the reward is taken away. This is, in fact, what happened.
8. To this day I usually *start* reading books out of a sense of grim obligation. If I'm lucky, it dissipates after a hundred pages or so.
9. The first grown-up book that I remember reading was a thriller about people marooned on the open ocean, when I was seven and on vacation in the French alps. I didn't read all of it, just parts, but I remember that they talked about cannibalism. I'm not sure whether my mother realized I was reading it.
10. The second was Jurassic Park, which I got when the movie came out. I was very impressed with myself until I found out that I wasn't the only person in my class to have read it.
11. Some of the few good memories I have from seventh to ninth grade are of reading the Hitchhiker's Guide books, and Slaughterhouse Five, and Siddhartha. I think I must have been insufferably pretentious, but I don't remember that part.
12. I have had awful taste in books: I made it through a giant fraction of the Babysitter's Club series, and a giant fraction of Anne McCaffrey, though I thought I was too good for Fear Street and Goosebumps.
13. I need to have a book with me before I'll eat alone. This has often resulted in me hanging around the bookstore until I didn't have time to get lunch anyway.
14. My favorite hangout in college was Indigo Bookstore, St. Catherine and McGill. I would go there three times a week after school or before school to browse and watch the snow fall. In Japan, I would get in at least three bookstore visits a week, generally spread out between the used bookstore by the university, the Kinokuniya at the harbor mall, and Metro Books at the Nagasaki station mall. I didn't buy books proportional to my bookstore visits; I just liked to be there.
15. I don't remember this, but my mother tells me that when, at a rather young age, I entered Concordia University's library, I said that I wanted to work there someday.
1. My parents claim that they didn't know I had learned to read until I sounded out "electrical appliances" in the hardware store at the age of four.
2. This may well have happened, but I have a clear earlier memory of asking my mother, "Does this say this? Does this say that?"--I would've been four and a half at the time; it was a Christmas book about a moose(?) who wants to be one of Santa's reindeer.
3. When I lived in France, my relatives shipped up a great crate of books: nearly all of Roald Dahl, and all of Little House on the Prairie. There was also Harriet the Spy, and Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door, and more I can't remember. I loved all of it indiscriminately until we got to some of Roald Dahl's more adult and disturbing short stories, which I have grown to like very much.
4. These were books that were read to us at night; but during this time, I was so anxious to find out the ending to Danny, Champion of the World, that I snuck into my parents' bedroom and finished the rest of it in one evening. I felt tremendously guilty.
5. When in elementary school, I had the hideous habit of picking books off my friend's shelves and reading them while I was over at her house.
6. My middle school had a reading-points program where you could get things if you read a lot. I earned a walkman that lasted me for many years--pretty well above most of the other people in my class, I think.
7. I didn't know then about the studies that show that if you reward someone for doing something, they'll likely stop doing it when the reward is taken away. This is, in fact, what happened.
8. To this day I usually *start* reading books out of a sense of grim obligation. If I'm lucky, it dissipates after a hundred pages or so.
9. The first grown-up book that I remember reading was a thriller about people marooned on the open ocean, when I was seven and on vacation in the French alps. I didn't read all of it, just parts, but I remember that they talked about cannibalism. I'm not sure whether my mother realized I was reading it.
10. The second was Jurassic Park, which I got when the movie came out. I was very impressed with myself until I found out that I wasn't the only person in my class to have read it.
11. Some of the few good memories I have from seventh to ninth grade are of reading the Hitchhiker's Guide books, and Slaughterhouse Five, and Siddhartha. I think I must have been insufferably pretentious, but I don't remember that part.
12. I have had awful taste in books: I made it through a giant fraction of the Babysitter's Club series, and a giant fraction of Anne McCaffrey, though I thought I was too good for Fear Street and Goosebumps.
13. I need to have a book with me before I'll eat alone. This has often resulted in me hanging around the bookstore until I didn't have time to get lunch anyway.
14. My favorite hangout in college was Indigo Bookstore, St. Catherine and McGill. I would go there three times a week after school or before school to browse and watch the snow fall. In Japan, I would get in at least three bookstore visits a week, generally spread out between the used bookstore by the university, the Kinokuniya at the harbor mall, and Metro Books at the Nagasaki station mall. I didn't buy books proportional to my bookstore visits; I just liked to be there.
15. I don't remember this, but my mother tells me that when, at a rather young age, I entered Concordia University's library, I said that I wanted to work there someday.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
14/12/05 23:18 (UTC)The crazy thing is that I remember both being jealous/proud/amazed that you could read 'electrical appliances', and knowing that you were right. And my memory is of outside the hardware store. We were walking past it, not in it. And I can clearly see 'electrical' in my mind, the way you wouldn't expect to remember something you couldn't actually read at the time.
Not that memories of that age aren't at least 50% conjecture based on what other people tell you, but still... it is weird, is all.
(no subject)
15/12/05 02:03 (UTC)(no subject)
15/12/05 02:06 (UTC)