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Post your favorite book related memories ITT I was thinking about this because of the childrens' lit discussion in the general thread. I spent a summer with my grandma in her tiny town without a real library when I was like 9, and ran out of reading material pretty fast. She had a vast collection of books and I ended up reading both Call of the Wild and White Fang for the first time there. Another would be the first time I ever did an all-night book read and ended up having zero sleep for school - some Agatha Christie novel. I don't even remember which one it was anymore but I remember being so glad I finished it before the sun came up.
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Jul 1, 2020 18:42
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i saw my first ever bever in Breakfast of Champions
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Jul 1, 2020 22:44
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TheAardvark posted:Post your favorite book related memories ITT When I was 12 or so my dad's job got transferred to this lovely little town in the middle of nowhere. It was one of those "do this for a year then come back to a promotion" things. But it sucked. Anyway in the middle of June my mom drove my brother and I to this town to look for a house to rent. To pass the time, I bought Jurassic Park to read as we drove around. At one point, after who knows how long of house hunting, we stopped on one of those small town middle america main streets. I think there was a realtor office or something she wanted to go in, and my brother went with her. I was 200 pages deep at this point and just being completely brain-melted by this book so I declined to join. They were gone a long time. I was entranced in the book. Suddenly I was like man I'm not feeling well. Of course I was inside the car in the middle of summer. I can't remember the window situation, I'm guessing they were down because my mom was not insane, but she was stressed about the move so who knows. Maybe they were up and she probably thought the trip inside was gonna be short and of course she figured her dumbass son would be smart enough to get out of the boiling car. But I wasn't. I start to catch on but it's too late. I get out of the car (book in hand) and I was so out of it I couldn't make my legs go the right way, so I was just wobbling all over this sidewalk. I vomited and it took the strength out of my legs. I fell against a chain link fence and passed out. I came too to an older couple fanning me off and yelling for someone to call 911. I had ended up like two blocks the wrong direction, and I didn't know the town, so I couldn't figure out where the car was. Eventually we heard my mom screaming and we sheepishly drove off. I finished the book before we found a house.
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Jul 5, 2020 02:18
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I remember reading Star Wars books in 5th/6th grade (this would be around 1996/1997). I would read them during classes and the teachers would get annoyed. Reading star wars books (and some other random sci-fi/fantasy like this thing, which I think was also written by a guy who did some of the Star Wars books - https://www.amazon.com/Heroes-Die-Fantasy-Novel-Caine-ebook/dp/B001MYA38W ) was basically my main source of entertainment and I would always be super excited after finding something new at Barnes and Noble. Another kind of amusing book memory is the time I read Rainbow Six in 1998 or 1999. I remember thinking it was really hardcore and Adult. The only specific thing I remember is there being some line about peoples' heads "exploding like overripe watermelons." I went on to use this phrase in a Starcraft "battle report" a year or two later*: "At first my Hydras exploded like overripe watermelons at the wrath of the sunkens, but once they formed their distinctive half circle of destrucion the sunkens were goners." * http://www.battlereports.com/viewreports.php?reportnum=2621 (it's amazing this site still exists and has these battle reports I wrote when I was 14-15; it's basically the ancestor of Let's Plays) Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Jul 5, 2020 |
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Jul 5, 2020 21:16
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I read Murakami's Hear the Wind Sing on my Nook one afternoon during summer at college. All my roommates were home for the summer, so I would keep the living room blinds closed and play the original Dark Souls and watch Twin Peaks. I was reading the book at the campus breezeway, which was a little roofed commercial strip with circular stone seats and small trees. There was a summer downpour that lasted for hours, but the breezeway had restrooms and vending machines, so I sat by the edge and read the whole book and looked out at the afternoon storm.
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Jul 7, 2020 22:36
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I got SO MANY free pizzas from the Book It program. Free pizza for something I was gonna do anyway? Sign me the gently caress up!
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Jul 7, 2020 22:53
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That's one of the reasons I prefer physical books. A lot of the books I've acquired have memories associated with them. For instance, I have my dad's collection of the Harvard Classics (dark green and gold binding) shelved next to my desk, with the Aesop / Grimm / Andersen volume spine head ripped off because I kept pulling it off the shelf as a kid. (Kids: don't form the habit of pulling books off the shelf by hooking the spine head with your finger.) Another volume has tooth marks put there by my first puppy. I was looking through my copy of The World Encyclopedia of Comics the other night. It's an unabridged-dictionary-size book, nearly 800 pages. When I was a kid, my record for taking books out of the library was 25 books at one time, including the World Encyclopedia of Comics, and then I managed to schlep the whole load uphill three blocks and down one, which was the distance between home and library.  This is the first joke book I ever had, and introduced me to the wonderful world of puns, knock-knock jokes, and Tom Swifties, which no doubt contributed to making me completely insufferable as a kid. 
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Jul 7, 2020 23:24
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For me it would be tie for first place for each of the 20,000 times I have read a book while having sex.
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Jul 9, 2020 22:31
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Oh, another thing I remember from elementary school is Accelerated Reader, where you would take these computer tests on books and answer questions about them (with more points for longer/harder books). I remember that the only person with more points than me was this Chinese girl in my class, and I got really salty about her gaming the system by skimming long books.
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Jul 11, 2020 05:49
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Ytlaya posted:Oh, another thing I remember from elementary school is Accelerated Reader, where you would take these computer tests on books and answer questions about them (with more points for longer/harder books). I was the top AR kid in my school until third or fourth grade when we stopped doing them.
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Jul 11, 2020 08:59
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Ytlaya posted:Oh, another thing I remember from elementary school is Accelerated Reader, where you would take these computer tests on books and answer questions about them (with more points for longer/harder books). Heh. I'm old enough to remember having the original SRA set in elementary school, although none of my teachers made any organized use of it. During filmstrips or movies in class, I used to sometimes excuse myself to "go to the reading room" instead. At that time, I didn't realize it was the room for remedial reading classes -- I just thought it was a place I could go to grab something to read for a while. Now I wonder what the remedial reading teacher made of me occasionally wandering into their room.
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Jul 11, 2020 23:04
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My first e-reader was a decade ago, a Kindle Keyboard, a hand-me-down from my girlfriend's mother. I was a broke as gently caress college student with a huge backlog of to-reads, and I suddenly had access to everything. I buy everything now, but at 20 with a bank account in the double digits, piracy was a godsend. I think the first book I read that way was Wizard and Glass, which wasn't at my library or available for transfer. I had it for a few weeks before I finally wanted to read the book bad enough to just download it. I kept swapping between kindle piracy and the library out of guilt for 3 or 4 years until I could afford to buy everything. I've bought nearly all of the stuff I pirated back then, but it's hard to feel guilt about a time I was eating ramen and bologna sandwiches and working 2 jobs.
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Jul 12, 2020 00:00
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Who was it said, that they had clearer memories of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, than of many incidents in their own life? I probably remember reading The Hobbit for the first time more clearly than I do the rest of that entire year of my life.
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Jul 13, 2020 06:26
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When I was a junior in high school (1979, yeah I'm old, get out of my yard!), the librarian at my school took a liking to me for some reason and gave me a copy of The World According to Garp to read. She said she figured I was mature enough to handle the adult situations in the book. It was the first "adult" book I had ever read. A few years later after graduating, she was clearing out old books to make room for new ones and came across a sci-fi book I had checked out on numerous occassions, When Worlds Collide/After Worlds Collide. She went out of her way to bring it to me instead of tossing it even though it wasn't in the greatest condition.
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Jul 15, 2020 02:00
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Ytlaya posted:Oh, another thing I remember from elementary school is Accelerated Reader, where you would take these computer tests on books and answer questions about them (with more points for longer/harder books). We had that in our middle school (did for years after, until the librarian who really pushed it retired  ) and on top of that, he would purchase all sorts of goodies that we could buy with the points we got from AR. Most kids spent theirs on candy and stuff. In 8th grade, I became the first person to have earned 1000+ points in a single school year and got myself a $100 savings account at a local bank with it. My record wouldn't be broken for like 10 years after that, and I set it before Harry Potter was even a thing yet. But I could burn through 2 5-point Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys books in a single school day. IIRC the books with the most points we had back then were War and Peace and Gone With The Wind, and as someone who was mainly into sci-fi and fantasy, gently caress reading either of those.
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Jul 21, 2020 07:23
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taiyoko posted:In 8th grade, I became the first person to have earned 1000+ points in a single school year and got myself a $100 savings account at a local bank with it. I did this at my school and my reward was a basketball.
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Jul 21, 2020 10:22
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Selachian posted:Heh. I'm old enough to remember having the original SRA set in elementary school, although none of my teachers made any organized use of it. Oh wow, I haven't thought of the SRA in over 40 years -- your post made me suddenly vividly remember that colour-coded box! Ytlaya posted:I remember reading Star Wars books in 5th/6th grade (this would be around 1996/1997). I was 11 going on 12 the summer Star Wars came out, and we had to drive to King of Prussia (just outside of Philadelphia) to see it, as there were no first run theatres closer to where I lived. There was no merchandising or anything associated with it like you get now, but a novelisation of the film came out (which I still have somewhere in storage). I remember being stuck in this awful caravan at the beach with my parents, reading and rereading this book -- all of my associations are with the damp, sandy mattress in the room I had as a bedroom, listening to traffic and people passing by within inches of the room all evening and into the night (the caravan park was between the dunes and the main highway, Fenwick Island, DE, just before the state line to Maryland, if anyone knows that era). My parents were much older than average when I was born, so it was more like growing up with almost-grandparents -- we stayed in the caravan in the off-season, so whilst it was still autumnal/Indian summer warm during the day, it got pretty chilly especially at night. My parents would go to bed early, and there was no TV reception. Despite it sounding a bit grim, my associations with the book, being wrapped up in a cosy blanket, listening to passersby grow fewer and fewer as the evening faded into night, the close-by waves breaking on the beach, reading what I thought at the time was one of the coolest things ever...it's a good memory. Lots of good reading memories as I've been an avid reader since the days of picture books and Berenstain Bears. I loved when we'd get those flimsy Scholastic book order forms (this was back in the 1970s); my mom would buy anything I ticked off. It was always a great day when you went into the classorom and there was a little pile of books on your desk. I still have a lot of them! I've in the years since chased up first editions of some of them -- Scholastic tended to edit the gently caress out of books, so it's been a huge pleasure to find a first, original edition of a favourite childhood book and there are new scenes and conversations edited from the originals. Scholastic used to (re)publish a lot of British children's books and totally change them for American kids. I had to switch to a crap Catholic school in the 5th grade, and was really disappointed that they didn't do the Scholastic thing. The other kids thought I was weird because I liked to read so much Ah, gently caress'em -- I read everything in the teachers' classrooms for silent reading and book reports, and went through the entire library (which was only like a 6 x 8 cubby).The library in my high school was one of my favourite hiding places; I spent a heck of a lot of free periods way in the back in the stacks, often hanging out with a pal. The librarian liked me, so she let us watch videos on the then Very Expensive VCR (lots of PBS stuff and RSC plays, but, kids, David Robb was hot in Hamlet. When I graduated, she let me take any book from the library that I wanted as a graduation gift, so I took a 19th century copy of Hamlet 
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Jul 21, 2020 11:04
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This is kinda dumb, but here goes. This is mid-90's. I lived overseas because my dad was in the military, so the only bookstore I had access to was the Base Exchange, which has let's just say a "limited" selection. Anyway, I was (still am) a big fantasy nerd and I had just finished reading Tolkein and Eddings, and was looking for something new. Well, I found a book in the bookstore that looked really interesting. It was called "The Great Hunt" by Robert Jordan. The cover art looked interesting, it was really thick so it was obviously good, and I had just enough money to buy it. I grab it and take it home and start reading. Well, I don't know how I missed it but I quickly realized I was jumping in the middle of a story. Oops, this is the SECOND book in the series. So I put it on my shelf. I tell myself I'm going to wait until I read the first one to read the second one, and I just have to wait until it's available at the BX. Six months later, I finally get the first book in the series. During that six months, I probably took that book off my shelf three or four times a week and just stared at the cover art, imagining what the Great Hunt could possibly be, who those characters were, what's the deal with that cool looking horn? I daydreamed in school about that loving book, what it could possibly be about, based on nothing but the title and cover art. I devoured The Eye of the World when I finally got it. Then I turned to The Great Hunt and I vividly remember being in my bed at 10:30PM with a flashlight, beginning to read, and feeling tears come to my eyes I was just so loving excited. I still can't think of that book objectively since thinking about it consumed so much brainpower when I was younger.
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Jul 23, 2020 21:35
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Selachian posted:Heh. I'm old enough to remember having the original SRA set in elementary school, although none of my teachers made any organized use of it. My school library had like half of the Time Life Books "Mysteries of the Unknown" series. The vampire one *really* stuck in my head. Lucas Archer posted:This is kinda dumb, but here goes. This is mid-90's. High school wheel of time summer vacation was good fuckin' times Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 19:38
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When I was 13 the day after I came back from holiday I was feeling unwell in a way I never had before so I stayed in bed all day reading Im Westen nichts Neues and then it turned to be appendicitis
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Jul 24, 2020 22:21
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I was the target generation for Harry Potter, and I remember 5th grade queuing up for the 4th book, getting that hardcover brick in my hands, and just smelling the new pages. Got home, and spent the next 7 hours reading and finishing it in my lovely bunkbed next to the fishtank. It was everything I wanted.
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Jul 25, 2020 16:44
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I went to a Montessori elementary school for a couple years when I was 7-8, that had a wooden structure on its grounds, tucked away among some oaks, the kind that is essentially just treated lumber fastened together and filled with odds and ends for child enrichment. I don’t remember the first floor at all, probably a play-space of some kind, but I do remember that you could climb up a little ladder and end up in a loft that, to a seven-year-old, seemed quite spacious. It was dusty and warm, and it smelled pleasantly of wood, dirt, trees, and books. I’m not clear on how all those books ended up there – maybe kids brought them from the library and just abandoned them in the loft, maybe the staff kept it stocked with books for kids to pick up on a whim (which seems like a very Montessori thing to do), but the place had a bunch of books at any given them, and it made that loft the best place on the school grounds for me. School wasn’t working out well for me, I was the kid who was done way ahead of everyone else and terminally bored as a result, and by the end of third grade I would be doing homeschooling. But one of the only vivid, positive memories I have of my years in the school system is of being in that loft on a warm afternoon with the sunlight making the dust motes dance lazily in shafts of light, while reading the beautiful old hardcover version of Jane Langton’s The Diamond in the Window. I’m convinced that was a formative moment, and I think about it a lot these days: how the big formative moments can also be so quiet and subtle and private, especially for children.
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Jul 26, 2020 18:45
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Lex Neville posted:When I was 13 the day after I came back from holiday I was feeling unwell in a way I never had before so I stayed in bed all day reading Im Westen nichts Neues and then it turned to be appendicitis
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Jul 27, 2020 02:47
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:High school wheel of time summer vacation was good fuckin' times Hell yeah, same. Everytime a new Wheel of Time book was out it would consume all my free time until finished, from dawn to nighttime and then some if a flashlight was handy. One strong reading-related memory was long long ago when I was going through some tough health problems, nearly crippling chronic pain, and reading was the only thing I could consistently do to entertain myself without difficulty. Books could distract me from the pain in a way that pills could not and for that I was ever thankful.
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Jul 27, 2020 06:12
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When I lived in Brooklyn I had an hour long subway commute each way, and those two hours of sitting there with my kindle, powering through three books at once were the only reliable bright spot in my time there. I’d have a novel, a short story collection, and a nonfiction book going at once so I always had something I was in the mood for ready to go. I powered through 163 books in the year I lived there.
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Jul 30, 2020 13:40
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Daikloktos posted:It bothers me I can't remember if this is somehow ironic it's not. it's just a memorable reading experience 
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Jul 30, 2020 17:36
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During a summer my sister got a stack of books from the library and one was Vertical Run. I was the right age and hadn’t seen Die Hard so it was a fun thriller to go through in a day.
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Jul 31, 2020 05:40
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Lucas Archer posted:This is kinda dumb, but here goes. This is mid-90's. This is a really wonderful and sweet memory, thank you for sharing this with us.  My favorite memories of reading are scattered but I really enjoyed carrying a big purse around in middle school...because it let me carry all the big scifi novels I was reading. Having one on hand to read at all times was super satisfying. I do the same thing now but its not quite the same.
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Aug 20, 2020 19:55
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HIJK posted:My favorite memories of reading are scattered but I really enjoyed carrying a big purse around in middle school...because it let me carry all the big scifi novels I was reading. Having one on hand to read at all times was super satisfying. I do the same thing now but its not quite the same. I discovered cargo pants in middle school, when it turned out that you could fit even the thickest paperback into the extra pockets. From that point on, my wardrobe was dictated by how many books I could fit into the pockets. This lasted until sometime in my mid/late 20s when it became obvious that the Kindle was here to stay. (I think my first one was a Kindle 2, and I know it cost me almost $300). Until I got a Kindle, I wore cargo pants every day, unless it was cargo shorts in the summer. I always had two novels on me; the one I was reading and the next one I wanted to read, in case I finished the first. Cargo pants improved my reading and carrying capacity so much.
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Aug 20, 2020 21:03
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Gonna flog the BOTM for a second but it's real https://twitter.com/alloy_dr/status/1289053712057544707 This was absolutely my favorite book as a child and it still is. One of my favorite memories is just sitting on the kitchen floor puzzling out the words in this book and wondering how much of it was fictional and how much was true. So now I'm going through chapter by chapter and doing a deep dive on what parts are Pyle's invention and what parts derive from the traditional Robin Hood ballads and historical sources. Please come join! You won't regret it!
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Aug 20, 2020 22:24
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HIJK posted:This is a really wonderful and sweet memory, thank you for sharing this with us. Thank you.
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Aug 21, 2020 15:43
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I read The Stand over a spring break week when I was in the 6th grade. I read that loving thing the way I'd go on to play video games in my late teens and early twenties (wake up excited to play, play all day, go to bed and dream about them) and have never since had a book pull me in like that one did. This was before I'd read enough Stephen King to see his flaws as a writer or before I understood what a quite literal but also quite unsatisfying deus ex machina the ending really is. It's still my favorite book despite those things because of the way it absolutely engrossed me when I was a kid. Every time I pick up a new book I'm secretly hoping it'll make me feel that way again. A lot of them come close but never quite ring that same bell.Hyrax Attack! posted:During a summer my sister got a stack of books from the library and one was Vertical Run. I was the right age and hadn’t seen Die Hard so it was a fun thriller to go through in a day. Glad there's another Vertical run fan. 
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Aug 21, 2020 19:21
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Ms Boods posted:I loved when we'd get those flimsy Scholastic book order forms (this was back in the 1970s); my mom would buy anything I ticked off. It was always a great day when you went into the classorom and there was a little pile of books on your desk. I still have a lot of them! I've in the years since chased up first editions of some of them -- Scholastic tended to edit the gently caress out of books, so it's been a huge pleasure to find a first, original edition of a favourite childhood book and there are new scenes and conversations edited from the originals. Scholastic used to (re)publish a lot of British children's books and totally change them for American kids. Ah, I forgot about those forms! Yeah, the whole experience of getting the books was really exciting. I also totally forgot about the books getting left on my desk. As for the republished books, are you talked about those books that would be sort of shortened and with changed language? I remember reading a Robinson Crusoe and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (and probably others) that were like this.
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Aug 22, 2020 01:47
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reading stephen king's IT in my family's house's living room, with the summer light peeking thru the shades in the midafternoon, during the summer before 4th grade
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Aug 22, 2020 06:34
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like three years or so ago, i woke up truly wanting to kill myself. like, moreso than your everyday 'suicidal ideation.' instead, i drank a beer and read a bernhard book, the limeworks, and ended up having a good time. i now look back on that fondly
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Aug 22, 2020 06:39
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cda posted:For me it would be tie for first place for each of the 20,000 times I have read a book while having sex. please do a sincere post
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Aug 22, 2020 06:44
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i read the malta section of pynchon's v. while sitting in the harbor of valetta, malta
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Aug 22, 2020 09:56
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When I was in fifth grade (early 90s), I randomly found The Dragons of Autumn Twilight. I wasn't much a reader before then but that book hooked me. I flew through that book, then the Dragonlance Chronicles series and my love for reading started to come alive. Shortly after finishing that series, I found a book called The Eye of The World. Another memory is being sicker than poo poo while in the Navy in the early 2000s. The docs gave me some percocet for the pain, and I borrowed the first Harry Potter book from someone. Spent that magical weekend on a percocet high reading Harry Potter. Felt like I was at Hogwarts. Hughmoris fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Aug 24, 2020 |
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Aug 24, 2020 03:17
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