/lit/ - Literature

>>16284003
the second question answers the first, i wasn't encouraged to read more because i grew up with a single teen mom

>>16284003
I did. I'm not some /r9k/ loser like you who copes by reading.

>>16284019
based sex having chad

>>16284003
I literally read as much as I could. If I wasn't reading, I was writing, or drawing.

>>16284011
Same here, although my mother was old. She bought me Harry Potter books, but if she knew I liked reading why couldn't she have taken me to the library or just looked up Top 100 Books online and bought a couple of those instead of video games?

>>16284003
My parents encouraged me to read from an early age but they never bothered to get me new good books so I was rereading Harry Potter every month when I was 12 or so. And then I guess I played vidya and watched anime more than reading in my teenage years, although I read some in between. I read war and peace completely when I was 15, still my favorite novel.

>>16284003
>watch a teen movie
>everyone makes fun of the nerd for reading the dictionary
>lmao nobody really does that
>remember I used to read the dictionary

Because the mandatory reading list in school was a bunch of depressing shit about rape and slaughter and after the 4th author of the same shit it put me off reading

>>16284043
Same here bro. My parents haven't read a book in years probably, and that just kind of rubs off. Even though I like reading.

>>16284055
How old are you now?

I didn't realise until quite recently how poorly educated my mother was, when she started writing emails and the grammar and spelling were all over the place. It's quite sad, and she isn't at all confident about such things.

>>16284047
War and Peace at 15 is an accomplishment, well done.

i read more as a child in a year than i have for the past 5 years. although not really comparable because of the differences in difficulties of the books.

Thinking back, I now realize when I started reading, when I was reading ravenously, my dad read a lot- he would sit in his office for hours and read. One of my strongest memories of him from that time is me shuffling into his office, and he'd be sitting in his leather seat, leaning back, reading a book.
By the time I was a teenager, he'd almost stopped completely, in favor of watching tv. It was really sad.
At least I never stopped reading (until depression hit). I remember my classmates once making a bet that when they came in first bell, I'd already be sitting at my desk, reading (I was).

>>16284003
I did not have a good upbringing but I did read a lot more than now, particularly about antiquity. I taught myself the Greek alphabet and very beginner Greek phrases I still half remember.

>>16284066
I am 24. It is sad yeah, but I feel quite sympathetic for them. They did always encourage me to be better than them and to turn out better for which I'll always be grateful. It's just that they didn't know at all how to approach that task.

>>16284070
Funnily enough I'm reading war and peace again after all those years, definitely a lot I missed when I was 15!

>>16284003
Deaf blind and mute now cured

>>16284092
There's something profoundly sad about realizing that the people who treated you poorly were actually trying their very hardest, they just didn't know better.

My father emotionally abused me and my brother (not verbally, but through being extremely unpredictable and reacting very aggressively to basically everything) and on very rare occasions physically.

Now, he can't work, is depressed, and lives alone, and when we talk, sometimes he'll say things like "I did my best for you and your brother. I did good, didn't I? I was a good father!" And you can hear the desperation in his voice. I always say "Yes, of course. Yes, dad." But I remember the time he flipped my mattress when I was seven, and the time he cracked a light switch with my brother's forehead when he was 13, and the time, years later, when, as an adult I broke my mother's wedge of Parmesan cheese and almost started crying, because I thought she'd yell at me.

And I'm not mad. I'm just sad. I wish I could make him happy, but I know in my heart that my father will be miserable until he dies.

Look at me and where I am and try to have some bit of sympathy. My life has been absolute Hell. Rose is where she is because she is an idiot. She was not self-teaching herself foreign alphabets as a kid. For someone like me to be at the same place is totally different. It is shameful and makes me think of suicide.

>>16284003
I read a lot, I liked comics and Jules Verne, in my teens I also read LOTR. I have read a lot for a midwit.

I grew up in a poor and abusive household, where i was beaten and insulted for my attention deficit and hyperactivity.

>>16284129
Damn man. thats pretty morbid. but it does sound just about right. its just fucking sad. Not angering or something else, just kinda sad.

>>16284119
same, its amazing what reading the bible in braile does to a man.

>>16284129
That's sad brother, I hope you are at peace now.

My father wasn't in the picture, and when he was he would usually use my meeting with him as a way of criticising my mother to a paranoid degree. My mother herself was pretty much broken by their divorce, and suicidal throughout my early teens. It sucks to have to grow as a person knowing you are outgrowing your parents, to the point where their behaviour seems childlike and pitiful. Even as late as 2017 my mother was still threatening to commit suicide during a small argument. It was at Christmas time and when she threatened to leave the house and not come back I pinned her against the wall, and her facial expression was one of such animalistic, primitive confusion and fear that it really disgusted me. Made me realise that she and I will never really connect.

>>16284003
i did. i could read before i started school
i wasn't really "encouraged". but my dad worked away from home most of the time, leaving my mother to look after five kids, of which i'm the youngest. so i would read as a form of escapism. my local library was only a short walk from our house, so i spent a lot of time in there.

>>16284154
Wish I had been confident and aware enough to visit the library as a younger kid, I was in exactly the right mental space and stage of life to throw myself into reading completely. Instead I just ruined my brain playing video games twelve hours a day until my head hurt.

>>16284137
>I have ADD
>it's not my fault
You're medically diagnosed as being inferior. Congratulations.

>>16284003
My parents actually discouraged me to read anything aside school textbooks, but I always found a way to read without them knowing.

I loathe them so much. I wish I lived before DNA testing and modern egalitarian shithead laws. I would show them I mean business.

https://youtu.be/HBjnqpaUxRY

>>16284178
>reads past the part about growing up poor and in an abusive household

Subhuman reading comprehension.

>>16284003
Prole parents, no good books in the house (or a whole lot of range to select from in our small-town library for that matter), prole parents didn't expose or encourage me to anything related to the humanities, and since we were relatively poor, even if I was exposed, I'd have probably been pushed hard towards STEM anyway. My milieu of mostly lower-middle class kids with a peppering of upper-middle class kids also didn't really engage with any of the humanities in any real way besides what they could use in a masturbatory, pseudointellectual manner, and therefore I thought humanities (and the arts especially) were reserved for limp-wristed faggots and women.

I wish I could go back and guide myself to get on this track sooner.

>>16284196
I forgot the obvious - we were too poor to afford books anyway. The second-hand market is flooded with pulpy romances for middle aged women and crappy tom clancy knockoffs - I almost never saw any classics on sale, and back then ebooks weren't a common thing yet.

>>16284003
Getting together with friends to play soccer or vidya was more fun
Grandparents weren't the intellectual type, reading was for school

>>16284054
>getting filtered by rape and slaughter
I think we got a hole here

>>16284287
I said it got repetitive, not that the content was particularly bad. Take your meds

I read all the fucking time. I would read while walking home from school. I'm pretty sure it gave me autism.

>>16284003
I did, it was a cornerstone of my existence up until the age of 15 when I started to get interested in girls and being popular. From then on my reading slowly started to decline. I also started to use the internet more and play vidya more consistently so my concentration took a fucking dive off a cliff. Ten years on and I struggle to read even an article.

>>16284003
My parents are ignorant hicks who have only read the bible, barely. I hated literature until I was around 12, fell in love with Harry Potter, which lead to better things.

parents had the passive approach to raising us; they would fill our bookshelves with books with the belief jsut surrounding us with books will make us read (similar with other thing). it worked till I became bored with the selection they had there which was too childish so I moved more and more to vidya and only reading history books relating mostly to the vidya I was playing (Total war).
I know I will not do this hands off approach with my children. I wish I had been given more advice not just silent stares and acceptance of whatever I wanted to do. I feel like I lag behind the kids from stronger parents by maybe 5 or more years by having to do, trial and error and amend everything myself.

If it werent for the chauvinistic AP lit with Hemingway obsessed teacher it would have been even later before I got back into reading again.

>a good parent tells his child what to do and doesn’t hope for him to do the right thing all on his own

Poor and uneducated family. Parents aren't that bright. It's basically impossible to be well read if you're in a horrible environment and lame parents.

>>16284003
The books I was encouraged to read weren’t very good, but I still read them. I read quite a bit as a kid but went through a period of not reading as a teen because what I read as a kid was garbage

>>16284003
>Why didn't you read more as a child?

i did, i think because of genetics because my father also was an avid reader, but he never pushed me to read or anything, i just did it on my own

>>16284003
im dyslexic so i naturally hate reading, i only read manuals to do with spatial stuff or math books because they always have pictures showing wtf they are talking about but i still prefer videos explaining the same thing anyway.

I truly regret how much time I wasted playing video games as a boy, but I find a little comfort in the fact that I was at least reading and usually reading books like The Hobbit, Brave New World and Phillip K Dick's work with stuff like Siddartha, Moby Dick and Hamlet sprinkled in (even if it typically went way over my head at the time). My biggest regret is that I hardly absorbed any historical or practical knowledge. My fund of knowledge is severely lacking and I'm trying to make up for it now in my 20s.

>>16284003
All it takes is something to capture your imagination. For me it was Goosebumps and Animorphs.

>>16284003
i was encouraged to read more
i didn't because i had more fun playing videogames
i wasted the better part of my life desu

>>16284003

Later on it was video games and I wasn't encouraged to read anything specific so I just ended up rereading HP and LOTR (eventually in English even though I'm ESL, caught anti-translation autism at 13). I developed prejudices against normal fiction and German books since bookstores generally seemed to be packed with boring looking shit. It's not like my parents are illiterate, now that I seriously got into reading I appreciate having access to their bookshelf with most of the canon on it, I don't know why my dad never tried to talk me into reading anything that I didn't find on my own. I guess liberal parenting.

>>16284003
I was told off for reading too much.
I didn't do homework, I read during tutorial, often during classes.
Just constant unending reading.
Which is funny as I barely read now.
The internet has fucked with my mind.

uninvested parents

I was raised by a single mom who sat me in front of a TV or threw me outside so that she could have boyfriends over. She got remarried to a drunk ex felon who would beat me because he had to buy me food instead of liquor for himself.

I never read or even really went to school until grade 12. Then we read The importance of being Ernest and I was shocked I enjoyed it. Silas Marner was our next read and I fell in love with reading. I havent stopped since

>>16284003
My dad was the first generation in his family to have a college degree. My mom did not get a college degree. I Have mine and I intend to encourage my kids to read. Problem is I’m an ugly socially awkward mofo still single in my 30s and won’t likely have kids.
Inb4
>hurr durr just date ugly/fat chicks
Nah.

>>16284003
I read a lot when I was a young kid.
Being forced to read all those shitty outdated boring-ass books in high school made me avoid reading for a whole decade

>>16284003
I did, except it was "trash" (goosebumps etc). I wasn't exactly like Alexander Pope who would sperg out over the illiad at age 8.

>>16284003
Vidya and no need to cope yet.

>>16284003
I did. I read a lot. My parent's rule was that for every hour I read I got an hour of screen time.

>>16284003
Mandatory reading list in school was the most painfully boring, grueling shit of all time. Any books I enjoyed reading like Goosebumps I couldn't use for book reports anymore and school libraries were also utter shit with barely anything interesting.

read books easily when i was a child. grew up and it became harder, had to step back and fix my life and now its easy again. that doesnt answer your questions but whatver

I read a good deal until I had to read The Scarlet Letter as a high school freshman, which killed my interest in literature for a few years.

>>16284003
I'm American.

>>16284003
honestly because I was out being a normal kid, playing with friends, playing sports, riding my bike everywhere with the neighbor kids. Now look at me. Asking for advice from incel faggots and reading obscure Swedish philosophy for answers I can never find on a Japanese car maintenance image board

I read a lot as a child. It's around high school when I stopped reading

>>16284050
Same but desu I wish I read the encyclopedia instead.

>>16284003
yeah it sucked only got into reading in my mid 20's

>>16288778
good for you anon

>>16284003
I read every day since I was 5 years old

>>16284129
Are you a tranny now

>>16292389
No, not even a little bit

>>16292953
Hmmm I think you might be though

>>16292969
okay, you got me, I'm NB

I read a lot as a child, probably because I had no friends

My parents read a lot, my parents encouraged reading, my older siblings read a lot, so I read a lot as well, about 100-300 pages a day on average between the ages of 7-15. At the beginning rather less, later more. My friends read a lot as well.
However I read mainly children books (classics) and YA fantasy novels. Good and bad stuff, rarely adult literature or something that wasn't marketed at children.
I have reread these books (a few hundred I guess) far more often than I have read different books at all. Any book I really liked has been reread 2-15 times.
Why: Escapism from my shitty life. So I thought of myself as the protagonist and loved (re)reading their adventures.
Another point was that I had troubles finding good books: I didn't have a list with good children/teenager literature and disliked most YA. I wasn't ready for most adult literature and had troubles enjoying it. The bookstores were pushing shitty YA novels and not all classics were good. Fuck this hack Enid Blyton.
Then I spent a lot of time with the Xbox 360, especially Halo 3 and Gears of War (2) in split-screen co-op with my friends. Great times, now I'm fondly thinking back, so much pure fun. I haven't had that much fun with video games after that, what a shame. I play games rarely but they rarely capture me and I don't miss video games.
I don't think that the reading gap between 15-18 was bad at all, life was waiting for me and I enjoyed my teenage years. What turned out really bad was the influence of smartphones and constant stimulation. Between 15 and 18 I should have read good non-fiction stuff.

>>16293000
Your femininity shows

>>16293854
we are doomed to be who we really are

My mom only read self-help books and romance novels, yet she still pushed me into reading from a very early age, the first thing she ever spoke to me of was my ABC's. Because of where I live I was often the only person who could read in my early years. Also the only brown only-english speaker in a sea of ESL's and Bi-linguals. My strong initial grasp of the english language is probably why I feel very little connection with people who technically share my heritage and background. Anyways, my mother would often let me run around in bookstores and choose a book to sit down and read, i was always hyper but somehow had a great concentrational reservoir for books, so It was a win-win and sometimes she'd let me buy one. On one particular evening when i was eight we ventured into the bookstore and I happened to choose the brothers karamazov as my book of choice. My patrician status was calcified from that point on. I'm not a pseud though so I also developed an appreciation for the picture-books my friends were reading at the time.

>>16284003
Parents liked the fact I actually read books, but at the same time they didn't like how introverted and reserved I was so they ended up forcing me to do dumb shit like
>MUH SPORTZZ!!!!
>ACTIVITY CLUBS!!!!!
Which ended up doing the exact opposite of what they wanted because I just wanted to go home.

>>16285386
This too. It's a shame how hard the education system can utterly kill anyone's interest in learning and reading.

Can't really remember if my parents encouraged me or not. I did read all the time as kid and the only real memory I have is my father being nasty to me for reading fiction. Entering high school I stopped for a year, assumed my lowly social status position and eventually went back to books. There my interest shifted in trying to understand social dynamics by reading psychology and attempting to get popular. By senior year I figured being popular was kind of boring and I went fully into books and music.

>>16284129
i crown you the biggest sissy on /lit/

I did but only because I had no friends and my parents were too poor to pay for any other hobbies

I read every day growing up although I had the same experience as this nigga >>16294759 It sometimes felt like they hated my curiosity [they read (past and present tense) pretty rarely]

>>16284003
I used to read three books a week from third grade through eleventh, before I tapered off as I started focusing on more difficult texts. Didn't matter what. Sci-fi? Fantasy? Guiness World Book of Records? Textbooks? Phil Esposito's autobiography? Environmentalist polemic? Anything was game. Now I read two books a month on average, no more than 40 pages a day in order to ensure I comprehend and remember.

I was put in from of a screen my whole life, no encouragement to be better, then I stopped wanting to be a dumby that I knew I wasn't.

videogames. dad was a gamer who never read, mom was a TV potato who occasionally reads best-seller junk