First Half of "What I've Read!" post

This is not about writing. This is about reading. I can’t tell you how or why I became intrigued in reading, but I did, at lets say age four, and have been ever since.
You don’t read, but get your first books read to you: Dr. Seuss' Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, O the Places You’ll Go, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. Love You Forever by Robert Munsch.

Even when entering kindergarten, then first grade, you still get read to, but usually on giant carpet rugs. This time, between kindergarten and fifth grade, I only remember a select few, though to my teachers’ credit, there were dozens. I remember Where the Wild Things Are; Titanic; Freak the Mighty; BFG; Swan Lake.
Then fourth grade came, or before fourth grade. At the local library, I joined the book club, and did so for many summers to come. I read Beverly Cleary, Roald Dahl, Judy Blume’s Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? series. The R.L. Stine Goosebump's series, Mathilda, James and the Giant Peach, Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Yearling, The Bridge to Terabithia, Hatchet, The Secret Garden, The Phantom Tollbooth, Island of the Blue Dolphins, A Wrinkle in Time, Number the Stars, Maniac McGee. Ad infinitum. There is an entire world of good literature out there for fifth, sixth, and seventh graders.
Unfortunately, seventh and eighth grade was a different time for me, which we Americans call puberty. Although in honors English by then, I simply didn’t have time to read. I played sports. When I did read, it was text books. Maybe this time in my life was so traumatizing that retrospectively looking back, I remember nothing, so as to save myself from embarrassment. Maybe Sounder and Mr. Popper’s Penguins, but that’s all I got.
High School was the big shift. Kind of like the gear shift. The tactile shift.
More honors English and more books. Everyman, and all Charles Dickens. A lot of Shakespeare. Things Fall Apart. Jane Eyre.
Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
Buck's The Good Earth. The House On Mango Street. The Red Badge of Courage. The Great Gatsby. A Farewell to Arms.
For Whom the Bell Tolls. The Sun Also Rises. The Iliad. The Odyssey.Death of a Salesman. The Crucible.
Gone With the Wind. The Things They Carried.1984.
In four years you can read a lot of books when you are forced to. And I was forced to. However, by my junior year, I lost interest. No more honors English. Now regular English. Different people in these classes. More apathy, and I loved it.
But the big shift came in eleventh grade. I took a poetry class, for some reason, and have since “stuck with it.” Well, it’s an on again, off again, relationship.
I started buying books, and buying books for people. For girlfriends, for teachers. I was shameless. See a book, buy a book. I can’t say what happened, but when reading and writing crossed, they stayed together like two good friends. I started slowly with Hemingway. Read all Hemingway. . . . . . . . . .



O.K, second half to be announced at a later date.