At what age did you get interested in literature and why?

20, video games couldn't do it for me anymore (with rare exception). During my free time now I watch films and read mostly nonfiction

I've read my whole life, but got truly into literature when I was 17.

3. Grew up in a well-educated family surrounded by books.

I really wasn't a reader as a kid - my younger self considered it a boring activity for dweebs, which is sad and pathetic. I suppose the one positive I can take away from that is that I never had to force myself through any of the Harry Potter books when I was a child. I think I turned out a better person for it.

Anyway, I'd say my mid-teens in when I really started picking up books regularly.

21. None of my regular hobbies/distractions did the trick anymore. I had read a lot as a kid (mostly Star Wars and Matt Christopher books), but after a point I was never able to just sit down and read. My /lit/ journey started with A Confederacy of Dunces and Journey to the End of the Night.

>>9394033
This. Perhaps 3 or 4 here.
I was raised on La Fontaine, Homer and Ovid and I read Baudelaire at 7. Mostly poetry though.

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18. I grew up reading everything that was assigned and I did well, I even loved learning about history but something about reading for enjoyment never clicked with me. I used to play a ton of World of Warcraft. I changed a lot as a person that year and I came to really loving reading and writing in my diary desu

>>9394067
Love*

>>9394033
>>9394063
Fuck off, privileged scum. Down with the bourgeoisie! *spits on the ground*

>>9393990
20, because i forced myself
now i actually like it

15. I once saw a lighthearted humor thread on Greek mythology, and it sparked my interest. I bought a copy of the Iliad and have been reading literature ever since.

19, I was listening to a lot of lectures by Bart Ehrman and decided to buy two of his books. The first book that I ever read was "Misquoting Jesus". I eventually started reading fiction, but it took some time.

20, had seen every good tv show and I was thirsty for more entertainment

Proper literature, at 19. I had read YA, fantasy and other more entertainment-centered genre fiction before, but at that age I was depressed, useless and randomly met someone online that had a great interest in literature. I started with Hesse

21 (22 now)
Back in high school I didn't enjoy most of the books I had to read. As I was looking for ways to entertain myself I gave an attempt at literature. First LN Welcome to the NHK, then Kafka on the Shore, No Longer Human... soon I got myself an e-reader and have been reading since.

How do I avoid using "I" so much in my sentences?

18
I grew up playing video games but had reached the point where they began to feel unfulfilling to me so I decided to give literature a try.

It kind of went in stages for me. I didn't really ever read for pleasure before the 7th grade or so.
When I was a kid I loved having my mom read me bible stories before bed
When I was like 12-15 I would read a lot of fantasy like Harry Potter orTolkien
When I was in highschool, I had to read Tom Sawyer and House of Leaves for summer reading projects
When I was 17 I picked up Ulysses from the library, unaware of how hard a read it is, but I was too stubborn to not finish it.

10. Got to pick out a free book at my Elementary school's library book fair, did so, took it home, read it, loved it, started checking out books. Started collecting when I was 14. Sheer love and an interest in how other minds present themselves in essays, poetry, stories, etc.

18. I took a conscious decision to be cultured. I decided that since I was a lonely loser, I might as well be a well-read lonely loser.

>>9394241
When you're writing in first person, don't describe what your character is doing, describe what is changing around your character and how their actions are affecting the world, whenever possible. Also interject their thoughts about what is happening without attributing them. And NEVER describe your character sensing things! Describe the things themselves.

E.g. This is before (sorry it's shit, it's just an example):
>I heard screaming somewhere in the building. I took off. I started running down a hallway. I saw doors on each side. I opened the doors but I saw that the rooms behind them were empty. I kept running.

This is after:
>Screams. They were coming from somewhere in the building. Were they my sister's? I took off, and the squeaky thuds of my feet hitting the ground echo off of the alabaster walls around. Behind the first door, nothing. The next, nothing. And so on and on. Breathing feels like rubbing sandpaper against my neck. The screams don't stop, and so neither can I.

Idk, it sounds bad (i.e. like YA fiction) because I don't know what the fuck I'm writing, but this is the general idea.

>>9393990
>19
I thought literary fiction would make me smarter. Has it? Probably not, but at least I'm a stronger reader now

15. Started reading to impress my girlfriend, who liked literature. She'd read Anna K. at that point, among other actual good books. Started to actually enjoy the literature at some point, and now--six years later--we live together and I read way more than her. Though I read a lot of post-modern shit and she hates it (she's currently reading Brothers' K, and I've finally got around to Anna K. so I guess it's a sort of full circle at this point).

>>9393990

My uncle touched me while reading e.e.cummings

first started reading for fun in 1st grade and started reading serious fiction in 8th and it's been hell/great since

>>9394241
>Back in high school, I didnt enjoy most of the books that were available. Looking for more ways to entertain myself, my focus turned to literature. etc.
You generally have to use it a bit, maybe once or twice, but once you've contextualized who is the subject (you, I), it becomes obvious. who else would you be speaking about?

>>9393990
I read pretty excessively as a kid, but started really getting into literature (mostly continental philosophy) when I was 17.

>>9394971
Aw, that's sweet

>>9394971

>Brothers K

Sucks.

>>9393990
Grew up in an unread poor family but my mom bought me books since it's usually cheap. Turned out it was a good idea.

Got into the joy of reading way back in even elementary school with 40k books. From then through high school I devoured science fiction, occasionally veering into the classics when they seemed like they'd have good sci-fi idea value (Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, Gulliver's Travels, etc). Then in college I read Book of the New Sun and it blew my top. The first time I truly realized the power of language itself. After that I started dipping my toes into real literature. Nabokov, Pynchon, Faulkner, etc. Although funnily enough I might still, despite reading all that, not realize that I was into "literature" if it wasn't for discovering Christopher Hitchens a few years after BotNS. He was the first person that really showed me what the literary life actually means.

>>9394953
Damn, right on.

>>9394953
>started
>never describe your character sensing things
>breathing FEELS like sandpaper against my neck
shouldve been "breathing IS like rubbing sandpaper against my neck" desu

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>>9393990
11, nobody wanted to talk to me so I just turned to reading

>>9393990
14

My English teacher have me 1984 and Brave New World to read. Then F451. Then Camus. I had 19 kids in my class in a town of 750 people, so she'd never had too many kids as interested in literature as I was.

I'd get done with a book and discuss it with her. She had a good way of explaining the more complex themes of a work without being condescending.

It was just very mentally stimulating to me. Especially the first few when it took a few chapters to grow familiar with the sophisticated writing styles, which was a lot harder than the Darren Shan/ Gary Paulsen stuff I'd been reading.

I felt like it gave me a deep insight into situations, people, and ideas that I wouldn't have known about or concerned myself with otherwise. Reading was, and continues to be, in my opinion, the most efficient, accurate, and beautiful way to express the conditions and psyche of other individuals.

There's a lot universality to good literature. The idea that someone could string a few words together that could be passed down and set in front of another person 400 years later in a completely different world and still evoke the same intended emotion is incredible to me.

Another thing that continues to draw to me literature is the idea of language itself. Everyone uses language. It's not an exclusive club. You don't have to spend years learning to draw, sculpt, paint, or play an instrument. If something is written in your language, there's little stopping you from reading it. And there's little stopping you of creating something of your own. The idea that a few geniuses throughout history have 'mastered' this thing we all use, this we have to use to understand and communicate with the world around us, is very inspiring to me.

Language is used in every part of life, and so there are few things that cannot be conveyed by it. It's the closest we can get to truly understanding people.

basically literature kicks ass

19.
Basic training is really fucking boring.

17 when I read Infinite Jest, the first "literature" book I really read without anybody assigning it to me

>>9395169
this desu

I never made a conscious decision to get interested in reading. It's just something I've always enjoyed doing

17 or 18. I'd read like Brave New World and Siddhartha and shit during my teens and even tried to start Ulysses but I only seriously got into it around 18 when I got really intensely interested in Christfaggotry and starting reading theology which then took me to philosophy and literature.

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>>9394953
Saved

>>9395476
>brave new world
Lol

>>9393990
20. i basically went through a pseudo-existential crisis where i was paranoid about how im wasting my life playing video games, watching vacuous movies and tv shows and realized there was millions of incredible books out there that i wont be able to read in my lifetime and that every passing moment is just wasting away for brainless nonsense.

I don't want to make a thread, but I was hoping to get a bit of advice. I'm trying to start a book. I plan to have it in the first person, but I don't want to have things like, "I said"; "he said", how to write about sending a texting with saying it. Any advice?

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As a business major in college I read "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and had a reaction similar to this, but not as dramatic:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VSFnmM12LOQ

I pretty much wobbled all the way from the library to my next class. I could barely do more than mumble to other people. I had no idea words on a page could give me a stronger physical reaction than anything I've ever seen on a screen.

I haven't felt anything like it since, to be fair. Even reading the story again does nothing for me, and it's not even one of my favorite stories now that I've read more writing. But that initial feeling was enough to get me into lit.

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>>9394081

19, I realized that "The Big Lebowski" was a biblical allegory and an existential piece on modern times. I became fascinated by the manner which stories in movies and literature could represent and explore the human condition and wanted to dedicate my free time to understanding it as a creative passion. I had read plenty of highschool required literature and genre fiction etc. as a nerdy kid but as I became an adult I realized it was time to become a skilled professional at something in order to be independant, and to have goals and dreams as well. Better than smoking pot and playing games

Never, I'm a stupid fucking piece of shit that needs to die

>>9395476
>I'd read like Brave New World and Siddhartha and shit during my teens
kek, were you in my AP lit class

>>9395723
It's a good book, if you don't like it, you're a confirmed cock smoker

>>9393990
Maybe age 13, when I stopped reading Agatha Christie and started reading Gorky.

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>>9395168
ownt me

>>9393990
19. There was very interesting comment on 9fag (forgive me) about Dostoyevsky and how he criticizes Catholicism through his novel The Idiot. I, as an ignorant fuckwit failed to consider that Orthdoxy was the norm in Russia, thought that's pretty interesting how a Christian criticizes Catholicism. So, in order to have some background info, I started with his earliest major novel Crime and Punishment, then to The Idiot and so on, reading every other major novel of Dostoyevsky chronogically.
The end.

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>>9395218
Yeah, yeah, that's nice and all. But the important question is: Did you fuck your teacher?

>>9393990
22, I was living in my hammock and you can only spend so much time drinking 40s and masturbating yourself to sleep.

16 because my life was lacking
nothing has changed

always
neither of my parents read, but i was encouraged.

Man, you guys are a bunch of latebloomers

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>>9394136
>tfw my shitposting may spark an interest in literature for some 15 year old

>>9396509
do you really want to doom some innocent teen to this fate of ours, anon?

My mother painted me a whole book containing the alphabet (each page had a letter and a painting of a thing that started with that letter), so I learned how to read a few years before everyone else. At first I mostly read comics, often aloud to other kids in the kindergarten.
When I was around 8-10 years old I started reading real books, I soon had devoured Hobbit, Narnia, Harry Potter, Schwab's Greek mythology and lots of other stuff including Eragon.
At 15 the school system forced me to start with the Greeks and spend the next 4 years learning about the history of western literature. Luckily I had a good prof so I ended up loving it.

15 because I didn't have friends in school, so I needed something to do during lunch that wasn't just staring blankly at everyone else having fun.

True fax.

As soon as I was able to read. That's what happens when you have parents who don't even bother buying a TV.

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17. Murakami. I was recovering from brain surgery and I had a lot of time to read.

>>9394067
IS THIS GRAHAM BARKLEY?!?!?!

>>9394033
It's funny how our parents raise us wrong, fuck up our lives, and later have the guts to call us failures.

>>9397020
It's weird how some people never grow up beyond the "all my faults are someone else's fault" phase.

>>9397053
Good goy.

>>9396706
Shelby Foote

>>9394274
Kek, I'm an 18 yo bored of games trying to search for something to read here.

What did you started with?

>>9397068

>blaming not only your parents but also the Jews for all your problems

Sounds like a healthy outlook. And besides, even if the Jews were ruining your life, actually blaming them and believing it only further denies yourself agency, making the problem worse.

>>9393990
54564

>>9397525
Thanks, rabbi.

>>9394912
Are you still a lonely loser till now?

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>>9396696
Did literature prevent you from becoming a vegetable?

>>9393990
7
School made me read, ended up enjoying. Guess I have an inate inclination towards literature. Since im introverted I found books more entertaining than people.

14. I was a jock, then suddenly became interested in knowledge. Plato says we should start with sports, right?

>>9397545
Is the pussy game still good?

>>9397519

Not the OP, but I most seriously got into literature because of David Foster Wallace's essays. I was in a similar situation as you, so my attention span was shorter as a result of the (semi-)instant gratification of more visual media like video games, so reading his essays, which have great prose and are dense with content, allowed me to get the satisfaction of reading engaging literature more easily because of the relative brevity and idea-density of the essay form. I'm still of the opinion that essays are the most satisfying type of literature because the best of them contain all the virtues of literature (good prose styling, insight into wide arrays of topics, tight structure, etc.) in a format that almost necessarily cuts out all the fat.

Once I began reading essays, I found my vocabulary, attention span, and interest in literature skyrocketed. Both Wallace and Updike are great places to start because neither holds back on the prose styling while delivering extremely interesting arguments. Montaigne is the canonical example of an essayist, and he is also quite good (and in some ways better), but I'd start with the others first because they are often structurally more similar to fiction, which I think simply makes for a better read, at the very least for aestheric reasons.

My dad rapes me

Dumbledore dies

>>9397545
I got no women until I started down the path of a writer, then I got all sorts of writer women. Go figure.

>>9393990
I was 8 when the first Harry Potter book came out, it was given to me for my birthday, and I've been been reading books ever since.

I graduated to adult literature when I turned 13, that's when started reading Lovecraft.

>>9397600

This.

My first memory of reading is my mother reading me a chapter of Harry Potter every night and I got so pissed at how slow she read that I just started reading it myself.

19

I'd play videogames all the time in my free time and loved them but as time passed I kept getting disappointed by new releases. I went from playing games for like 4 or more hours a day to barely an hour. I'd maybe play a couple of multiplayer matches and then call it a day.

I then started reading some books my dad had and got hooked.

I still occasionally play viddy games, been playing Persona 5 recently and I really enjoy it but I always find at least an hour a day to read.

>>9393990
It was probably when I was a child and my father was teaching me how to read. I learned on the Houghton Mifflin reader, I think, an old version that was grey with gold trim. I still remember the story of the sparrow and the snow. I remember pronouncing the double O's in "look", and was fascinated.

Now I've since graduated on to Green Eggs and Ham.

>>9396027
This man knows whats up. Tell us >>9395218

>>9395731
Now you're just wasting you life reading books instead.

>>9397525
Fucking kike. Give me your fucking bag of gold.

>>9394912
This except I was 20 instead of 18. Happy to report that reading didn't make me any less of a lonely loser.

21. I watched Solaris and the characters talk about Dostoevsky and I got tired of knowing fuck all about literature. Sort of hard and pointless to get deep into art film without also being in to literature

>>9393990
Serious literature at 17, I hated my life and thought that literature ought to have an answer to why I hate my life.

I still hate my life.

>>9399734
No

I didn't.

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>>9400150

I decided to check out /lit/ while I was 16 and on vacation in Ireland, so I bought The Stranger and Blood Meridian, finished the stranger on the trip, and finished BM when I was 17. I've been picking up pace ever since

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>>9400317
Did you start out of genuine curiousity or just for the, uhm, streed cred? I mean, why would you start because /lit/ recommended you its meme-collection?

>>9399953
Hauntingly similar to the path I took and age I took interest. The scene in the cafe in Vivre sa Vie pushed me over the edge.

>>9394014
Same, I really needed some depth in my life. Never looked back. I never thought I'd grow out of games either.

21-22
i was deep into music film and games so it felt as if one medium was missing. for example i was advanced enough into music to be interested in musique concrete or electroacustic but i had read maybe 2 books by my own. also all my life i've had an inferiority complex regarding people who read. by now i've assimilated that they're better than me and my only purpose is to be used as a human toilet by them, get defecated on my face, be forced to walk like a dog, be deprived of food and fun for their enjoyment, etc

>>9395218
Very well said

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i chair the exact same feelings as everyone in this thread... i was really burnt out on video games and anime from my teens and wanted to try something new

19, deep loneliness

>>9401043
>samaistuin

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How do you burn out on video games and 4chan? Please god someone tell me so I can end this obsession.

>>9397555
Whaaat?? I remember writing essays in high school. Those things I wrote - utter garbage. What are the topics of these essays. Are they always problematic? That's the kind we used to write. Are there any satirical, happy essays?

>>9402221
do something productive once in your life. The next time you play video games for 5hours you'll feel guilt that will motivate you to deal with this addiction.

14, my parents took me on a seaside holiday and I was a super fat fuck child. I bought a book and hid inside the hotel room because I was so self-conscious of my disgusting obese body. Now I like to read and I'm not longer a fat fuck, win win.

When I was like 11 years old.
I think the first book that I really fell in love with was The Hobbit. Then I proceeded to obsess over Star Wars EU books and the Redwall series.

>>9395220
You have time to read in basic training?

It's more like I slowly slipped myself into literature. I accidentally picked up Ulysses in 2010 (age 19) and that had something to do with it. But before that I had done a bit of casual reading with stuff like Palahniuk and Ellison, and Homer as a kid. I've been browsing /lit/ for some time and that helped facilitate things. But each year I'm more serious than the previous year so it's hard to tell where it really starts. I significantly upped my reading in 2015, maybe that's when I'd put it.

>>9402707
A sample
https://youtu.be/GwS5pEfcQNk

Also check out the essays of Joan Didion and GK Chesterton, along with the ones anon mentioned.

>>9395530
Saved

3-4 years old, stopped at 11 when I was finally allowed to play games like fallout. I then discovered video games are not all that great at all with all the freedom I now had being 18 (and drugs really, LSD is a much funnier game that chivalry MW). My friends did the same so we started spending less time with each other online. I finally restarted reading after some fags on /v/ told me to write my essay on Brave New World instead of BioShock. So 3-4 then stopped at 11 and started again at around 17-18.

12 or 13, someone left their copy of Animal Farm under my desk in math and I got bored. When combined with my teen angst and loneliness, it provided the transition into reading more regularly.

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>>9402221
Half listen to >>9402717. What you need is another passion too, not just work. I used to be a hardcore league player (other games too but with friends leagues was a good choice) and finally my friends and I lost interest and we drifted from video games. I did not find another game I was passionate about so I went back to my old hobby, reading. You can't force yourself to like reading that easily. I assume you take the bus or have some free time during the day, just read then. Pick a book you think you would like (the /lit/ starter pack is fine) and just read it when you can. Video games are like drugs, don't expect it to be quick and easy to replace it with another drug.

I was read to from an early age (good kids books like The Jungle Book and Swiss Family Robinsons and original fairy tales) and started reading proper literature myself around age 7 or 8.

My family are well educated and a librarian and an english teacher. They loved books and reading since they were kids, and the house was full of books.

>>9394081
>>9394076
Fags

>>9393990
I read a lot as a kid, but I only really got into real literature at about 17. It was around the time I decided I wanted to spend my life writing, so I figured reading more than I put out would be a good idea. Probably one of the best decisions I've made.

>>9393990
16 or 17. My AP English class assigned some books I actually liked (Siddhartha and The Stranger). I read through The Stranger in one day back then, and now at 22 I'm finally getting back into reading.

Finished The plague last month, and I just finished Nausea. Not sure what to read next.

i dont recall what age, and there wasn't any specific impetus
I recall enjoying The Hobbit, and I loved being taken to the local Library as a child