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High school English classes kind of beat the habit of reading out of me. I mean first of all there was this sense of new = not valid; To Kill A Mockingbird was the newest work of literature I studied in high school, written in the 60's about the 30's, everything else was 19th century or older. The Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare, Poe, the goddamn Bronte's.
I stopped going to book stores. I stopped going to the library. Adult reading is like rubbing wood chips in your eyes. It's dry and awful.
My grandmother handed me a book. A paperback novel called Utopia by Lincoln Child. It's a kind of whodunit mystery thriller set in a futuristic theme park, and the main character has a teenage daughter who has an mp3 player. And that caught me off guard. Because I was a teenager with an mp3 player. This book was new. It was written by someone who was still alive, about characters who were my age and my generation. And the book was kinda okay.
I miss my gramma.
Man, same here. In Germany, all we did was read scripts for drama plays. There's nothing more boring. We read only one enjoyable book, which was Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
Only recently have I started enjoying books again and it started with the Hyperion Cantos. I also read a shit ton of books with my little daughter, ranging from Toto the Ninja cat, over Stitch head and Amelia Fang to Harry Potter and Roald Dahl classics. It's a lot of fun, especially since I get to do all of the voices. Sometimes we laugh so hard, it's difficult for her to fall asleep :)
I recall two enjoyable books, both by Morton Rhue, being boot camp and the wave (and one that I liked but most people didn't, kafka's metamorphosis. Sure didn't like having to interpret that though).
At least early on they tried making us read enjoyable books, as in modern books aimed at teenagers, they just... weren't very good.
I think the peak of unenjoyment for me was Das Parfüm, which is technically somewhat modern. I tried reading it and was so bored I just couldn't continue, ended up reading a synopsis somewhere and pretended to know what i was talking about.
At least it never killed reading for me because by the time school made me read books I was already reading fantasy novels in my free time anyway.