After everyone’s amazing movie answers I’ve gotta ask, my mentions be damned: What’s your best memory of reading a novel? I’m not asking about the best novel you’ve ever read, I’m asking about the experience of reading that novel. What’s your favorite memory associated with reading a novel and why?
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One day, as a young teenager, I tentatively decided to try Dragonflight again. I loved it, and it opened up a whole new world of books to me.
I thought of this moment with deep nostalgia when Philip Roth died and thanked him for his work.
We weren't very close at the time but a shared love of TP helped us bond.
We've been married 31 years.
And congrats! To both of you
Sarum by Rutherfurd was such an escape. And long, god bless it. I needed that length to get through that time.
Probably the most peaceful I've ever felt 😌
I spent the rest of my classes with it tucked inside my schoolbooks, reading and trying to silently laugh.
That said, the name of this series is ultra edgy and it seems like it would be initially, but ends up being incredibly wholesome.
Mild, sunny early September day, staffing the boat rental shack at a lakeside resort all by myself. Few guests in the resort, no one wanted to rent a boat.
I read The Princess Bride for the first time, cover to cover, and was delighted the whole time.
Much better than sobbing in class reading Where The Red Fern Grows.
So we got a stock pile of weed, booze and junk food and had a bad books party
Adventure in the breeze and rustling leaves!
Nobody to answer to but time.
I've loved him since his first published stories - I remember running out to get CivilWarLand in Bad Decline the moment it came out. But he reached new levels with Lincoln
It was the first time I'd ever read a book with a queer protaganist and that was a revelation for the teenage me.
Years later, i found out he did it to get me to read. It worked, & still does
A sweet memory
RIP
I was in the HS library &I pulled down Uncle Fred in the Springtime by PG Wodehouse
I just flew thru to a comic world which was never blighted by loss
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Baynes
Read it in one sitting because I couldn't stop. I felt the tension like a red-hot wire going from the top of my head to my feet. During one scene, I don't think I breathed as the images flashed past, the noise from the chaos clanged in my ears. I felt drained at the end.
The Mist specifically because my grandparents used to own a cabin near Bridgton where the story was set.
The book was home.
Mom read me the Hobbit chapter by chapter over many days.
We finished it one afternoon, lying on her bed. She closed the book, left to make supper or some such... I rolled over, picked up the book and started reading chapter one.
Reread a couple/three of them a few years ago in my late 40’s and happy to report they were exactly what I was hoping for.
It's not my best experience of reading a book, but a very clear one
I think my favourite experiences are rereads
It’s also the oldest continually serving restaurant in the world, since 1725.
I have a random copy of Don Quijote in Spanish, reprinted in Paris, I found in a bookstore in Rye (England), proudly displayed on my bookshelf. Worth 40 pounds. Maybe.
I really needed to read it again, one afternoon as school was letting out, during the last week of the spring semester.
The librarian smiled at me fondly and told me to just keep the book.
Friend sends me a text: "Fuck."
Me: "So you met Jinglebells, then?" (just in case I was wrong)
Reading Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light and Dilvish the Damned in middle school, then meeting the author at a local library.
More recently, the Lies of Locke Lamora was the first Audiobook I fell in love with.
I also remember taking forever to realize that a work of fiction referred to within them didn't actually exist, that it wasn't just my inability to find this book that the characters talked about.
I didn't, but I damn sure thought about it.
Or reading Turks Fruit in Italy, crickets on the trees while pine needles are scattered by my chair.
Reading House of Leaves on a trip and coming back home to my roommate, instead of saying hello, saying, “Did you know you have one more window on the outside of your bedroom than the inside?”
Didn’t sleep in said bedroom for a week.
Basically all I was doing was teaching, finishing my dissertation, and reading WoT.
It also gave me an appreciation for what’s good about the series. There’s something weirdly irreplaceable…
Especially when you can hold the whole thing in memory because you’ve been mainlining hundreds of pages a day.
Jokes on them. I got an ending.
Not usually a series that creeped me out, but that part did.
I shared a birthday with the main character, which I found rather exciting.
Unfortunately, there was a death in the family, requiring a road trip to Idaho
As we drove across E Washington, we stopped at a rest stop somewhere north of Walla Walla.
There, on a picnic table was Blue Shoe.
It had been left (intentionally!) through Book Crossing
We had my mom, myself, my 3 kids, my brother and my niece in a mini van. Having that slice of time to finish my book in the exhaustion at the end of a day of driving was priceless and so memorable
It was then that I looked up expecting a miracle. How I wanted to be her
But it was Mercedes Lackey & Arrows of the Queen
It was a voyage of wonder: I discovered danmei/manhuas through Qiang Jin Jiu/Ballad of Sword & Wine & never looked back
#T97 changed my writing & perspective on everything
2. Use of Weapons, when it all comes together. I had to, ahem, sit down for a long time.
it means nothing to almost everyone, but for me it was "uh how do i do reality testing??" levels of @_@
I read it in 2 days, and I kept having to put it down and walk out on the balcony of my apartment to watch cars go by. Just to make sure there were still people around.
1. Buying "HP: OotP," book and CDs, at midnight with my wife and seven-year-old. Listening to it on the way home, then swapping the book all weekend among us.
2. Listening to "Moby Dick" in my 40s for the first time, awed at its magnificence and so glad it hadn't been forced on me before then.
The second was reading 'Salem's Lot at 25 while riding the light rail btwn Camden & Trenton, NJ as silent suburbia slipped by.
I emerged dazed.
when I was 5 I got D'Aulaire's Norse Gods & Giants from the library and lay on the carpet taking it in
and then when I was 33 my younger godchild kept dragging it over and climbing into my lap and opening it to different pages to demand, "tell me about THIS one"
https://mstdn.ca/@pjohanneson/113215386637671272
Which time? Every time.
And to think I only picked up The Hobbit because it had a dragon on the cover. 😆
(This is *not normal* in London.)
At that moment I knew it was ALL TRUE. Hail Eris! Ewige blumenkraft!
I was about 14, so prime age for war movies/shows. This was the first time I read a book that actually made death/fighting tangible as opposed to a statistic or something that happened to other people. I was wrecked, even though it was about the "bad guys".
Eleven years old, under the covers with a flashlight, pouring through all 1000 pages with exhilarating fear in my heart.
Yeah, I know the sex scene's weird.
Hobbit and LotR had been bedtime stories when I was an extremely little kid exactly once. Unrestricted access to the Rankin-Bass animation, but if I wanted to read it again it was on me.
That (past ready) rite of passage was one of the best weeks of the 8th grade.
Absolute banger.
In retrospect, not my smartest reading decision, but man, that guy can scare you pretty good.
now (which is now then.)