Looking back to my childhood to recall what books I read is challenging. First, I don't remember many of them, but then I know I didn't read many books of any importance until my mid-teens. I don't understand why that was because I thought I was a pretty smart kid. I got good grades, and school was just easy for me.
One time in my early teens, I went to Salt Lake on one of their regular trips with my parents. At that time, my Uncle’s family lived in the North Salt Lake area, and we stopped for a visit. He had a large family, and the two girls that were the closest to me in age were sharp girls. Socially, probably ahead of me at the time, and perhaps even a little brighter. I remember as I walked down the hall, seeing in each of their bedrooms that they had books by their beds. The idea that having books to read at that age was good did occur to me from this experience. Nevertheless, I didn't just change my habits and start reading things. I wish I had.
When I was about 3 or 4, my parents would take turns reading to me at bedtime. They read kid books. Probably from the Little Golden Books series. At about eight years old, I started reading funny books. Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Donald Duck, and Uncle Scrooge. At about ten years old, I started reading Boy's Life. At around 12, I started reading movie magazines.
I read the TV guide, Reader's Digest, and Popular Mechanics. I suppose I read everything that was around the house.
After about the 9th grade, I became interested in some well-known dystopian books such as 1984, Brave New World, and Animal Farm. By the time I started college, my interest in philosophy had led me to The Republic by Plato, Aristotle, and The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, to name a few. I read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and then a lot of self-help books.
When I finished college, I began reading a lot of business books. Robert Ringer's book "Winning Through Intimidation" impacted me. I also started reading church books. I have read the scriptures over and over throughout my life.
I have read Ulysses by James Joyce several times to find out if I could understand it. I have read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and most of what Shakespeare wrote. Moby Dick is a book that I read several times and started out hating, but after the last reading, I saw it as a great book. Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Civil Disobedience are books I have read several times.
My love of these books led me to pick the authors that stood out to me. Edgar Allan Poe, Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Charles Dickens are all authors I like. Hemmingway and Mark Twain are authors I have read a lot but don't care for. Faulkner, Nabokov, T.S. Elliot, C.S Lewis, Toni Morrison, Walt Whitman, and Franz Kafka all have many great books I have read.
I love the authors but love the poets even more sometimes. Robert Frost is a favorite poet, and a new poet I like and want to hear more from is Amanda Gorman. Her inauguration day poem for President Biden, "The Hill we Climb," is amazing.
Ok, I have some fallback favorites. Stephen King always gets my attention. This shortlist is top-heavy for what I have read as an adult. There are probably several dozen authors I should have included. (Apology to Maya Angelou, for example) Lots of just modern and exciting authors.
