When you acquire the ability to read and write at the early age of three you have quite some time to do serious and less serious reading until you're 23. For the last 20 years I've been working my way through literature, taking a well-trodden, if somewhat boyish path.
My first books were crime stories for children. There is this...
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When you acquire the ability to read and write at the early age of three you have quite some time to do serious and less serious reading until you're 23. For the last 20 years I've been working my way through literature, taking a well-trodden, if somewhat boyish path.
My first books were crime stories for children. There is this Austrian writer - Thomas Brezina - who every Austrian knows and most of us have read as kids. The funny thing is that crime stories (and romance) are the books I read the least now.
The next big step that brought me farther into the snares of literature was fantasy books. Again, I started reading a German writer's books - Wolfgang Hohlbein - who was full of talent and ideas but whose characters were all the same. Which is why, after about three years of being his most avid fan, I moved on to the usual: The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter books and all sorts of other fantasy novels, good and bad and some of them ugly.
One should think that with highschool I started reading more serious literature, you know, all the big names. Alas, I was cursed (or blessed) with the sweetest German and English teachers ever who kept suggesting we read Goethe and Schiller but never wanted to actually force them on anyone. I did take up those suggestions, though, and soon discovered that I like reading plays as much as watching them, that my English is quite good enough to read novels in the original language and that there was, indeed, a quite big world outside the fantasy realms I cherished so much.
By now, I have a range of favourite authors that cover pretty much the whole of literature - excepting romance and crime, and I'm slowly working my way into the latter.
Without books, my world would be half-empty and I wouldn't be the person that I am.
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