Another influence on my early reading was my mother.
When I read Roald Dahl (barely a functional mother, alive or present, to be found) with my kids, I still feel that thrill that I remember from my early reading.
I definitely discovered some narrative possibilities by reading the Chilean poets Gonzalo Millán, Nicanor Parra, and Enrique Lihn; my early reading of Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, and — last but not least — Edgar Lee Masters was also important.
(Which amused me, because much of my early reading was decidedly unfeminist: I must have read every single Mills & Boon romance published before I was 16. And each time I try to read those books called "classic feminist texts", I get bored, and I struggle to finish them).
"I can only go on my early reading of the report, and it's certainly not a report that anybody should be taking decisions on on the basis of only reading through once," he said.
I don't know but I know that's what remained with me from my early reading of her in that convent school room.
1904,FDR in Switzerland with Mrs. Stanley Mortimer and childern Years passed, each confirming, ever more clearly, a prophecy fully foretold by my early reading list.
If time and toddler allow, I will also cram in Colin Dann, Dick King-Smith, and – regressing all the way back to my earliest independent reading – Enid Blyton (although I can no longer fit into the grey jumper with the knitted pink bunnies that feels de rigueur for this sort of time travel).
I'm going to stretch my definition of "literary" to include manga and comic strips because the graphic genre was formative in my own early reading as well as that of both my children - who picked up their cartoon reading addiction from their mother (I picked up mine from my father).
I was greatly looking forward to meeting a writer who had been so much a part of my own early reading, especially the delicious, clandestine reading done avidly in lieu of homework, and the compulsive reading done at night with a flashlight when I ought to have been sleeping.
