Can you recall the first literary work you read?

[Winston-Smith]

The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula K. Le Guin. I think I was eleven.

[Dimitra]

Sans Famille by Malot and Uncle Tom's Cabin.Particularly that affected me the most and I still remember how much I cried lol.I was about 6-7 and I swore never to read that again,though now I doubt it would affect me much.: p

[Bastable]

Les Miserables when i was about 16 or 17

[Lumiere]

I don't remember any books before I devoured Jane Eyre at 13.

[Snowqueen]

I read an Urdu translation of King Solomon's Mines at the age of 7. While the first English novel that I read was Oliver Twist.

[marcolfo]

'twas Truman Capote's In cold blood.

[Jozanny]

I really can't remember. When I was young I read copiously and wrote badly. I had to get past university, in fact, for my bylines to take off, as it were, but I was genre driven and read a ton of then contemporary science fiction, Charlotte's Webb, and Toni Morrison, who I did not fully grasp at the time.

The best I can recall is that when I was twelve, getting butchered in the hospital by orthopods, I read Margaret Mitchell, and a fictional biography of Napoleon, called Desiree, Golda Meir's autobiography, and maybe a quickly done pastiche about the life of Judy Garland--but for that last I might have even been younger, when we still lived on Camac Street in the city.

We recently rode past there on the bus, my ex and I, but that world and this one I'm in now might have occurred in another universe.

[hack]

The first "literature" I recall reading (not having been read to me) were the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson. I suppose I was 8 or 9. My bed is still my boat.

[Amoxcalli]

I was read Le Petit Prince when I was very young, but I think the first literary work I read on my own was Robinson Crusoe. What age? About 7, I think, give or take a year.

[Katy North]

The first work of children's literature I read was "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe".

The first work of adult literature that I enjoyed was "The Lord of the Flies". I had read others before then, but didn't understand "how" to read them, if you know what I mean.

[neilgee]

With me it was more a case of discovering what wasn't "literature" when I was about 14/15. When our lit teacher encouraged us to "read" I didn't know there were any distinctions until I told him one day that I'd read The Exorcist and didn't get a response. I thought he hadn't heard me so I repeated myself only to get a rather weary "Oh, have you?" and I suddenly understood there was a distinction without him having to say anything else.

I wouldn't say I was into literature though until I tried Shakespeare again at 18 and actually began to enjoy it.

[myrna22]

It was probably Little Women. Also Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom's Cabin. I was a voracious reader as far back as I can remember. My dad started taking me to the local library when I was very small; in elementary school I went there on my own. I worked my way through the children's and young adult sections and on to real literature. By the time I was in high school I was taking the bus into the city once a month to go to the main county library and roam the 'stacks' for anything that looked appealing. I became an author reader. When I read something I particularly liked, I'd read everything they had by that author. I still tend to do that. So, I've read everything Hemingway wrote. Everything Steinbeck wrote. Everything Thomas Hardy wrote. And so on.

Although my dad introduced me to the local branch library and read to me at night, things like The Bobbsey Twins and Pippi Longstocking, I didn't get much guidance about what to read beyond children's literature. I would read books that had been made into movies because I believed if a book had been made into a movie, it must be a good or important book (and back in those days, it often was). So I read things like The Grapes of Wrath, The Good Earth, Rebecca, Gone With the Wind, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Anatomy of Murder, Breakfast at Tiffanys, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, East of Eden, and so on, all films I had watched as old reruns on TV. It is also how I got into reading plays, such as The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, when most kids didn't read plays. I don't actually rememeber most of the stuff we read in school. I remember the many, many books I read on my own, and those wonderful trips to the downtown library, half an hour on the bus each way, a couple of hours roaming the stacks.

[thelastmohican]

I'd say mine had to be Tom Sawyer. I read it when I was about 10 and still have the same copy 35 years later.

[blazeofglory]

I remember when I read Robinson Crusoe as a small boy

[Three Sparrows]

Hm...I believe the first I read was the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, if that counts, when I was 6 or 7. I remember reading Anna Karenina when I was 11 though, and I actually liked it.