man sometimes all the weird shit i did as a kid comes back to me and im like "why did i read about incorruptible saints obsessively when i was like 7"
other weird shit i used to read as a child:
- the phonebook
- like three or four books on the ghosts of st. augustine
- the encyclopedia (it had an astronomy section which is where i learned about the hertzsprung-russell diagram and the tolman-oppenheimer-volkof limit)
- manuals on electrical wiring
- "the book of the sandman and the alphabet of sleep", a really old and weird book that was falling apart but was my favorite book of all fucking time until i was like 10 or something
i obsessively read a book my dad had that catalogued all the different types and variations of roofs from the 1200s to the present day and still remember that my favorite type is a clerestory roof. like i read that thing so much.
i also read the manual for the thermostat and hvac for some reason. this was infuriating to my dad because i always wanted it colder than it was and i knew more than him at some point lmfao
not gonna lie that book about the roofs sounds like a good read to me. also lmaoooooo
I read paleontology textbooks as a kid. But my vocabulary was through the roof by the time I was three anyway. I read The Belljar and the Illiad in Kindergarten. My parents scrambled to get books for me growing up. The school librarian called me a monster in fifth grade cause She caught me reading her thesis.
My favorite book growing up was the Doom 2 Strategy Guide. If you've never read it before, it is written in the tone of a drill sergeant yelling at you before giving you military briefings on each level. For somebody who (quite reasonably) had only ever been exposed to books about friendly animals to this point in life, it really opened my eyes to what books could be. It also contained maps and detailed instructions for how to navigate the areas those maps described, and probably sparked my deep and abiding interest in maps.
fellow strategy guide enjoyer!!!!!! i loved reading those too :)
