Jane Eyre and The Lord of the Rings were both books that pulled me into them entirely when I first read them. I think the age I read them at (about twelve or so) was crucial. They were the type of books that my parents would have to take off me and hide so I'd sleep. And they still give me pleasure every time I read them, which not every book I loved at that age does.

What was your most pleasurable reading experience?

I'm not sure how to answer that. I mean, define?

Because my book collection contains a lot of reading material that is pleasurable, but not in the sense I think you mean. To be vague.

Either sitting in the car at a lakeside park reading Me Talk Pretty One Day with the slow build funny that left me first smiling, then grinning, then by the end of the book laughing so hard I thought I was going to puke, or that point in Anansi Boys where I realized I was spending all the time I wasn't reading it casting it.

(Current mental cast list: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mos Def, and Colette Brown. It turns out to be a hard movie to cast.)

I remember being sucked into LotR the first time I read it (I had to finish it ASAP, and did manage to finish it in 10 days). One of my most fun reading nights that I remember just enjoying as I was experiencing it was one Saturday night during my freshman year of college, when my roommate was gone for the weekend and I had the room to myself, so I put on a tape of some classical piano pieces, curled up on my roommate's easy chair that I didn't feel comfortable using if she was around (even though she gave her OK), and wallowed in King's The Stand. A very fun break from studying, more so than any barhopping I could have done instead.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in all media. It's the sort of book for which I'd have created fandom. It so needed it. I read it around people who loved it, so it was a very interactive experience. And I've read them an assload of times by now. And forced other people to read them too. The Phantom Tollbooth--it's sort of a proto HGttG, for kids, with a moral. Obvious morals, but not heavy handed. I wish I'd had someone to interact with about it while I read it the first time, someone to go to with all my "Oh! Cool!" moments, of which there were quite a few.

Hmm. What else. Anansi Boys, distractingly so. I don't remember having nostalgia for the process of reading a book before. Especially since I was in my car during lunch in hot Simi parking lots.

Pride and Prejudice was my favourite book required for school. I'm seeing a trend--the ability to talk about it during and shortly after the read of a good book really heightens the experience.

There's a Nalo Hopkinson edited anthology...Mojo Rising, perhaps, about magic in the African diaspora, that was a series of stories that were both familiar and fantastic, and of a really consistent high quality. Many "sit back and nod" moments there.

I clearly remember reading Lord of the Rings on a car trip to the Lake District and Scotland, and deciding to memorise all the poetry. By chanting it out loud. I enjoyed myself, but I can't speak for my parents.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold was exciting for meta reasons. I was 9 or so, and my grade school teacher saw me being bored because I'd read all the books in the classroom. So she brought this in from home. I'd been raiding my parents' bookshelves for longer than made sense, so it wasn't my first grownup book. But it was my first grownup book given to me to read by a grownup.

Reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in the lounge car of the Capitol Limited -- it was an overnight train so there was absolutely nothing to distract or interrupt me, and I think Wolfe's style gave me a contact high. I've never reread it, which is odd for me, but I know I'm not going to recapture that extremely trippy experience.

Most of my favorite books are associated with all-nighters, which are fun in their way, but while the reading part is pleasurable, I'm not sure the exhaustion is. I think it took me two very long nights to finish The Prodigal Woman, but since I'm usually pretty plot-focused it was kind of a revelation for me to love a character as much as I adore Leda.

Oh, I will steal from ita and mention Hitchhikers. It was a family thing for me -- we started listening to the radio series on NPR and immediately got the book. So I associate the first book with my brother fussing to record the show onto cassettes, and my parents on the couch listening, and me in the battered 70's armchair, reading along with the show (before the plots start to diverge completely). I was... jeez, 8 at the time? So it was a few years before I had friends who knew what the hell I kept going on about.

ou find something new that arranges your brain, and then there are those kind that when you put them down you feel like you've been somewhere, like coming out of the movies can sometimes be.

This is really well put. Maybe you should, you know, write or something.

The first time I remember loving the experience of reading was reading Wind in the Willows. I remember sitting on my mother's lap as she read it to me, and suddenly (of course it wasn't, but it felt like it) the squiggles on the page clearly corresponded to what she was saying! And then I started trying to do it by myself, and having the story show up in my head via my own efforts, rather than someone telling it to me, was wonderful. A revelation.

Fast forward to third grade and The Hobbit. I don't even remember the physical reading, just being sucked in.

Another standout memory is a summer in high school. Every week at my cello lesson, my teacher would give me a shopping bag full of paperbacks, and I'd spend the week either floating on the pool or laying on the deck devouring them. Mostly science fiction. And I probably should've been practicing cello instead.

Reading was always a bit uncomfortable for me, as before I had surgery on my arm I couldn't hold a book for over 10 minutes without it hurting. And my mother, who taught me to read before I started school, then decided I read too much and would harangue me constantly ("The reason you have to wear glasses is because you read so much!"). So it was always a guilty pleasure, intenified because none of my friends did it.

One of my favorite reading experiences is reading the last half of Absalom, Absalom! in one Sunday. I spent pretty much the entire day in the upstairs TV room plowing through Faulkner. That shit fried my brain in the most awesome way possible.

Never read that book...yeah, yeah, I know. Whatever shock you've got, heard it. I don't know why I haven't at this point...I used to think I wouldn't like it, but I didn't know y'all then. Was almost literally a different person. But I've still not gotten to it yet.Most recent "Damn!" reading experience is either Lethem's "Fortress of Solitude" or Price's "Freedomland"(Freedomland made me cry like a bitch, though. So not having that experience in a theater. Nuh and uh.)

What Strega said about TEKAAT was my experience with The Illuminatus Trilogy. I read that during a day of getting a government physical, having fasted for 12 hours when the day started and not eating all day, sitting by myself in the corner of a waiting room, and by 5 pm I seriously had a contact high going.

I spent several nights in college reading basically all night -- a couple of times with Stephen King, a couple with Anne Rice. It made me feel badass both in the "I'm not a kid anymore! I can stay up as late as I want!" sense and in the "FUCK YOU, schoolwork!" sense.