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.

I don't think I've done the read all night thing. It's hard for me to get that comfortable in a reading position.

A reading experience I wish I remembered was Where the Wild Things Are. It's the book that prompted my parents to teach me to read early since they were fed up with reading it to me over and over (and you know how pissy kids get if you try and cheat and skip stuff--I was the ur-pisser).

Especially with a bigger book, I like to kind of slounge in bed with a pillow on my lap and the book propped on that. Also I just roll around and change positions a lot.

This wasn't exactly pleasurable, but very memorable. I took a redeye to Iowa for a conference, and someone gave me the Langoliers to read. It really added to the creepiness that I got to my destination airport while everything was still closed and had to wait in the deserted terminal until the shuttle buses started running.

Holy shit, -t. That would have been fucking creepy cool.

I've wanted to read that; I really liked the miniseries.