My favorite reading aloud to others experience was always my babysitting gigs. The Slucki girls across the street loved me because I was the only sitter who had them get ready for bed an hour earlier than their parents said just so we could read together (they even asked why I wasn't around when I had to take a break from sitting jobs while I was in a play).

I used to read Interview with the Vampire sitting upside-down in a papisan chair (under my loft bed, behind a curtain), while blasting Phantom of the Opera on the stereo. At least I was a dedicated teen cliché.

Hee. I inhaled The Stand over a long weekend when I was about 15, while obsessively listening to a new Howard Jones album. To this day I can't hear anything off that album without getting a little creeped out.

As bad as some versions of King's work can be, I do love the miniseries of "The Stand," especially the opening credits of the first ep with the song "Don't Fear the Reaper" playing over images of the death inside the compound where Captain Trips started.

I read The Stand in India. It took me nearly the entire trip, plane rides and all.

Was that the original version, or the rerelease, now with 500 more pages!

The rerelease! Extra long!

The reading in the dark thing I kind of get (and nag my husband about now), but my mom used to chide me for reading upside down, saying THAT would ruin my eyes (I'd lay on my back on the floor and put the book over my head resting on the floor). Given that everybody in my family back as far as I know had glasses, I'm going to doubt that that killed the eyes.

I used to drive my parents buggy by reading good parts of books to them. Context-free, of course.

My mom would smile at me rather wistfully whenever she would see me get wrapped up in a book (unless, of course, said wrappedupness was interfering with her plans for the day). She said seeing me read reminded her of her father, who although he was "just" a Midwestern dairy farmer with a fifth-grade education (had to leave the one-room schoolhouse in 1912 to work on the farm full-time), was a complete bookaholic who always had something to read on him, even if it was just a seed-dealer's sales pamphlet to peruse during his lunch break on the tractor.

Harvard, Yale, MIT and Stanford were pipe dreams before the US was founded.

I enjoyed reading The Da Vinci Code merely because of the number of times I stopped and exclaimed to my mother "And now guess what they're doing! Guess! Idiots."

Someone had given it to her as a Christmas gift on that vacation, and I snagged it because I'd seen a few people on the beach reading it. I have no idea if she bothered with it when I was done breaking it down.