My favorite reading experiences are:

Reading Persuasion in a 15th house that had been turned into a hotel on my first trip to England.

Reading Middlemarch the summer before my junior year of high school. I picked it because it was the biggest book on the shelf, and I wanted a challenge. It took me a great deal of the summer to get through it, meticulously reading all of the footnotes, and I loved every minute of it. George Eliot is still my favorite author of all time.

Reading Jane Eyre for the first time in my second college English course and picking apart every detail of it that I could in class.

and then when I'm done, I immediately grab into the bookbag and grab another novel

I can't usually do this. I usually need to give my brain a day or two to let go of the last book I read before I can start another one.

I remember reading The Two Towers in the back bench of our old station wagon, by the light of the cars behind us on the highway.

Lots of memories of reading musty historical hardbacks from the library in Moultonboro, NH, either at the beach or crashed on my bed in the loft at our old summer house. I remember spending a whole summer reading James Bond novels, when I was about 14.

And there's a certain album and a certain book that are linked too

Well, there's that Poe album and House of Leaves, but I'm going to guess you aren't talking about that.

Gus' Frankenstein experience is like mine - I read it during a hot summer and it was coolth.

For me, Watership Down and Cheetos are linked, from hiding in my sister's camper shell with what provisions I could scrounge.

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.

Reading Illuminatus! while fasting and isolating yourself--of course you got weird mind things going! I expected to hate Illuminatus! when it started flipping POVs and timelines and everything, but it was one of the basic texts of something I was just discovering--the multi-layered world of Discordianism--and I realized the twists were the point. Plus there's porn! I wonder where my copy is.

Most revelatory reading moment--the moment when Dernhelm rips off "his" helmet and cries, "I am no man! You face a woman!" and the Witch King hesitates . . . see, I didn't get that it was Eowyn. I had no clue until that very moment. I was young, and I trusted authors completely. I remember sitting bolt upright from where I was laying and reading, staring at the page as the hair on my arms stood upright. It was the very first moment I realized that girls were allowed to kick ass, that a girl could stare evil in the face and make evil take a step back. Until then Eowyn was just the poor girl with the embarassing crush, but there on Pellenor Fields . . . damn Peter Jackson for leaving out "Begone, if you be not deathless!"

I wish I knew how that scene was received back when it was first published.

So I finished Foucault's Pendulum and wrote about it, in a fashion, and coincidentally enough, the post also features Watership Down, because Raq is awesome.

BF and I are already excitedly planning our reading list for our vacation, which is not 'til August. Vacations are all about reading for us (well, reading , eating and Teh Sex) and deciding which books to take is one of the most fun parts of planning.

and coincidentally enough, the post also features Watership Down, because Raq is awesome.

Hee! I was just over there reading your post and thinking about commenting "Hey, P-C and I share a brain because I was just talking about Watership Down elsewhere!"

And because The Shipping News still blows.

And because The Shipping News still blows.

Thank you. I tried three times to get into that book, since it's one of my mom's favorites. I just couldn't.

Cindy, your post reminded me of when I read (re-read, mind you!) The Haunting of Hill House right after Pete and I had moved into our house. Our house that makes odd creaky noises, and that I had not gotten at ALL used to. That was not a good night.

Oh man. This reminds me of when I was in 7th grade and read The Amityville Horror, very shortly after moving to a new room (new addition) in our house. It's silly, because it was the same house I'd been living in for years, but I managed to convince myself that it was possible that the land that the addition was built over was haunted (old Indian burial ground, naturally) but the rest of the house wasn't. The freakiest thing was that my bed would shake sometimes, and it took me months to figure out why (in response to the vibrations when someone would walk up the stairs), so I just quietly freaked out every time it happened, convinced that Satan was about to spring out from underneath my bed.

I don't do very well with horror.

Everyone knows that you're supposed to put scary books in the freezer.