[skissane]

My father’s philosophy textbook from university (A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, edited by Arthur Pap and Paul Edwards, 2nd ed., 1965). As a young teenager, I leaned on it to argue to my mother that God did not exist and therefore she should stop forcing me go to Mass with her

When I was 15, I went to the library of the nearest university, and stumbled upon a book - IIRC, it was Vickery’s The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough (1973) - which introduced me to Algernon Swinburne’s The Triumph of Time-and from there I discovered I liked many more of his poems

When I was 11, I read a large chunk of The Lord of the Rings - I got bored near the start of The Two Towers, switched to reading the chapters of The Return of the King in reverse order, then gave up and to this day have never finished it. But I fell in love with the Appendices