[em-bee]

the books that i remember reading are about a guy traveling the americas on horseback, some about traveling parts of the world on a bike. horatio hornblower, all books by karl may and several by rudyard kipling.

i don't know how much of an influence the books had. i started traveling around europe when i was a teenager. was it because of the books or did i read the books because i was already interested in exploring the world?

i know i started reading kipling because of the djunglebook and kim, which both have a significance in scouting.

what surprises me the most is that i didn't read any science fiction until much later, but now i am exclusively focused on that genre. this is worth noting because i wonder what would have happened if my dad had had any scifi books at home or if i had been exposed to them in some other way.

i believe the first scifi book was "brave new world", which was a book assignment in my exchange year in the US, but i didn't really pick up on the scifi aspect of that book either. it is significant because it is the second book i read in english but the first one that i enjoyed reading. the first book, which i hated, was "for whom the bell tolls", which i had picked because my teacher recommended hemmingway as an american author. it was a horrible book that took me almost a year to get through, and i always thought it was because english was my second language. but then i just flew through "brave new world" and realized that my english was not the problem, but hemmingway was. i wish my teacher had recommended someone like mark twain instead.