At what age did you start to Read?

I was reading the "What author started it all?" thread and got inspired to post this one.

I can't really remember a time when I couldn't read, and at least write in some rudimentary fashion. According to my parents it was somewhere around 5 or earlier, before I started elementary school. Reading has been a huge part of my life ever since. My heavy reading, in turn, inspired me to write. As a result, writing professionally is really the only profession I've ever really aspired to. It was always the answer I gave to "What do you want to be when you grow up?" when I was little. I just wanted to see what age everyone learned to read, and how soon after did it inspire you to write?

Jadezuki said:

My second grade teacher called me a liar when I tried to write out Book-It slips - said no seven-year-old could possibly have read all the books I had in such a short period of time (The Secret Garden, Caddie Woodlawn, The Great Brain). I was so humiliated I didn't tell my mom. Now, as an adult, I know my mother would have given that evil lady what for!

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Alas, I too was a victum of what I like to call "Evil Teacher Book-It Envy". My teacher was obviously jealous of the fact that I had earned all the stars on my Book-It pin in the space of a week, and real books to boot. Well, I assume it was jealousy. What other reason could a person have for telling a small child that they were lying about an accomplishment, of which they were very proud of? Fortunately, I was a confident child (perhaps overly so) and I told the teacher what for. Of course, that resulted in a detention. Of course, that resulted in my mom coming down and telling the teacher that I did indeed read all those books. The teacher, feeling like an ***, canceled the detention.

I_Shrugged said:

From all accounts, I was 3 when I started reading. I'm the youngest of 5 kids, so my siblings taught me everything way ahead of school.....

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Yeah, I was also the youngest, and I definately say that was to my advantage as far as pre-school education is concerned. I can still remember my sister reading books like Bambi to me, even though I could read at the time. We would talk about each chapter after she finished. In retrospect, that really gave me an incredible grasp of stuff like plot and character development at a very young age.

veinglory said:

There are many beliefs about writers and their differences that I think threads like this feed into. How many people will leap in and say they learned to read late? Many who did were quick to forget it.

I, personally, was in the slow readers group (called, appallingly, the donkeys) and could not read at any functional level (see spot run etc) until around the age of 7. I was even slower to become numerate and these days my inability to tell 6s from 9s what probably be called dyslexic but it came right with time.

People develop at different rates. I sit here now with a non-fiction book in progress in one window and a GLM statistical anaylsis in the other.

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I didn't mean for the thread to chastise people who learned late. I was actually curious to see how many late readers went on to become writers. Honestly, I think it's circumstances and environment that determine when you learn to read more than intelligence or creativity. It's cool to see that people turned a challenge in early life into a life's passion later on.