Weekends seem to be good times to ask non-political questions about things like music and literature. So here's mine:
What book made you a reader?
What did you read at just the right age -- maybe you were ten, maybe you were twenty -- that made you realize that books weren't just those things teachers forced on you?
For my son, now eighteen, it would be
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. He read it at age 13 during the week I banned both my kids from watching TV. Before that, I had to wheedle or threaten him to get him to read. After that, he started asking me to recommend other books. Now he never goes anywhere without a book in his backpack.
For my daughter, who is eleven, I think it might be Stephen King's Carrie, which she read about four months ago. She now claims King is her favorite author, even though she has yet to read another book by him. (I've been pushing Salem's Lot.)
Or it may turn out to be Bastard Out of Carolina, which she finished just the other night. She was sufficiently caught up in it that she came into our room crying about the ending. I told her that in an odd way it was good that she was upset, because that showed she cared about the book and the people in it. ("I think I have too much empathy," she told me. I told here there was no such thing as too much empathy. Unless you're a Republican. I also told her I was delighted she understood "empathy.")
For me, it was Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I was ten at the time. Even though I read a respectable amount -- although my teachers never seemed satisfied -- this book engaged me on an entirely different level. It was the first book I ever read where I enjoyed the style as much as the content. I've since learned that Burroughs is better remembered than re-read, but he's still the writer who showed me just how thoroughly one can be transported by reading a book.
You'll notice none of those books would be considered particularly lofty or "literary." That's not the point. It doesn't have to be a book that's stood the test of time, even for you. It just has to be a book that made you want to read another book that good -- whatever "good" meant to you at the time.
So what was that book for you? And what was the age?