The Friday Five: This week's questions:

1. What were your favorite childhood stories?

Much to my wife's astonishment and dismay, I never read children's stories as a child. They bored me. I remember being particularly unimpressed by "The Cat in the Hat", which character I found intensely annoying. (The hero of the book, it seemed to me, was the fish.) I read comic books. I read anything Batman was in.
Well, I must have read some. I remember ordering regularly from Scholastic Book Services, and reading them until they fell apart. Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars. The Boy Who Stole The Elephant. The Thinking Machine (not really a children's book, but an edited version for young readers; I've since re-encountered these stories in the unabridged Dover editions).

2. What books from your childhood would you like to share with [your] children?

See above. But they're old enough to appreciate Robert Heinlein's juveniles. It may be time to introduce my son to the Thinking Machine. "Two and two make four, not just sometimes, but all of the time."

3. Have you re-read any of those childhood stories and been surprised by anything?

Most of the stories I'm reading to my kids now, I'm reading for the first time, so re-reading is not an issue. If I'm surprised by anything, it's that some of them actually are decent reading.

4. How old were you when you first learned to read?

I don't remember learning. I know my grandmother taught me to read on TV Guide. I think I must have been around three.

5. Do you remember the first 'grown-up' book you read? How old were you?

Good heavens, no. Again, see above. But Tarzan of the Apes must have been among them. I was enthralled by Burroughs' storytelling, and disappointed that the Tarzan movies were so much simpler than the rich, multi-threaded pulp originals.