Reading Provenance

Spurred by a chatroom conversation on this interesting discussion from Matthew Cheney, I'm interested in your provenance as a reader. What did you start out reading? Which of those authors did you keep, and which discard? Which authors are you reading now?

And, well...why?

I'll start. (and so has sosostris2012, here)

( The list goes ever on and on... )

There are patterns here. At some point around high school, my reading window broadened, I jettisoned a bunch of things I'd been reading since early childhood, and I settled comfortably into a steady diet of fairy tales and hard science fiction. And there are more common elements to those two genres than you'd think: they're both very concerned with the application of fictional (dare I say allegorical, sometimes?) concept to real life, they're both quite grim at times, and they're both...highly structured without being formulaic. They also both have enough of a tradition behind them that they can be subverted within their own text, which is harder to do with high fantasy.

If this partial list can be believed, I read for structure. I read for character, and I read for prose style. I read to know things I didn't before about people and how we work, and I read for shiny ideas, and sensawunda, and rigorous plot logic, and thematic resonance. None of these things are mutually exclusive.

How were your reading habits formed? When? What results in your own data surprised you?

Consider yourselves all tagged.