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I can't recall anyone in my family encouraging me to read but I was a voracious reader as a kid growing up in the '50s and 60's. My mom, who went to college, was more of a reader than my dad who dropped out of high school to join the Army for WWII. They apparently had a subscription to Reader's Digest Condensed Books (very popular at that time) because I remembers rows of these condensed novels on the book case and I probably read them all. My maternal grandfather was an avid reader and had bookcases full of books, many of them Westerns and biographies.
As a kid I read everything I could get my hands on. Comic books, magazines, cereal boxes, etc. I read all of the Tom Swift Jr. books (the second series), Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew books. There was also a boy's series about a boy that went SCUBA diving with his father. I can't recall the name and I'm pretty sure it wasn't Sea Hunt. I remember just picking out volumes of our Funk & Wagnell's Encyclopedia and reading them cover-to-cover. (That how I learned how to play poker!) In fifth or sixth grade I was tested and my parents were told I had the reading and comprehension skill of an 11th grader.
Quite the opposite of encouraging me, when I was in grade school I distinctly remember being told by my father "Get your nose out of that book and go outside and do something!". He thought I spent too much of my time reading.
When I was old enough to be able to ride my bicycle to our local library, I was there whenever I could. This fascination with libraries continued into my 40's. The peak of this fascination was in my college years when I lived only a few blocks from the Detroit Public Library (the main branch) where I could spend hours and hours just browsing the stacks. I used to browse the card catalog until I found something interesting then go and find that book and look at all the books with a similar subject. I read fiction, non-fiction, biographies, auto-biographies, history, and whatever interested me.
Although I still read books when traveling, and I subscribe to lots of magazines, I really didn't read books much at home but I bought a Kindle not too long ago and have re-discovered my love of reading books, albeit they're e-books now.
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