So basically I was one of those kids who was bored in kindergarten because I already knew how to read and write when I started. It helped that I was born in October so I was older than everyone else, but a big part of it was my dad thought literacy was by far the most important part of any education, so he put in the work to get me there.
Anyway, I was reading children's lit on my own in first grade, and Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew in second. The summer before third grade, he gave me The Hobbit. The next summer, LOTR. I read my first Michener novel the summer before fifth.
Dad was a huge fiction buff. I inherited his collection of novels, and I haven't bothered to count them, but they number in the multiples of thousands. I have no idea if he read them all, but he was a truck driver who taught himself how to speed read, so he'd finish several novels every week he was on the road.
Anyway, as I was finishing elementary school, he implemented the next phase of his plan. Since I had learned how to read admirably, he started giving me the more difficult nonfiction he thought was important. I actually remember the first nonfiction essay I ever read, because it was so important to him: Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience. After that, Walden (this one's actually kind of boring, he warned me, but finish it, anyway). He started sprinkling in classic American poetry, especially Frost. This man's entire higher education was a GED and a two-year business management program that HoJo's paid for, but somehow he had made himself a man of letters by sheer force, and I think he would have considered it a failure as a parent not to pass all that on.
For the record, those times where my writing seems obtuse and high-minded, even snobbish, that's not because of him. His lack of formal training allowed him to give me the experience without the academic airs. When I slip into that kind of asshole, that's all grad school talking. I've been trying hard for years to unlearn those bad habits.
Long story short: my dad loved language the way he loved music - it touched him in his soul. And he put all the effort he could muster into passing that love down to me.