Pluto, my saviour
Something about weird topics always fascinated me. As an '80s child raised in the Middle East, I could get my hands on only a couple of CCCP-era books, my entire astronomy "literature," passed to me by an uncle or aunt. The books mostly covered "basic" topics like the solar system and the constellations. My favorite, though, was the now ex-planet Pluto. The chief reason: there was literally no information about it in my books! Everything you could find was like: yeah, and then there's the last planet, which we don't know anything about, together with some artist's drawing of what she thought it might look like. While there were whole chapters dedicated to superstar planets like Jupiter and Mars, old Pluto could not get anything more than a miserable paragraph. And this, ladies and gentlemen, was amazing to me: knowing that there was something out there, lurking in the dark and cold, which no one (at least according to my heavily outdated books) knew anything about.
Tragically, in the years that followed, I lost my interest in astronomy due to a series of unsuccessful attempts to acquire further materials — or, God forbid, a telescope. Nevertheless, good old Pluto left its mark on how I learn: go for the lesser-known topic, the one everyone else ignores.
PS - in fairness: my books were old, no doubt, but back then there genuinely wasn't much to say about Pluto. It sits in an extremely distant orbit, and no spacecraft had ever been near it. Until New Horizons flew past in 2015, the best pictures anyone had were a handful of pixels. Pluto was a mystery to the astronomy community too, not just to a self-taught kid at home with a stack of hand-me-down books.