Lee was a solitary child who preferred to figure things out on his own. Until he tested into Kaohsiung High School, he found the well stocked local library a virtual intellectual amusement park. He read fiction, philosophy, political criticism, and poetry, as well as the existentialist and modernist literary works then popular with students.
直到考上高雄中學後，館藏豐富的圖書館，對於喜歡孤獨、自我摸索的李敏勇而言，成了閱讀與思考的樂園，除了小說、哲學、政治評論、各類詩刊，還加上當時風靡青年學子的「存在主義」和「現代主義」文學作品。