Booking Through Thursday

A weekly meme about (mostly) books and reading hosted by Deb at Booking Through Thursday. Deb asks a question new question every Thursday, which can be answered in the comments on her blog or as a post on your blog.  She also says you can answer any day of the week you want. But I’m anal and doing it today.  This week’s question is

Have your reading choices changed over the years? Or pretty much stayed the same?

Oh, yes. Yes they have. And I’m so glad it’s been for the better. Unlike a lot of bloggers and readers in general, I wasn’t a big reader until college. I enjoyed reading as a child but it wasn’t the necessity it is now. I like to think I didn’t have the guidance of my parents or a good librarian to help me choose the books I’d really like.  In elementary school I read mostly popular series books like The Babysitter’s Club, Sweet Valley Twins/High, and Nancy Drew.

I had some teachers that steered me in the right direction. I’m glad that I enjoyed a lot of Beverly Cleary’s books. I loved Runaway Ralph and the Ramona books. I also eventually gobbled up all of Roald Dahl’s stories and Quentin Blake’s illustrations after BFG was required reading in fifth grade.

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbit, and A Wrinkle in Time were required reading and all three books made a lasting impression on me. Now only if I could’ve read more books of this caliber going into jr. high…

This is where I’m really not proud of my reading choices. Even my seventh grade English teacher Mrs. Whipple told me I was reading garbage. But I kept on reading them. I was back to cheap, scary series books like the No Fear series (which were apparently so forgettable that I can’t find an image or link) or Goosebumps. I’m having a difficult time recalling any titles of substance.

Then there was high school, and my honors/AP English reading and other class studies took over, and with extracurriculars I didn’t have “time” for reading.  I wasn’t enough of a nonreader and living under a rock when Harry Potter came on the scene, and I started that series with pleasure.

Other than that, I started reading mostly in the summers of my university days when I didn’t have classes, and began making up for lost time and started with old adult and young adult classics and popular and literary fiction.

Now I still read YA, but I feel like my taste is much better, and my imagination broadened. I like fantasy more than ever and I even have to have a little bit of urban fantasy – a genre I thought I’d never read.  I’m willing to try almost anything (maybe not Westerns).  I just wish that in my adolescent/teen years I’d had a little more exposure to authors like Robin McKinley, Lloyd Alexander, Ellen Emerson White, and Deb Caletti to name just a few.