Discussion: Sparking the Love of Reading

Hey all, Dani here.

Oh my goodness, here we are at my first discussion post. I have been abstractly considering doing these sort of posts for well over a year now, but I always ended up psyching myself out and then just abandoning the idea. I worried about how much extra time it would take me to plan out these posts and whether or not people would actually be interested in them. But I have seen discussion topic posts on other blogs and people seem to like them, so after my two day blog burnout earlier this month, I said okay, let’s just give these discussions a try.

Which of course meant trying to figure out discussion topics. Yikes–well, if you have any suggestions, I will gladly accept them in the comments.

For today though, let’s discuss the book or books that really got us into reading. I see this as a question on numerous book awards and book tags. It is a question that I enjoy seeing what answers people give, but I also find myself immensely frustrated because for some of us it isn’t easy to pinpoint.

So often I see those of us in the book community talking about how Twilight or The Hunger Games or City of Bones or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was the book that really started the reading bug, that desire to just explore other books and read as much as possible. And those are all worthy books to enter the world of book lover status. If one of those is your book for this topic, then please understand that I’m not trying to say that there is anything wrong with any of them.

However, when I look back over my life, I can’t recall a time when reading wasn’t a massive and major part of my existence. My mom tells me stories about how she used to read aloud to me while I was in the womb. She continued to read to me until I was old enough to start reading on my own.

I can still very much recall devouring pretty much every single Dr. Seuss book that my godfather had at his farmhouse when we would visit him. I can still imagine little four-or-five-year-old me climbing the steps to the second floor children’s area at my local public library and picking up as many of the book bags as I could to take home with me. Those book bags had a children’s book and a cassette tape/audiobook version of the book as well, so little ones could listen to the book, or follow along with a physical copy. I read so so many of those from my library when I was a kid.

I think that I ended up reading a majority of the books offered in the children’s section, but I still wanted more books. When I was in the age range of Middle Grade to Young Adult, we didn’t really classify books that way so much. There were Children’s Books and Teen Books. Actually, I think the Middle Grade Books are still housed in the Children’s area at my public library. But the Teen/YA section has quadrupled in size since I was in that age range.

My mom took the age restrictions of my library card when I was like ten or twelve, because that’s when I really was starting to run out of new book options in the Children’s Area. So that really opened me up to the land of Adult Sci-Fi and Fantasy. I still read plenty of Animorphs and other younger reader books, but I also felt the need for bigger and more challenging books.

So what book or books really got me into reading? Pretty much any of them. As a child, I devoured not just Dr. Seuss, but also The Boxcar Children, The Baby Sitters Club, the Dear America series, and more, but I also read Little House on the Prairie, Chronicles of Narnia, and I read so many Mercedes Lackey books back then as well. Do I remember my Lackey reads as much as some of the others? Well, no, but I do remember that I liked them–which means they probably deserve a re-read now that I’m an adult.

I can’t imagine my life without books in it. I was the girl who would take an entire bag full of books with me on longer car rides, or especially on vacations. I was the girl you could count on to get a huge stack of books from the Scholastic Book Fair. I was the girl who usually had at least two reading for pleasure books in her backpack/locker.

Now I’m the woman who has a rather large personal library in her house. I’m the woman who voraciously reads books and talks about them online. And yes, I’m still the woman who has multiple books on hand just in case I have a few spare moments to read (I can think e-books for the easy and quick access to so many books).

I have completely built myself a life with books at my core. I love my life, and I love how important books are to me.

Which is also why I really don’t like the question of “What book got you into reading?” It works for some people, but for weirdo die-hard life-long obsessive readers like me, it is difficult to search that far back in out book lives to answer that question.

Thoughts? Opinions? Feelings? And if you actually have a proper answer to this question, I would love to hear you gush about the book that got you into reading. Just because I don’t have a clear answer doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy listening to your tales of the book that started it all.

That is all from me today. I will be back soon with more bookish content.