Looking back, I’ve always considered myself a ‘reader’, even during times when I completed maybe two books over the course of the year. I picked up reading fairly early and spent most of my childhood devouring series like The Baby-sitters Club, Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley High, and The Unicorn Club, plus any children’s books written about horses, Egypt, vampires, or ballet dancers. Fast forward to middle school and high school when I decided it was time to read ‘serious literature’ and read the pretentious books that most college students carry around to coffee shops. I missed the Harry Potter craze because of this, and I don’t really regret it. Not having read the Harry Potter series makes me the worst youth librarian of all time, I get it, but I feel like it's also a sort of bizarro badge of honor, like never learning to ride a bike.
Anyway, reading ‘serious literature’ all the time makes it kind of hard to read a lot of books and to read diversely because so much of what you think is literature in high school consists of the writings of old and/or dead white men. So I kind of fell out of reading for awhile. Although I could tell that a lot of what I was reading was universally recognized as ‘good’ and contributes to the amorphous idea of someone being well-read, I wasn’t having a lot of fun and wasn’t seeing myself in any of the stories. Then, throughout college, I mostly read for school. I was a history major and had to read a lot of exciting works like the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and that kind of reading takes up a lot of time, which doesn’t really allow for much recreational reading. This was the non-fiction era of my reading life which meant I read about quite a few interesting people and learned about different historical events and cultures, but still wasn’t reading for enjoyment.
After college, I tried to get back into reading for fun, but my bookshelves were crowded with history books and I wasn’t really aware of what was new and exciting in the world of fiction. I still loved books and information, so I ended up attending library school, which doesn’t do much for one’s reading life either. Most of my time was spent reading library science articles and doing a lot of writing and researching. The only books that I read enthusiastically at that time were probably George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, because they reminded me of my college history tomes but they had dragons and a lot more female characters. Then, during my last semester, I interned at a public library and spent a lot of time checking in books at the book drop. There were so many new fiction books I had never heard of! Of course I knew and had read most of the classics and modern classic authors, but there were all kinds of amazing looking books from genres I never really paid much attention to before.
During that internship, I realized I really liked working with youth and that meant I needed to brush up on my knowledge of youth books. I knew that YA was a thing, but since it wasn’t when I was a teen I didn’t really know much about it other than that some series were wildly popular and were turned into mediocre movies on a regular basis. So I perused online reviews and must-read lists to figure out some brand-new YA titles that I had to read to arm myself with recommendations for teens. This is also around the time that I started actually using my Goodreads account, and started making tbr lists. I read a bunch of popular YA titles, and although some were really good and some were not, it was a good way to get back into reading for pleasure. The titles were not very lengthy and allowed me to read a variety of different authors and perspectives in a fairly short amount of time. That year, I think I read (and actually finished) about 25 books, which seemed like a pretty good amount to me (oh, poor, naive me).
After graduating library school I immediately found a job as a youth librarian and realized I needed to up my reading game even more if I wanted to make effective book displays, recommendations, and be able to weed and develop the collection. So I began spending more time on Goodreads, Booktube, and various book blogs, and made it a goal to read books from authors I had never read or from genres I knew little about. This past year, I joined a Goodreads challenge that involved reading a book a week that fit a particular challenge criteria, and it was a huge part of increasing my reading over this past year. I set a goal to read 80 books, thinking this was a pretty big step up from reading between 5 to 25 books in a year, and put a ton of books on hold at the library.
It turns out once you start reading diversely and often, you can’t stop. You read a book from one perspective about a certain time period and then you want to read about a different view. You read a few very short books set in the contemporary world and decide to take a break from that by reading a 600 plus page tome about an epic fantasy world. You read a memoir and then need to mix it up by reading some science fiction. And this is how I ended up reading more than 100 books this year, after years of reading a few books a year. Now, my tbr list is some 15 pages long and I’m reading (and loving) books from genres I never would have thought I would have enjoyed. Currently, I’m planning my lists that I’ll be reading for my 52 books challenge in 2017 and am having the best time selecting a range of titles. So far, the genres include fantasy, romance, historical fiction, sci-fi, graphic novels, and classics, along with several sub-genres like urban fantasy and a range of middle grade, YA, and adult titles. I try to read from authors from a variety of cultures and nationalities, although I realize that after years of reading old white guy writers I’m making up for it now. This past year, out of over 100 books, only 8 were written by men and maybe half of those were white.
It feels like coming home to be able to return to reading. I even re-read some of those Baby-sitters Club books that got me hooked initially, and I can honestly say that I enjoyed those 50 times more than reading the majority of what is considered ‘high-brow’ literature. I look forward to many more pages of all different kinds of books and continuing to enhance and enjoy my reading life. This blog, meanwhile, will be a place for me to discuss what I'm reading, post my general bookish musings, and comment on contemporary book news. It will also be a creative way for me to track the books that I've read and loved, and hopefully help me enrich my ever-evolving reading life.
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