By the Bel: How I Fell In Love With Reading

I guess besides my Mum’s insane love of books being modelled for me for as long as I can remember; school was really the beginning of the seed being planted for my love of books.

My earliest memories are in primary school like in grade two, my teacher, Mrs Fuller, reading us Roald Dahl’s The BFG. Then onwards to Grade 3, with Roald Dahl again and James and the Giant Peach.  In 1991 grade 4 it was Fire in the Stone by Collin Thiele, and the first book to ever give me horrific nightmares, My Hiroshima by Junko Morimoto. Then the first and only book we ever read in school that Mum said no to, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Eleanor Coerr (understandable when by this stage the nightmares were so bad I was asking her for medication to help me sleep, at age 9). I still cannot stomach the thought of re-reading those two particular books.

Outside of school I was reading The Baby-Sitters Club series by Anne M Martin, and The Gymnasts series by Elizabeth Levy, and apart from my brush with the books about Hiroshima, my reading material was generally free of world shattering unpleasantness.

Things cooled off a little after that as I changed schools and every teacher having a different way of teaching, not to mention the curriculum being as it was in the 1990’s; it wasn’t until grade 8 that we did any book studies. Reading for the hell of it wasn’t really the focus anymore.

The Wave by Todd Strasser, Came Back to show you I could fly by Robin Klein and Peeling the Onion by Wendy Orr were the studies we did in the first 3 years of high school.

It had been years since I had voluntarily picked up a book by the time I’d finished my junior years at high school. I think mainly because having to analyze every little speck of information, character development and plot progression made the act of reading like eating a bowl of high fiber cereal without the aid of sugar, fruit or milk to wash it down or give it flavour. Anette Kurtis Klause was the author to rekindle my passion for reading outside of school with her novel The Silver Kiss.

From then I picked up some heavy hitters like Anne Rice and in the final years of high school we were able to choose about 10 books from the approved list and break them down into basic reviews.  Of the ten only two made an impact; Jean P Sasson’s Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia, and Jayne Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.

Now my book case is full to the point of over flowing.  Most of them carry some sort of supernatural or romantic themes. Humor is also an almost necessity, life is too serious most of the time so when I am escaping into a book, I like to be able to have a giggle.

Reviewing for Burn Bright and Marianne’s other sites is nothing at all like doing the books studies in my teen years. Books for young adults today have surpassed the calibre of those in the 1990’s by a light year or two. The variety and quality is second to none, and I look forward to reading any review books that come my way.