Books That Got Me Into Obsessive Reading

     As much as I love books now, I haven’t always been this way. Now, I spend hours in the Books-A-Million by my house just reading all the backs of book, memorizing titles, smelling the paper and coffee scent that floods the store, and going to the checkout counter with an armful of books where the cashiers and managers all know me. There was never really a time where I refused to read, like it never bothered me, I just preferred to play outside and watch Pirates of the Caribbean.
     However, when I hit sixth grade, I hit my first phase of reading obsessions. The next phase wouldn’t come until around sophomore year after my middle school passion died out in freshman year. So, I know you’ve seen these titles spoken about a lot on my blog, but I thought it would be nice to compile them into one post and a kind of timeline, but I’m excluding Diary of a Wimpy Kid because I was obsessed but… it’s crazy cringey.
     Starting in sixth grade and working my way up, here are the books that got me into reading obsessively in a loose timeliney order:

     The Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan

        I’m pretty confident in saying that this mythology series is what got a lot of people around my age into reading. It was the it book in my sixth grade class and pretty much if you didn’t read it, you weren’t cool. If you haven’t heard what this series is about by now, it follows the life of a younger boy who comes to realize he’s a demigod and begins to flail around in the world of Greek mythology while we all watch him struggle. It’s totally unique to the middle grade that was available in my day, but I have no idea what is out there now.

          I fangirled so hard this series. I taught myself the Greek alphabet and some basic words, like? I was in sixth grade? I think that was just a taste of how hard I could fangirl because when One Direction came around in my middle school years, I scared people.
          If you’re just starting to get into reading, whether you’re in elementary, middle, high school, or adulthood, I would highly recommend this book because not only is it really informative about amazing Greek mythology, it’s hilarious. I always think of those stupid jokes when they visited the Hoover Dam, those killed me.

     The Maximum Ride series by James Patterson

         Not going to lie, reading these books made me want to be a bird. You ma be asking yourself what’s wrong with me, but I’m asking myself if you’ve read this series. If you have, you probably wished it too and are just kidding yourself, if you haven’t read it, you just don’t get it.

          In case you don’t know, the Maximum Ride series is about a group of children, I think aged 14 to 6, who were raised in a lab. But plot twist, their DNA was mixed with 2% avian DNA, meaning yes, they have wings with like a 15-foot wingspan. When they escape this lab that has tested on different children with different animal DNA, all heck breaks loose as they try to run away and fight this company at the same time. In one of the books Fang makes a blog and so guess what I did? I made a blog. Lol, no one read it and it was really funny. It is also an 8 book series, but they are relatively short and quick reads, and I highly recommend you pick one up no matter what age you are.
               AND I JUST FOUND OUT DURING MY RESEARCH THAT IT WAS MADE IN A MOVIE LAST YEAR. AND I DIDN’T HEAR ABOUT THIS? WHAT? WHAT?
     The Twilight saga by Stephanie Meyer

          I’m not going to say much about Twilight because everyone knows Twilight, even if you just know it as “that one about the vampires.” It was so much more than that to me, though. I had four huge posters, one for each of the movies, that covered one of my walls, and then a flag kind of thing of the wedding that came in the special edition of Breaking Dawn part 2 that I hung over my bed. I even remember the time I got the first book, it was a Christmas present and we were at my grandma’s house and I almost cried I was so happy. I didn’t even talk to anyone the rest of the night because I was so engrossed in the book.


     The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
          I’m also going to assume everyone knows about the Hunger Games because it was all the rage a couple years ago. The Hunger Games years were just really good years, does anyone else remember that time? I’m talking about when the books had come out and we were all waiting for the movie and it was just so a good adaptation. Maybe it’s just nostalgia now, but it felt like a really great time in the world, where everywhere you went you heard that little tone they whistled in the movie and it just felt peaceful. Yeah… good times.

     The Hush, Hush saga by Becca Fitzpatrick

          I spoke about this in my last post too, and several posts in the existence of this blog so I’m going to list the main ones all here:

          Unpopular Bookish Opinions
          Re-Readbale Books: Because They’re That Good
          Hush, Hush || Review & My Thoughts
Skipping freshman year when I kind of lost track of reading…
     The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

          Again, not going to say much about this series because everyone has at least heard of it.
          J.K. Rowling is my hero of the writing world, and now just the world in general as she slays the disaster that is politics of 2016-17. She is also what really inspired me to write the novel I’ve been working on, and I think a lot of my voice in my book comes from reading Harry Potter.


     Pretty Much All Sarah Dessen Books
          I always say I don’t really like contemporary books, but there was this strange point in my life where I was really into these kinds of novels and I blew through them. I was in the school library like every other day picking out new Sarah Dessen and John Green books to read. The first one I read, and the one that really hooked me in Sarah Dessen, was the Truth About Forever. I still admit, even in my vague dislike of contemporary novels, that that book definitely got me obsessed with reading in that year.

     The Maze Runner by James Dashner

         I just did a kind of discussion that I feels sums up my love for this book in my last post, Unpopular Bookish Opinions, so I’ll link that there.


     The Divergent Series by Veronica Roth
          The final huge contributor to my reading obsession was the Divergent Series. I still remember bawling during Allegiant like it was yesterday. (Insert my short existential crisis when I realize that was already almost 3 years ago and I’m an adult now).  And though the hype of the series has really died down since only the last movie, Ascendent, is set to come out this year or next year, It was another really fun time of getting involved with the books and fandom. This is definitely one of those series I wish lasted a little longer, but I felt that the story played out really well in its timeframe and wasn’t stretched too far to make it a trilogy like a lot of book series lately.

     So, those are the main book and series that really got me obsessed with reading! Tell me down below which got you hooked on reading! Thanks for reading 🙂
                                   -Taylor

    
    

summer shopping for cozy, sunny days

The Moonflower Monologues – review

the 3 series that dragged me from a reading slump

Blog at WordPress.com.