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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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