How Fantasy Turned Me Into A Book Junkie

Then, one summer, I’m visiting my family in Victoria and my cousin says, “Have you ever read this book?  It is so great!”  The book was Guards!  Guards! By Terry Pratchett.  This introduced me to Discworld.  I then introduced my husband’s (then boyfriend’s) family to Terry Pratchett after I saw their taste in comedy was incredibly similar to my own.  They loved Douglas Adams, but also Flying Circus & something I had never heard of, Goon Show.  I gave my father-in-law my rather tatty copy of Guards!  Guards! and he was hooked.  I think we now have nearly all of the Discworld series scattered throughout the house although we are trying to gather them in one spot.

My introduction to Harlequins came via my family in Kitchener.  When we went on vacation, we would all bring Harlequins to read and then swap.  This had become a tradition somewhat earlier in our lives with Archie comic books, but then we changed our reading habits once we got older.  Whenever I read Harlequins, I found that I preferred the historical romance novels rather than contemporary.  One of my favorite novels is Hidden Fires by Sandra Brown.  Since I moved to my current town, I started reading more & more historical romances, especially Regency.  I’ll be doing separate posts on some of my favorite authors later.

I also started to get really into Teen & Children's books.  Although I didn't realize it at the time, what my high school library had was a highly curated collection of books chosen to appeal to teens.  While working at the library, I often saw my favorite books from high school placed in the adult Science Fiction & fantasy section.  So I dove right into the teen section which composes of books written specifically for teens.  As for children’s, well, there’s a ton of fantasy there that I love,  Again, separate posts will be forthcoming for some of my favorite series.

How I Became A Book Junkie

I’ve always loved libraries!  When I was a kid & growing up in a small southern Ontario town, there wasn’t a lot to do.  On the weekends, we'd all troop down to our local library (it was a Carnegie) and choose movies and books to read.  We had the traditional scary children’s librarian.  When I got older and was in grade 7, I was ready to read more adult books.  My piano teacher suggested that I read Jeanette Oke, which served as my introduction to the romance genre in general and the Christian romance genre in particular.  However, there was no YA or Teen section, so imagine my surprise when I got to the high school library.  All these books, meant for my age group?!  It was a huge revelation, especially when my Grade 9 teacher made us read a Fantasy book.  It was like a whole new world had opened up for me.  I started off with David Eddings and when I finished those two series, I moved onto authors Piers Anthony, then Terry Brooks.  I then burned my way through the first 5 or 6 books from the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan.  One of my cousins loaned me a book called Brightly Burning by Mercedes Lackey, but I really didn’t like the ending, so this turned me off her for what I thought would be forever.  During this time, I was still taking items out from the public library.  I started branching off into more contemporary romances written by Barbara Delinsky & Sandra Brown.

My grandmother also heavily influenced my reading as a child that would continue as an adult.  She gave me one of my first fantasy books, Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper.  It was such a delight.  I had to get the rest of the series from the library since I couldn’t wait to read the rest. 

My father read to us every night.  Obviously the books changed over the years as we became older the books changed to something that would take months or even years to finish reading.  We started off with picture books of course, but then as we got older my father read us books by Gerald Durell & James Herriot.  Eventually, he read us The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings.  This continued all the way to end of high school.

Apologies (Again!)

Goodness, it has been a long time since I wrote my last post, a little over two years to be exact.  I've been pretty lax about writing the blog post because to be honest, I totally forgot about it.  One of the reasons I feel I forgot about it was because I had trouble coming up with articles to write.  The other reason is that a lot of things happened at my workplace in December 2013 and I was then transferred in January to a full-time position at another branch in the library system for a few months, then back to my old branch and then to another branch in November 2014 until the end of January 2015.  My personal life also took a big hit when my husband got a job out of the country, so we were trying to spend as much time together as possible before he left.

Although this blog started out as a project for my Teen Materials class at Western, I’m going to change things up to make it easier for me to keep up the momentum.  One of my new series will be about my reading history, what got me started, series I've read & enjoyed, authors who I love, etc.  Also, I will be writing about author & publication news as well.