Biographies were my favorite through elementary school. The librarian made sure I had books every week. I loved reading about Amelia Earhart, Thomas Edison and Clara Barton.
Then the ugly years hit and junior high teachers made reading such a chore! Grades depended on reading and doing a report on the book. Sheesh. What a downer.
High school was similar to junior high, except English teachers wanted more about symbolism and theme and diagramming sentences. I was "forced" to read BARTLEBY, LORD OF THE FLIES and MOBY DICK. I didn't like those books. At all.
After high school, I decided to try and read the classics that my friends read in different high school and I didn't get to read. JANE EYRE, A TALE OF TWO CITIES, THE SECRET GARDEN and THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO soon became a few of my favorite classics.
(I also love how the covers are reworked over the years, too. It's interesting to see what the designers thought the cover would convey of the story.)
2 comments:
I love hearing about how people's reading habits developed over the years.
For me, I read like crazy in elementary school. Sports stories, mysteries, pretty much anything I could get my hands on. By fourth grade I was reading children's classics because of the book club my mom signed me up for. In junior high, I all but stopped reading. I still read, but not much, because I hadn't found something that excited me at that age, until I discovered Tolkien in 8th Grade. Then I read that a lot, and that led me to the classics of medieval lit, which became my passion through college. Now I read like crazy again (or as much as I can with my busy life), although I still lean heavily toward classics.
(https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2075122)
I remember in 6th grade we had to read 1000 pages of any one subject we wanted. It was the best assignment ever. I didn't have a lot of reading material on hand, so I read my dad's entire collection of Louis L'Amour books. I idolize cowboys to this day. They change you, don't they?
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