Ahh high school… While I was a voracious reader as a child, mainly as an escape from elementary school bullies, junior high school found me reading less since my main focus was on building friendships. I still read a lot but found myself gravitating towards love stories and yearning for my own prince charming. Whenever I found a book with a particularly beautiful description of falling in love or the perfect first kiss scene, I’d copy the passage into my journal and swoon over it again and again. It would be a few years before a boy would notice me (first, I’d have to lose the braces, figure out how to tame my wild curls and switch to a pair of glasses that didn’t take up half of my face!) Until that day arrived, I dreamt of finding love and enjoyed experiencing it through the pages of my books.
In senior high school, I experienced my first love and my first heartbreak. Coincidentally, this was around the same time that I outgrew the young adult romance stories and gravitated towards adult fiction for the first time. Some of my earliest choices were White Oleander and The Poisonwood Bible, which are still two of my all-time favourite books. Discovering Oprah’s book club list helped me to choose from the daunting selection of adult books and I found many authors that remain favourites today. (This was a much better option than my original idea to work through the adult fiction section, starting with A — which meant I read about ten V.C. Andrews books in a row).
In high school, I also had a brief obsession with reading classics. I wanted to be a writer and felt that reading the most inspirational writers would help me to become a better writer. I read The Hobbit, Wuthering Heights, The Handmaid’s Tale, and a few others that I can’t remember (eclectic mix, I know). In senior high school, I had quite a few classics as required reading and many, many more in university — and I think that was what ended my desire to read the classics on my own time.
But my university reading is a story for another time…
Writer Grrl Reads 