Introductions

I didn’t always love books the way I do now; those who currently know me well or even slightly would have a hard time believing it, but it’s true. When I was young, I liked reading an average amount. My mom, a special education preschool teacher, provided me with all sorts of children’s books and I was certainly fond of them. I still remember curling up and reading Marilyn Sadler’s Elizabeth and Larry for the first time on my own; I was excited by the independence reading gave me and it was a relief to move on from “I Can Read!” books like The Fat Cat Sat on the Mat.

But for whatever reason, during the first few years after gaining my reading independence, I felt little desire to explore the literary world. My mom presented me with books she had loved as a child like the Little House on the Prairie series, but I just wasn’t interested. Instead I almost exclusively brought home these square, blue or green hardcovers about animals. They were as factual and dry as could be, but I was fascinated. I brought home every single book at least once and the cat-related ones at least twice or three times each for my poor mother to read with me.

She stuck with me, though, and I’m so thankful she did. On her weekly library visits she always brought me along and finally one day, something fiction caught my eye. The book was Warriors: Into the Wild by Erin Hunter, and it was still very much about animals (cats, of course). But it still allowed me to break off from my monotonous, factual education I’d been giving myself. From then on, I became inseparable from books; I had missed out on a few years I could have been reading honest-to-goodness literature and I was more than ready to catch up.

I was late to the game with books, and I’m a bit late to the game with blogging, too. But I’m excited to start, to have a better log of my reading than I’ve ever had in the past, and to connect with fellow literary enthusiasts out there!