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Early Reading
In 2007 I started elementary school. The earliest books I can remember reading are "Goodnight, Moon", "The Velveteen Rabbit", and "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", which was my favorite at the time -
Rainbow Magic
In early elementary, the Rainbow Magic book series were my absolute favorite books to read. With so many different books and different fairies, it encouraged a lot of imaginative play with my friends and I. -
American Girl
In 2009, I fell in love with American Girl dolls and their books, my favorite being Kirsten Larson. I still own an entire shelf of AG books. The AG historical books got me really interested in history and historical fiction, and were probably some of the most influential books in my literacy journey. -
Late Elementary
By the time I was well into elementary school, I had discovered that I had a deep love for reading. By third grade I was reading at a high school level, and I spent my time at home reading for fun. In the 5th grade dystopian novels met their peak in popularity, and I was a huge fan of The Hunger Games and Divergent, even if they were definitely too mature for me to be reading at the time. -
Junior High
In junior high school, I took up the task of reading The Book Thief. At the time, it was a massive novel to me and seemed like a huge challenge to get through, but I ended up reading it in just a few days. It became a hugely important book to me, and I ended up reading it five times by the time I got to high school. -
YALSA Book Club
When I was a sophomore in high school I joined a local chapter of the YALSA teen book club, which gave teens the opportunity to read and review advanced copies of young adult novels for publishing companies. As someone that's always been interested in writing my own book, this introduced me to the world of publishing along with the online literary community. -
Reading Lists
At some point in high school, I began keeping yearly lists of all the books I read as a way to motivate me to continue reading. Reading throughout high school could be difficult to manage while keeping up with everything, so I would set yearly reading goals of the amount of books I wanted to read that year. These goals really did encourage me to read, I went from 12 in 2018, to 30 in 2019, and finally 50 in 2020. My favorite book I read last year was the YA novel Darius the Great is Not Okay
