International Authors Day Blog Hop | How I Got into Reading

Hi guys,

As part of the International Authors Day blog hop hosted by b00kR3vi3ws I'm going to be talking a little bit about how I got into reading.

I never went to a regular school. I was home educated by my mum, and when I was little, she had a really hard time getting me to read anything. Something which is still shocking to me today. For some reason reading just never interested me.

As part of teaching me and my two sisters and one brother. My parents used to go to these education convention things, where a bunch of people spoke about home educating. You could find out useful information about where to get books and supplies, and get tips and advice.

While at one of these events, my mum mentioned to one of the people running a stall or giving a talk (honestly, I'm little hazy on how the conversation came up), but basically she mentioned to this guy that one of her kids (me) just didn't have any interest in reading.

His advice was to let me pick out something to read which interested me. At the time I was really into Barbie's and so taking on board his advice, my mum let me choose what to read and I choose Barbie magazines.

Fast forward a few years until I was about ten or eleven, and now I really enjoy reading. I've moved on from Barbie magazines to books by people like Jaqueline Wilson, and I love going to the library.

Then maybe a couple years later when I was about twelve or thirteen, my older sister and I used to run these reading challenges. We'd usually run them for a year and see who could read the most books in that year. We'd write up lists and stick them to our walls, and that got me even more into reading.

I used to love to go to the library and find new books, and also buying books in the charity shops.

By the time I was about fourteen or fifteen, I had moved away from the children's and teen section, and I started reading a lot of adult fiction, specifically Lyn Andrews who was a favorite at the time. I also began to get more into reading the classics. I started reading Austen, Shakespeare, Dickens, Alcott, and Bronte and there was no looking back.

I was hooked on reading and my love of books grew from there. As I got towards my late teens I rediscovered the young adult genre, and I started reading and loving books by Sarah Dessen, John Green, Beth Revis, Morgan Matson and countless others.

I discovered Goodreads and started tracking everything I read, and taking part in the yearly reading challenges which soon had me reading close to one hundred books a year.

I started expanding what I read, picking up Dystopian, and sci-fi and other genres which I hadn't read before. I started reading different classics, pulling a lot from American and Russian literature.

I started this blog and got really involved in reviewing the books that I read, and I started writing and publishing books.

All of this stemmed from my mum letting me read Barbie magazines when I was little. I can honestly say that I have never been so grateful to Barbie, because perhaps if I hadn't been so interested in reading Barbie magazines, I never would have developed my loved of reading, and I never would have graduated from Barbie to amazing authors like Tolstoy, Hemmingway, Salinger, and contemporary authors like Green, Dessen, Ockler and more.

So that's my story of how I went from reluctant reader, to book lover and author.