Reading Changes

2018 was the year I turned 50. I don't feel 50 except maybe first thing in the morning when everything creaks and groans until I get the ol' body warmed up. As my body has changed over the years, so has many other things including my reading preferences. Let's step into the WayBack Machine to when I was a wee tike and see what those changes are.

I've always read. Well, before I could actually read, Mom read to me and maybe my brothers did, too? I don't remember that part (I'm the baby with brothers 10 and 8 years older than me), so maybe my older brother did since he's the one who loves to read, too. My other brother was more interested in sports and couldn't sit still for long.

So, when I could read on my own, I went through all my Little Golden Books and Dr Seuss over and over again. As I got a bit older I added books for teens even though I was under 10. School Book Fairs were my favorite time of year. Mom almost always ordered my long lists though now that I'm an adult I know money was tight so I love my parents even more for indulging me. 

Not my picture, but our road was much like this.

And then the Blizzard of '78 hit on January 26, 1978, two months before my 10th birthday. Even for Ohio, used to the snow as we were, it was a huge storm and we were out of school for over two weeks while people worked overtime to dig everyone out. I grew up on a farm and it was awhile before they got to us. Even then they had to come out with a front end loader to clear the roads. Snowplows were just not going to move such massive amounts of snow. My dad worked 3rd shift at Goodyear and he couldn't get home for 3 days. Anyway, I'm setting the scene for everyone. We had the motherload of snow, no way to get anywhere safely, and a nearly 10-yr-old who could only play in the snow for so long before getting too cold. There's only so many board games and card games to play, too. In other words, I was soon bored out of my mind. My oldest brother was off at college and my other one was a Senior in high school. Mom was desperate. So, she went through her bag of Harlequins and picked out ones to give me. Mostly old 1950s ones or Betty Neels. LOL For anyone familiar with Betty Neels, there's usually only a kiss at the very end. ;) Well, a whole new world opened up to me and I tackled them with abandon armed with the huge double set of dictionaries from our Encyclopedia Britannica set. Any word I didn't know (and there were a lot of them at first, I mean, what 10-yr-old knows the definition of lithe, cynical, sarcasm, etc lol) and I would stop to look them up. We would use those big ass dictionaries when we played Boggle, too. Just sayin' my childhood was filled with words. :D

I plowed through the stack and wanted more. My mom had created a monster. My oldest brother, lover of all things sci-fi and fantasy, was appalled when he found out, declaring at every turn that those books would rot my brain. Never mind that he completely ignored my vocabulary growing by leaps and bounds. *rolls eyes* So every chance he got he countered with sci-fi and fantasy. I was in book heaven for years. lol

A small fraction of my current collection.

I read Harlequin & Silhouette (all of their lines and boy did I love when they came out with the Blaze line *fans self*) for a couple decades with many sci-fi and fantasy thrown in for a decent variety. This continued until I finally started college at age 34. All book reading except textbooks came to a stop for 4 years (2002-2006) while I went every semester (yes, summer, too) until I had two Associates degrees. Side note: I still haven't gone any further with those. Maybe someday. During those years textbooks were just not cutting it. I had a reading void that needed filled with something other than educational shit. I had no time to delve into novels, so I did the next best thing: I subscribed to about 10 magazines. Yep. That many. And it helped keep me sane while I went to school, delivered the newspaper, did work study, raised 6 kids, and did all the usual household bullshit (cooking, cleaning, shopping, laundry, blah, blah, blah) while my husband worked full-time 2nd shift 7 days a week and went to college full-time (he came out with a BA and a BS - an overachieving Marine lol). Can someone tell me how we survived those years? We could totally rock an apocalypse, I'm telling you.

Ok, are you still with me? I'm now 38, just graduated and free to read whatever the fuck I want. And boy did I. I indulged like there was no tomorrow, sometimes reading as many as 4 Harlequins a day. Keep in mind, that all the little ones were in school and the older ones out of the house by this time and I wouldn't stop delivering the paper until 2008. Speaking of that, I started listening to audiobooks while I delivered. I mean, you can only listen to the same songs on the radio for so long before road raging (even if I was the only one on the road at 4am).  I introduced audiobooks to my kids in 2004 when I tried reading to them and realized my throat hated me for it. Thank the book gods for audios, nearly all of which I would get from the library though I did end up buying a few series for us on CD and a few more at Audible when hubby bought me a Kindle Fire. I did a post about the 12 yrs of audiobooks my kids and I listened to and you can read it HERE. I think, by the time I quit the paper in 2008, I had listened to nearly all of the Danielle Steel books (up to that time) and just about every other audiobook my library had which is a considerable amount as it's no small library. So, by 2008 I had added other contemporary romance besides Harlequins, womens fiction, historical romance, mystery, and thriller as well as a buttload of childrens and YA books.

It was the year of 2010 that would shift my reading preferences yet again. It was the Year of Paranormal. I was walking through the library, as I did (and still do) once a week, when I spotted Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton on a display stand. I took it home and entered a whole new world I had no idea was out there. How was this even possible? What is this sorcery?! Or not, since sorcery is technically fantasy, but genre catagorizing is a whole other sticky post for another day. How did I miss this emerging-from-the-dark genre? I was completely consumed by this whole new-to-me dimension of the book world and read all I could find. 8 years later and paranormal is still my favorite go-to genre while contemporary romance has practically fallen off my radar. I've since explored even more genres out there: classics, steampunk, horror, western, erotica, BDSM, monster porn, even fan fiction! I've also added graphic novels to my mediums of choice. I'm reading a wider variety of books than I ever have before and I'm loving it! There's not much out there I won't read. I've even been known to read non-fiction on a rare occasion. *gasp*

2010 is also the year we started building the 16'x30' Exterior Library.
It just needs shelves inside, tidied outside, and a paint job, but it's finally almost done.

If you've made it to the end of this post then congratulations! It's 2018 again and I'm still 50 for another 2 months. Did we lose anyone in the Wayback Machine? I hope not. You know no good comes from messing with the timeline. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed my nostalgic reading journey. 

Have your preferences changed? Let me know in the comments!