the evolution of my crappy reading tastes: part one

i'm not sure if y'all have noticed, but i'm a bit of a reader.

it all started way, way back in elementary school when i picked up a copy of The Boxcar Children. oh, how i loved The Boxcar Children: thinking about how i would survive in my own boxcar; how i would find food and eat; how i would survive my orphan life. i was a bit imaginative as a child. now that i think of it, i think The Boxcar Children is what started my obsession with this whole survivalist genre in books and movies that has morphed into my post-apocalyptic obsession. (see what the boy has to deal with? prepping for doomsday and shit.)

then when i got a bit older, i moved onto The American Girl books. since i am older (thirty-something if you will), i actually remember when the Girls were introduced. at the beginning, there were only a handful of Girls, and they all came from a different time periods. because i have no kiddos of my own at present, i have no idea on how The American Girls have evolved, but it seems they have themselves a store and empire. you go Girls! i liked Molly and Felicity, but my favorite was Kristen Larson. sadly, she is retired--what does that mean? Kristen was the Girl from 1854, kind of like Laura Ingalls Wilder or Dr. Quinn Medicine Women (which i never was into but my mother totally loved--i think i have my mother is to blame for my period piece obsessiveness). Kristen was a survivalist. i had all her books. i even had the Kristen doll. hell, my aunt even made me a dress to look exactly like Kristen. i dressed up as her for Halloween one year.

i can't forget The Babysitters Club books. anyone my age has had to have read them. it is a part of being a teenage girl. it was a rite of passage written in the handbook on how to be a girl (in the 80s). i was all over The Babysitters Club. i remember thinking that my girlfriends and i should start a babysitters club because it would be "totally cool." i do, however, remember the one thing that drove me crazy about The Babysitters Club books was the whole recapping in the first 2 chapters. i detested the first 2 chapters of The Babysitters Club books. to this day, i have an issue with series' that do recaps from a previous book because of The Babysitter Club. because no one, NO ONE, will pick up a book in the middle of a series.

good lord, there is more. i'm telling y'all, this is my evolution.

in junior high i got into the Indiana Jones Choose Your Own Adventure (or at least i thought they were Choose Your Own Adventure, apparently they were Find Your Fate Adventure) books. i had such an obsession with Indiana Jones that when i first went into college i wanted to be an archaeologist. (i have always and will forever be a dreamer. i spend most my life in my head.) i remember biking to the public library in my hometown and spending all day there in the summer reading my Choose Your Own Adventure books. this was all happening during the wonderful Book-It time. y'all remember Pizza Hut's Book-It program? i remember getting the Book-It button and then collecting the star stickers to place on the button. oh boy! i can't believe it was a Pizza Hut sponsored program. sidenote, i really hope the Choose Your Own Adventure books are still popular.

in high school my book of choice was the Sweet Valley High books. oh good lord, what was i thinking? i guess it was because they were easy and fast, and i just liked to read. Sweet Valley High was easy, and they were a series. (i am sensing a trend with my obsession with book series.) back in high school, when i would have to do this stupid weight training summer program because i was a competitive swimmer, i would skip the class and sit in the empty high school hallways and read my Sweet Valley High books. oh Jessica and Elizabeth, how i always wished i was like them. i remembered them as being blond hair, blue eyed and a perfect size six, which with today sizes would more likely be a size four or even two, so sad. i can't remember if that's exact, but that's how i remember Jessica and Elizabeth.

i should mention that while in was in high school i read a lot of books that were literary works of art that had opened my eyes to what writing as an art looked and felt like. yes, i liked reading my guilty pleasures--they were a lot easier--but these literary works of art were novels that needed time and patience and demanded a slower pace to truly digest each and every word. sometimes deciding between the fast read guilty pleasure and the literary work of art is a hard choice, but the high school reading list helped expand my horizon. the first book that i fell hopelessly in love with was The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but of course. another book i had to read in high school that i thought was amazing was The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. oh high school reading lists, how us high schoolers hated you, but when i look back i am very thankful.

so now that i am looking back, i can see why i am drawn to the guilty pleasure reading as opposed to the more lyrical writings that i had always thought i would be more likely to pick up (even having been an English major in college). i am finding myself more and more very day. i thought i had already gone through all this self-discovery as a teen, but i guess thirty is the new fifteen, right?