Books and me: Its Complicated…

Hey guys!!! So with this article I wanted to start my book reviews. In this post I will talk about when I started reading. What author made really serious impacts on me, the type of books I prefer to read, what I love, what I hate how long  I read every day  and all the other stuff, which I want to get out of the way before I start dedicating one post to one book.

I started reading books at a really young age. I probably got the habit from my parents. Both of them were avid readers and soon I started following in their footsteps. I started reading a lot of books at a very young age. But when I was 8 years old, there was one author, whose books I actively searched for and read. Enid Blyton. When I was in my fourth grade, I had finished around 75 books of her Famous Five and Secret Seven series.

So, at that time, Harry Potter was a huge thing. It still is. One day my dad bought The Philosophers Stone home, and I started reading it. But I felt that it was slightly mature for me and stopped almost immediately. But, near the end of my fourth grade I found my mother’s copy of The Da-Vinci Code.  I gave it a try and I loved it. In the process I became aware of a lot of, let’s just say, things. So from then on, I really didn’t have any reservations about what I read as long as the story and writing was good.

After The Da-Vinci code I got so hooked on to the Robert Langdon series that I started reading Angels and Demons immediately afterwards. I finished it in 3 days and after that, I re-read the The Da-Vinci Code, just to get the feeling of completion. One day during my fifth grade, I came across Harry Potter and the Deathly hallows in a second hand book store. I asked my dad, and he got it for me. So I stayed up that night and finished it the next day. It was epic. But, then I realized that I knew the ending and not the beginning. So I got the rest of the books and read the whole series in reverse order.

Around that time I became a really fast reader. Of the six times I read The Da-Vinci Code, I once finished it in 3 hours. So I really started going through a lot of books. After Harry Potter I was sorta hooked on to the fantasy genre, and I read a lot of those books. I read one book which was he 49^th in some series and I forgot the name of the book and the author. I really liked it but I couldn’t get my hands on the series, because I didn’t know what it was called. To this day, I don’t know the name of the book.

During my sixth grade, I got hooked onto Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. I also started reading a lot of novels. I read The Count of Monte Cristo. I read the Bourne novels and a lot of other fantasy novels. During my seventh grade, I was still hooked onto the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and Sherlock, when I got into reading a bit of Lee Child. My father used to read it all the time and I read a random chapter and I liked it. But unfortunately I was too hooked onto the world of fantast and super sleuths to let them go for more realistic fiction.

One day, when I was in eighth grade, I heard a lot of girls from ninth and tenth grade talk about a book. Most of them were my friends and they knew that I read a lot of books. They frequently started asking me if I had read “the” book. Enraged at the idea of missing a really good book that a lot of my seniors liked, I took the pains to track down and get a copy and borrow it. That was when “it entered my life. The poison. The book which should be prosecuted. The book which destroyed one of the most prominent beings in all of fantasy. Twilight.

Where can I start with Twilight? If there was a list of books that I regretted reading, this….thing takes the cake. Let me make this clear. Vampires were one of the most awesome and scary things in all of literature. Dracula is one of my all time favorites. And don’t even get me started on An Interview with a Vampire. Lesat is one of my favorite vampires, if not THE favorite vampire. Anne Rice, kudos for creating the PERFECT vampire. So, coming back to Twilight, I didn’t know what to expect, when I started reading it. But as I continued reading, I started becoming bored. All the book was about, in my opinion, was a girl, who could do nothing but be clumsy, lust after the hot guy in school, who turns out to be a vampire who SPARLKES? And we read all the thoughts that go on in that boring head of hers. That’s it. That’s the whole book. Notice the word “Lust”? Yeah. What happens in the book is not love. Love isn’t skin deep, but that is what this book says. My friends said that I am not a girl and don’t know to appreciate romance. Well let me make this clear, liking someone because they are good looking isn’t romance. If you really want to read romantic novels, read Nicholas sparks. He writes good romantic novels.

What I am trying to say is that I don’t consider Twilight to be fiction, fantasy or for that matter any form of literature. To me that was the time in my life, when I almost lost hope in the fact that a new author can be any good. But thankfully I didn’t lose hope and thank god for that. It was at that time did I read Heroes of the valley, which turned out to be a really compelling story. Around that time, I also got into reading horror. Not the campy Goosebumps horror, horror that freaks you out in the night, kind. Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz and Christopher Pike filled my head and gave me this urge to try my hand at writing horror. Although I kept at it and I do keep at it, from time to time, I am not really good at it.

My ninth grade started with a bang. That was when I started reading realistic fiction. Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, James Patterson, Jeffery Archer, Tom Clancy became favorites of mine. On my birthday my best friend gifted a John Grisham novel and I really liked it. But I did not really get addicted to the works of John Grisham. I did stick to realistic fiction and fantasy through my summer vacation and into tenth grade. Tenth grade was awesome. I read a lot, for someone who is only supposed to only study. I read fantasy, mystery, romance, legal, action and a lot more. But most importantly it was in this year that I started reading Patricia Cornwell. When a girl asked me if I had read The Body Farm and asked me if she would like it, I said I didn’t. But I got the book from her and finished it that night. What a journey it was. One of the best crime novels, I have read.  And I became addicted to it too. Too addicted in fact, that I started reading novels between my finals, which was not appreciated by a lot of my peers. From then on, I have been trying to collect and read all of Cornwell’s Work

So that’s basically, my history with books. Onto some general topics, i like most genres of books. I am willing to try out new stuff. I even tried reading a historic war novel. And it was not great, but, I am willing to cut it some slack.

One thing a lot of people ask me is how I get so much time to read books. Simple. If I am not doing something, or if I am doing something that doesn’t require a lot of my attention, I am most probably reading a book at that time. I read when I travel. In busses, vans, in the bathroom, if I am not sleepy, during English class when she is reading the text and generally whenever a teacher asks us to study; I put my head down and read a book, under my desk. It also helps that I am a fast reader. Another thing I get asked frequently is how I have enough attention span to finish a book. Well, let me be frank, I really don’t know. My mom always says that if I show a fraction of the attention I show on reading story books on my studies, I would probably be the king of science. So I really don’t know how I had the attention span.

Who is my favorite author…… that’s really hard to answer. I like a lot of them. They all have that distinct style of writing. The author, who inspired my style of writing, was Rick Riordan. I love a lot of authors. I haven’t even mentioned 3% of them in this post. I love a lot of series.  The Happy Potter series, The Hunger games, Divergent, The inheritance series, Scarpetta series and a lot of other series, which I can’t recall off the top of my head.

Why do I like books? Well, they are powerful, moving and inspirational and they also provide a world where you can escape to when you are feeling down. They never left my side, through all the ups and downs in my life. They are magical things.

So there you go guys. My book life!!!! Go on and read a book. It’ll take you on a journey…….