Follow Friday

Follow My Book Blog Friday is hosted by Rachel at Parajunkee's View and Alison at Alison Can Read. The point is to follow as many book blog as you can and make new friends! As part of the adventure, she gives a weekly question.

Here is this week's question:

Q. How has your reading habits changed since you were a teen? or If you are still a teen what new genres are you in love with currently?

When I was in my early teens, I wasn't much of a reader. My defunct school didn't spend much time with reading, and we didn't have an English class. I read the R.L. Stein Goosebumps books off and on, and, later, the Fear Street books. Loving wolves, I forced myself to sit and read White Fang during the summer between my 6^th and 7^th grade school year. That was an adventure! Dialect writing is really hard to read when you're an inexperienced reader!

At the end of that school year, I was pulled out of school to be homeschooled by my mother. Being homeschooled, I had a lot of exposure to literature. I was required to do five book reports during a school year. One of the books was picked by the school, three I had to choose off of a required reading list, and I could pick the last one. During this time, I ended up reading LoTR series (sans the Return of the King. I can never get through that book no matter how many times I try to read it!) and Battlefield Earth. I found that I really enjoyed reading and English as a subject of study!

However, I never really got into young adult books as a teenager. In fact, I really didn't like them. Granted, a friend of mind introduced me to Patricia C. Wrede's Dealing With Dragons series when I was about 14. My mother, being strangely hyper religious about it, decided to take the books from me and refuse to let me read them. However, it was two years later when I picked up The Last Herald Mage series by Mercedes Lackey, which came off of my parents' bookcase!

Those three book led me into a world full of fantasy through my high school years and beyond. Most of the time you could find me curled up on the couch or sunning on our balconies with my nose in a book. Before every college course started, I would be sitting in the hall reading my latest book. It wasn't until my aunt introduced me to Laurell K. Hamilton -- LONG BEFORE she SUCKED! -- that I got into urban fantasy. And, through my English degree, learned to branch out and enjoy other genres like contemporary fiction. My love for YA lit came when I took a class focused towards the genre. I learned a lot and was able to appreciate it more than I could as a teenager.

Currently, my TBR pile of over 30 books is sitting across from me on my bookcase. About 90% of it is urban fantasy and the rest consists of general fantasy, horror, and contemporary fiction.