Talking Meme: Day 18
just_ann_now: Books you loved as a child? Books you love now? Books everyone else loves but leave you feeling "meh"? Anything book-related!
So, yes, this is a hard one. Why? Because, as I've made it quite clear over the years, I'm a complete bookworm. Narrowing this down to just a handful of books to talk about is going to be pretty difficult.
What books did I love as a child? Oh, there were so many of them. I loved the usual kids' book series for someone who grew up in the late 80s/90s/early 2000s: Acorna, Animorphs, Anne of Green Gables, The Baby-Sitters Club, The Boxcar Children, the Dear America diaries, Fear Street, Goosebumps, Little House on the Prairie, Nancy Drew, the Ramona series, The Song of the Lioness, Sweet Valley, Wayside School. Artemis Fowl and Harry Potter, once they came out.
There was one book series, similar to Goosebumps, that I can't remember the name of for the life of me. I had about a dozen of them, and they came from a book club of some sort. I got them for, like, six months before we had some financial issues come up and we had to drop them. I remember one of them was about a family staying in a hotel, and the staff turned out to be... aliens, I think? Or maybe the family were the aliens? And I remember another involved a lunch lady cooking delicious food, except it turned out she was using insects in it in order to... transform the kids at the school into insects? Or something? Gah, it's going to bug me now that I can't remember the name of the series. :-/
I loved Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Narnia, and Shakespeare, once I was in my pre-teens/early teens. A Little Princess. Christy. The Giver, Under Aliens Stars. The Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Absolutely anything by Michael Crichton, Lois Duncan, or Jules Verne.
Lots of classics, mostly because I wanted something, anything, to read and my school library (K-9, at least) was woefully unprepared for me and my friend Ben. Both of us literally read 95% of the books in the library during our ten years there (fiction and nonfiction alike), and the principal had the librarian ask us for requests whenever they bought new books for the school.
I bounced in and out of comics, mostly reading ones that I stole from my older cousins until I started working at the Restaurant of Doom and could afford to buy my own. From 2002-2007 or so, I read a ton of manga.
Nowadays, I still read a lot, although not as much as I did before I graduated from college. I've been enjoying the Numinous World series by Jo Graham and the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik. I've been rereading some of my old manga series, which has been a nice walk down memory lane. I've quite enjoyed the When Women Were Warriors books.
Books that leave me feeling "meh" are up next on the list of questions, aren't they? Hmm.
I've never understood the appeal of Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters. I really seriously dislike Pride and Prejudice, and it's not just the writing style or something along those lines, because the various adaptations have all left me less than impressed. The entire plot is just extremely boring to me, and I can't see the appeal no matter how many times people try to convince me to give it another chance.
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