What book got you reading?

[dianaterrado]

I read Chamber of Secrets and never stopped reading since.

[bookworm2567]

I only started getting into reading when I was about 15 or 16 and I owe it all to The Perks of Being a Wallflower

[Zialex]

When I decided to sit down to read a book of my choosing I went to the library and randomly checked out a bunch of books that I thought would be interesting.

One of them was a book called "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer, it was a book about memory, and memory techniques. Which is a subject I really enjoy. That's what set it off for me.

[Kister Bless]

My English teacher was the reason I started reading books. I had no book of my own in primary school. My teacher could force me into reading stories from our class book and that's how I got into reading. To date reading is a part and parcel of me.

[Cardui]

I think my love for reading came from my mom reading to me as a child.

[KCWolf]

Charlotte's Web by EB White. Still one of my all-time favorites.

[Tomah]

I've never hated books, but I didn't usually go out of my way to read them, either. I was more of a comics kid. There were a few books here and there I either stumbled upon or was assigned to by school that I enjoyed quite a bit: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (albeit a "kid-friendly" version), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, etc. The one novel that really hooked me and made me more of a book reader, though, is Machado de Assis' The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (or Epitaph of a Small Winner).

[Monet_va]

The first book I was given that I read by myself was the Phantom Stallion series when I was about 8 years old. Giving me a book about something I loved (horses) led me to gain interest in reading.

[Florence Nalianya]

The book that got me reading is "things fall apart "by Chinua Achebe.

[dorebri2020]

When I was younger, I was inspired by the Ranger's Apprentice series, and then later the Harry Potter series.

[jkmalik]

The book that got me reading is "things fall apart "by Chinua Achebe.

That's a great book. I read it in high school, and I remember not appreciating it as much as I should have. I want to read it again, now that I have a better grip on Achebe's genius.

[jkmalik]

The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen. That was the book. Sarah Dessen was it for me. She was my JK Rowling.

I was a volunteer in the Young People's Department at my local library for five years. One day, when I was, fifteen, I think, I was organizing the YA shelves and I saw that book. I pulled it out, I liked the cover (judge-y!), and I read the description, approving of its premise. I checked it out, read it, loved it, and read more Sarah Dessen. I eventually stopped reading Sarah Dessen as I realized her books all kind of followed the same theme. As my friend put it once, all her books kind of "blend together". Although, I do appreciate the cameos of her other characters in her various books.

It may seem like I was a late bloomer, but I did read before, just sporadically. I wasn't a Harry Potter person, and was so scolded for that. I read The Bell Jar and Of Mice and Men and Animal Farm and The Handmaid's Tale (sounds so lame, but I discovered The Handmaid's Tale before it was cool, ha ha, joking...it's been around since 1985, if I remember my Varsity Quiz question correctly). Then, it's funny, I ended up devouring Sarah Dessen and YA up until a few years ago.

But it was Dessen, as well as Megan McCafferty's Jessica Darling series (up until about the fourth book, never read the fifth one, tried to, but...nope), that really got me into reading.

YA gets a bad rap a lot of the time, and it's nice to know that there are really shining stars that stand out. Let's not forget Ned Vizzini, Libba Bray, Anna Godbersen.

[E_Sethna]

When I was a child, I wasn't too fond of reading. That changed when my parents introduced me to Nancy Drew. I cannot remember the title of the first Nancy Drew book I got hooked on, though it was the first novel series that I enjoyed exploring. It also led me to discover other great mystery novels--and young adult books--as I browsed the school library.

[Aditi Sapate]

Famous five series by Enid Blyton!

[casdill]

As a kid I loved being read to but found it difficult to read. I was very slow and remember just dreading and hating my literature classes in middle school. We had to collect AR points for reading and I was always so far behind because I would choose the smallest, cheapest books to read because I could actually get through them.

Sometime around sixth grade a friend told me I should read Harry Potter (by this time the fourth book had come out and it disgusted me how big it was), and I thought she was truly, absolutely, entirely insane. She kept bugging me about it though and I finally checked out the first book and humored her by reading the first chapter that night. Well, a little while later I was the furthest into a book I'd ever been in my life and I'll never forget that moment. I still remember that girl's name and what she looked like because of that, though I don't remember ever speaking to her beyond those brief periods in middle school.

So like for most kids, I guess the actual love of reading started with Harry Potter. I did really like books, but I hated the process of trying to struggle through them for school. My first favorite book was a giant red Mother Goose book filled with illustrations and nursery rhymes that I attribute to creating me as I am today.