This week’s Booking Through Thursday asks… “Do you read books “meant” for other age groups? Adult books when you were a child; Young-Adult books now that you’re grown; Picture books just for kicks … You know … books not “meant” for you. Or do you pretty much stick to what’s written for people your age?”
Well. Let me do a bit of a longitudinal study here… -examines Goodreads-
Okay, so. I was going to say that I read a lot of YA and children’s books, because they are short and quick and usually delightful, but it turns out that I read way more adult-age-group (as opposed to “adult,” which sounds skeezy) books in general. But I suppose I read more books for young’uns than the average 25-year-old? I don’t know what the average 25-year-old reads. Nothing?
Anyway. Back to the point. In high school, I read a lot of YA, of course, but I also read a lot of adult-age-group books, including some that I still love today. Excellent. Then, in college, I didn’t read, like, at all for the first few years, except to re-read The Phantom Tollbooth, continue A Series of Unfortunate Events, or read through A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels. Those were some fun library trips!
So the first three or so years of college were about kids books. The summer before my senior year, though, I tried really hard to actually read books over summer break instead of working myself to death, and so I managed quite a lot of adult-age-group books, and then I read lots of stuff for classes during my senior year, and then when I got out of college I continued on that path.
The reason that I think I read all of these YA books is that after I got laid off and started reading ALL of the books, reading more book blogs, and going to library school, I found a lot of cool YA books I had never heard of and therefore devoured. Especially last year, when I took a whole class on YA services and had to read 21 books for it… a lot of my reading time after that class was spent reading the rest of series and other books by the same authors.
So far this year my reading is back to where it was a couple years ago, probably because I’ve burned myself out on YA books, and because I don’t have people constantly recommending new awesome ones to me! And on the flip side, I have lots of people recommending excellent adult-age-group novels to me every day, and my list is just so full! Of course, there’s plenty of year left and this could still change — got any books to recommend me? 🙂