I know a lot of my friends on Instagram didn’t discover their love for books until later in their life. I feel very lucky that I’ve been reading for basically my entire life, so I wanted to share how my love for books has grown since I was a litttttle baby. So where do we start?
Step one: Bookworm parents
So you can tell from the title of this post that I owe a lot of my bookishness to my parents. Both of my parents are huge readers. My mom likes reading pretty much everything – fantasy, historical fiction, mystery, thrillers, etc. My dad mainly sticks to mystery and thrillers. Their house is filled with bookshelves – they have huge ones on the walls in our living room, and then an entire TBR shelf in their bedroom! And of course, a shelf for just cookbooks, and then my mom also has a shelf for quilting books since she’s a quilter. I feel like it would be hard to not be a bookworm with parents like mine!
Step two: A baby bookworm
As a baby and small child, before I learned to read, my parents would read aloud to me (and my brother) all the time. It started with picture books – one of my favorites was Madeline. I even knew the author’s name (Ludwig Bemelmans) and could pronounce it correctly when I was like, 2 or 3 haha.
Sometimes my brother and I would sit in the corner of the living room by the bookshelf and flip through the picture books on our own too haha.
Of course when Harry Potter came out, my parents started reading those to us as well! We listened to the audiobooks too. There was a family trip we took where my mom was driving me and my brother and we were listening to the Chamber of Secrets, and she was speeding (only slightly!!) so we got pulled over by the cops 😂 she told him she was distracted a bit by the story and he was nice and let us go since she wasn’t speeding that much anyway hahaha.
Step three: Baby bookworm learns to read
One of the things that marked my transition into reading on my own happened one day when my mom was reading one of the Harry Potter books to us out loud. Apparently, I told her she was reading too slow and I took the book from her and started just reading it myself 😂.
As could probably be predicted, my parents, seeing as they themselves are bookworms, set the certain rules/expectations/etc from the get go that led to me (and my brother) being a bookworm. For example, whenever we went out to dinner we were expected to bring a book to entertain us as we waited to be seated or whatnot. In addition, our reward for good grades was that we got to pick out a book we wanted haha.
Step four: Bookworm grows up and for some reason has no memory
I have a bad memory for things that happened in my childhood, but there are a couple reading related things that I do remember.
My elementary school encouraged reading as much as possible. Every year we had a school-wide readathon. Basically, for a month (I think) you recorded how many pages you read and it was kind of a competition within your class to see who could read the most. Naturally, I won every year hahaha.
Our local library also ran a reading program during the summer that encouraged kids to read. I think this was also mostly during elementary school. The idea was similar, to just read as much as possible, but instead of competing against others you were trying to reach milestones in order to earn prizes for yourself! Yay for public libraries!!
I know I read all through middle school and high school but I don’t really have any specific memories, oops 😅🤷🏽♀️.
Wait there’s one exception! I was in middle school when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out, and at the time I was at a sleep-away camp for nerds. Seriously, it was for nerds I’m not kidding, you had to get a certain score on a test to even go to this camp lol. ANYway, it was very close to my hometown so my parents brought me a copy of HP7 the day it released and I read it in 4.5 hours that day hahaha. Clearly Harry Potter has been one of the big influences in my life.
Step five: A social media bookworm
Fast forward a bit to my third year of college – aka when I discovered bookstagram! I found it through this Buzzfeed article actually. They had done a spotlight on Emily’s (@blueeyedbiblio) bookstagram, and that was the first I had ever heard of the community. I started browsing through her account and other people’s accounts, and eventually decided to make an account for myself! I think finding the community made me realize how amazing it would be to have people to talk about books with – though my family reads, my friends at the time didn’t so I was kind of on my own. From there, I feel like things mayyy have escalated faster haha. Bookstagram is such an amazing place to find new book recommendations, and there are a ton of books I never would have found without it.
Not to mention all the fellow bookworms that I met through the platform!! I’ve made some really close friends from it (one being my co-blogger Shari, obviously), and have been fortunate enough to meet up with them in real life. It’s been such a wonderful outlet for me, both socially and creatively.
Bookstagram also opened me up to the world of author events! And meeting authors!
And then just last year, I found blogging!! Well, I mean I knew book blogs existed, duh. And I had toyed with the idea of having my own, but I’m in graduate school and I didn’t feel like I really had the time to do it. But then!! Shari wanted someone to co-blog with, and you know the rest. Well maybe you don’t, if you’re newer here haha. But anyway, I joined her here on Colour Me Read and it’s been so much fun. I’ve gotten to write more, which I never really did much of before, gotten more opportunities to interact with authors and publishers, and discovered great books through other people’s blogs.
That’s a lot about social media, but obviously I’m still reading. I’m reading more than I ever did before I think. I feel like everything over my life has just compounded my love of reading, and it feels like it’s growing exponentially.
Step ??: The neverending story
Honestly I don’t think the journey will ever end haha. There will always be something new that makes me love books even more, and I’m really excited to find out what that thing (or what those things) will be.
And to end, I just want to say THANK YOU to my parents – without them I wouldn’t have books, and without books I’d be very sad.
I hope you had fun learning a bit more about me! How did you get into reading? What were some books that kickstarted your love of reading?
I loved hearing your story! Mine is somewhat similar to yours, in that my parents are both huge readers, and we always listened to audiobooks (including Harry Potter!) in the car. My dad is a really fast reader, so he picked up most of the books I was reading in addition to his own (we also swapped and still do swap recommendations), which meant I had someone to talk to about my books. We also had some sort of reading program in elementary, but I don’t remember it very well. But I LOVED the summer reading challenges at the library! I was so sad when I aged out. 😂 The big difference for me is that I almost always had friends around me who were also big readers. That seems to make me an exception in the online book community.
Yay I love that we have those things in common! And I love that you swap with your dad, it’s like me and my mom! That’s so lucky you had reader friends! I have a few more now but they’re not quite obsessed as I am hahaha
Aww, this was so lovely to read! My dad isn’t a reader, but my mum enjoys horror, thriller and crime (far more than me, haha). When I was a child, she introduced me too Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series, which I loved!
I never really liked being read aloud to. I have vague memories of being read to by volunteers at school and hoping they’d hurry it up, hahaha. Thank goodness I can change the speed of audiobooks!
Ahh, when Deathly Hallows came out, I remember reading it as fast as I could, hahaha. I had to know what happened (and it was also the book where I flicked to the end to see whose names I could spot, LOL).
hehe I’m glad you loved reading it Steph 🙂 it was really fun to write.
Haha yeah I really like that function on audiobooks! Plus it makes me feel like I’m winning when it takes me a shorter amount of time to listen to an audiobook than what it says the length is hahaha.
Omg I could never flip to the end haha.