Hello all! I’ve decided not to participate in the Library Loot event anymore because I check so many books out and only read about 5% of them and it seems silly to post pictures of books on my blog that I’m never even going to crack open. But, I still want to do some kind of weekly themed post so I’ve come up with ‘Pryday’! Every Friday I will ask a book-related question, something to get me thinking about the books I love, why I love them and how I’m developing as a reader. I’d love to hear all of your responses too, if you feel like sharing. My first Pryday question is:
“What is the first book that you really LOVED?”
I wasn’t much of a reader as a child. I was a good reader and I liked to read, but for some reason I didn’t read for pleasure. I was always outside playing with my friends or making mischief with my brothers and sisters indoors, but reading wasn’t a big part of my childhood. I only started to read seriously when I was about 13 or 14. That’s when I became more introspective and struggled socially after I entered junior high school. I turned to books to escape myself. Around this time my grandma sent a box of books to me that had been my mom’s books when she was a teen. Inside the box was a big, fat, dusty copy of Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I chose to read it during my summer break and was completely mesmerized. I remember being smitten with Scarlett, wishing I was as bold and fearless, as headstrong and demanding as she was. The passion and heat between Scarlett and Rhett was irresistible to a 13-year-old girl, prompting fantasies of having a dramatic romance of my own. And what other book so sways the reader so persuasively to the side of the South during the war? I held my Confederate sympathies for many years after reading GWTW and was convinced that General Sherman was a monster because of it. This is the only book I can remember immediately starting again right after I’d finished and I think I read it 3 or 4 times in a row during that summer and fall. I was so beguiled by this novel and I’ll never forget that feeling of falling in love with a book for the first time.
How about you? What was the first book you really LOVED?
A Certain Fondness 
my first book I loved as a kid it was a book called abel island about a mouse that gets stuck on a island as a adult it was probably something like famished road or midnights children when I was 19 or 20 set up love of magic realism and the booker prize both set abroad as well suppose that says something as well ,all the best stu
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Oh, interesting that the books you first loved have influenced your current reading. I so admire people who have read Midnight’s Children because I didn’t like it at all and it frustrated me!
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Mine was Little House on the Prairie – which is also the first book I can remember anyone giving me, though clearly we had books before then. But Gone with the Wind was the first book I hid under the mattress, because my mom said I couldn’t read it. She was not happy when she found it (what was I thinking – much too big a book to hide that way).
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Haha! I love the image of GWTW making a bulge in your mattress! I loved the Little House tv series, but was curiously never inspired to read the books…
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I really need to read GWTW – what am I waiting for?
The first book I loved was probably an Enid Blyton one – I loved books as a child and hers have really stayed with me. Possibly The Magic Faraway Tree or the Malory Towers series. Sigh…I want to read them again right now.
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I think you’ll really like it when you do get to it!
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I used to read a lot when I was a child and like the Book Whisperer, I was a big fan of Enid Blyton. But the first book I remember really loving was Watership Down by Richard Adams when I was about ten years old. I read it again last year and was pleased to find I still loved it as an adult too!
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Enid Blyton has been mentioned by so many bloggers in the UK as a childhood favorite, but she is pretty unknown here in the States. We only have 1 of her novels in my library system. I wonder if GWTW would be as wonderful to me now as it was 20 years ago…glad you liked Watership Down just as much now as you did as a child.
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I gave up Library Loot a while back for just the same reason. My mother has always loved books and encouraged me from a very early age, but I think my first real love was Winnie the Pooh.
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How great to have a mom who encouraged you in your reading!
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First book I really loved was Little Women. Re. earlier question – Jane Austen always gets me out of a reading slump – shame she only wrote 6 novels!
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I liked Little Women also, but it didn’t capture me like GWTW did. Yes, Jane Austen is good for getting out of a slump. I need to remember that next time!
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As a child it was Blyton’s Malory Towers series which I loved. Then aged 12-ish it was Jane Eyre which I loved, then just after that Rebecca. GWTW was my mother-in-laws favourite, she re-read it constantly and for that reason I’m never going to read it. It would feel too much like being in her domain!
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Haha! That sounds like a good question: “What books can you never read because your mother-in-law loves them?”
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