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 
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