To be honest with all of you, when I came across this prompt- I knew it would be the first thing I chose to write about in this whole "journey of self-discovery" that I'm attempting to go on throughout 2018. I also altered it slightly, because I can't choose my favorite 'author.' I read too much to just have one. Since my tastes have changed throughout the years, this post will be segmented by what level of school I was in/how old I was. Of course, all of these books are recommended.
It's taken me several attempts to make it all the way through writing this, because I keep remembering amazing books, authors, experiences, classes, and anecdotes that I need to go back and tell all of you.
I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.
I also hope that you all enjoy my new series answering these random prompts, which I have affectionately called, "A 'Prompt' Response."
-----
It's taken me several attempts to make it all the way through writing this, because I keep remembering amazing books, authors, experiences, classes, and anecdotes that I need to go back and tell all of you.
I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.
I also hope that you all enjoy my new series answering these random prompts, which I have affectionately called, "A 'Prompt' Response."
-----
“We live and breathe words. .... It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them."
-Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
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Elementary School:
If you know me, like really know me, personally, or if we've ever attended school together or been friends in any way, you'll know two things about me when it comes to reading. One, I used to be a serial-dog-earer when it came to my books, and two, that I almost always carried some type of reading material around with me from the time I was about seven.
The first 'series' I remember reading, would have to be anything Little House on the Prairie. The first time I read through the books, I read them out of order. The next time, I read them in order. Now? I just read them by what I'm in the mood for. Laura Ingalls Wilder was a huge part of my development as a young reader. It was traditional content, but it made me start to think about historical periods of time, and everything that the past held in the form of books.
After that, I started reading anything Percy Jackson. I was obsessed with Rick Riordan and his tales of adolescent half-blood children and teenagers literally solving all of the worlds problems. I wanted nothing more than to attend Camp Half-Blood, wear the signature orange shirt, and earn my beads from summer to summer. Alas, the only time I could ever attend the camp was through Rick's marvelous storytelling- which, to be frank, ended up being perfectly fine with me.
Like any young female, I was obsessed with Judy Blume. Not only did I frequent the tale of Margaret, a child growing into a young woman on the hunt for a bigger purpose in life, but I reveled in the Fudge books. Every crazy family story was either something I'd experienced, or enough like my own life that I easily related. Her books were also the precursor to me falling head-over-heels in love with New York City.
Come to think of it, almost every book or series that I read at that age was set somewhere in New York. I don't think I've ever realized that before. Huh. You really learn a lot about yourself when you're trying to remember everything you ever looked up to as a young reader.
In the fifth grade, I also started reading works by this magnificent author named Beverly Lewis. She wrote Amish romances, and my mom and grandmother had been reading a series called "Annie's People." A few years later, about seven, this wonderful woman held a book signing in my town. Mom signed me out of school early, and we were among the first in line to meet Mrs. Lewis. She has the kindest heart, and we even told her about how my grandmother loved her books. She signed three or four of ours, but she also asked me to please send her anything I wrote in the future, because she wanted to know of my success when I get there. I might send her a link to this blog, but her books honestly helped shape me as a human being, and are a big part of the reason I try to find kindness in everyone.
Thank you so much, Mrs. Lewis, for continuing to write your whole life. Thank you for inspiring someone like me to keep writing, even when the words don't come so easy.
Middle School:
To be really honest with you, I don't remember reading very much in the early part of sixth grade. I had a lot of friends, and had departmentalized classes. However, I apparently was good at something, because I was in a spelling bee.
Towards the end of sixth grade is when we initially moved to North Carolina. The school I went to wasn't my favorite place in the world; I called home sick from the office at least twenty times, no exaggeration. My favorite place to escape? The school library- between the pages of books. One time I asked to go to the restroom, and then spent the following twenty minutes in the library checking out books.
My favorite series was this never heard of series called Camp Confidential, and it was about a bunch of girls going to a summer camp in middle school. This launched me face first into teenage chick-lit. The author of that series is Melissa J. Morgan, and I really admired her work for that somewhat dark period of time in my life.
Other than reading novels sporadically after that, I didn't have a specific interest in authors of books. I was more into the content. However, seventh grade was the year I discovered Stephenie Meyer, and I joined my first "fandom."
(For those of you unaware of what a "fandom" is, it's usually a group of people who are super-fans of the same thing. The topics of fandoms range from YouTube personalities, to musicians, to television shows, and of course, even authors.)
I started reading Twilight, read the entire series in a 72 hour span of time, and then found all of the movies and watched them. At this point in middle school, we were still doing A.R. ("accelerated reader;" read a book, take a test, get points based on the challenge level of the book) and so I used the Twilight books to get all of my points for both semesters.
Another author I really liked throughout this period of my life was Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. She wrote books that followed tweens, teenagers, and young adults throughout different events and experiences in life. (I also enjoyed that one of her main characters had a boyfriend named Patrick, because that was the name of my boyfriend at the time... and well, now. It was cute then, too.)
We also read the Giver, by Lois Lowry, in class that year. It was my entrance into the weird and wacky world of societies that governments thought of as utopian, but were commonly referred to as dystopian. When I first wrote that definition down for class that year, I had no idea what it would start to mean for me as a reader, and as a writer. (I also feel the need to add that I never knew that the Giver was a SERIES- and didn't read any of the other books until I graduated high school. Way to go, me!)
Come to think of it, my seventh grade homeroom won a pizza party because we read the most books in the school (at our grade level) that year. That might be the only time I think that I had any kind of social status in middle school, ever. I was the girl that read like, forty books, and got us in the top three in the school for books read in the county-wide competition.
The year I went into eighth grade was the year that The Hunger Games trilogy was topping the YA charts, and I think that the first movie came out the spring of that year, too. I was the first person in my English/Language Arts class that year to read the whole series, and it was before the series jumped on a waiting list that was 10 miles long. I loved the series, and ended up rereading it my Junior year of high school just because. Thank you Suzanne Collins, for feeding my warped love of dystopian novels early on.
With middle school also came newly published Beverly Lewis books, random books with titles I cannot remember checked out from the library every three-or-four days, and the best class I ever had in middle school (that everyone else and their brother will disagree with me about)- literacy block.
It was an hour or so of reading- every. single. morning.
We took an aptitude test to find our reading levels, and I got placed in a classroom with a bunch of kids who were probably too intelligent for their own good at that age. We read books about science, we read this book called "The Red Badge of Courage," we read some of the Canterbury Tales, we read Beowulf, and so many other books. At first, we read aloud, or we read to a certain point and then stopped to let the class catch up.
Not me.
I almost got myself into trouble, because I read the books so quickly. However, the teacher in charge of us has a sense of humor, and she eventually realized that there wasn't a plausible way to keep me from reading ahead. A couple of other students were doing it, too, but not on the scale I was.
She eventually handed me a book, which I'm not going to lie, I didn't intend on reading to completion. I was just going to read it in class every day to have something to do. Well, I ended up taking the book with me: home, to church, and to every class.
It was called, "The Unexpected Dragon." It is by Mary Brown, and is the most awesome science fiction trilogy that I have read in my entire life. It almost 900 pages long, and if you're looking for a new something to read to make you think- read this. Just do it. It'll change your life.
It took me two weeks to read, despite using every ounce of free time that I had to read it, and it left me dumbfounded at the end. I just hadn't really been challenged to read something so... Crazy?? The good kind of crazy. Again, I completely recommend this book.
After that, I finished out middle school reading whatever particularly drew me in. Nothing too memorable, unfortunately, but that was that.
High School:
When I began high school, I lived in North Carolina, had a lot of friends, and had a boyfriend. These things didn't exactly spell out bookworm, but oh my goodness, was I ever.
Within the first month of high school, I'd read at least ten books written by Nicholas Sparks. I was in love with this wonderful concept of cheesy romance novels, and I read about a dozen more books that were equally as cheesy, but not by Mr. Sparks. His books are amazing, take place in some of the most beautiful places, and tell stories that some other people wouldn't dare to tell. My two favorite books are definitely Save Haven, and the Notebook.
I spent a lot of my lunchtime, sitting on my rear-end in front of a bookshelf, looking for another book to lose myself in. The librarian was incredibly kind to me, and offered recommendations every time she saw me. When I got the news that I was moving, I actually even told this librarian. Turns out, she was from West Virginia, and was even born at the same hospital that I was. That brought me wonderful relief and peace, and suddenly I didn't feel as hopeless as I thought that I would.
So, after I moved, I didn't read as much as I could have. I spent a lot of time journaling, and even more time listening to music. When I did read, it was class-mandated, and I despised being told what to read at that point. What even is the point of reading a good book, if it's going to be ruined with guided questions? Teachers also felt the need to say that books had one set meaning, and for us to think differently was wrong. The school library was much smaller at my new school, and I just didn't find the same joy in it that I had at the previous school.
However, I did go through this period of time when I discovered John Green, where I read every book that he had out at the time, and threw myself into "The Fault in Our Stars." I swore up and down that I would get his autograph, because I love his writing so much, and late last year, I bought a signed copy of "Turtles All the Way Down."
The following year wasn't much better- as my school had a proclivity for banning books.
{I found the word "proclivity" in an online thesaurus- I was originally going to use the term 'fetish,' but didn't want to make some of my more sensitive readers pass out on the ground, so I changed it. This is ironic because of what I'm about to tell you. Stay with me, here.}
We read several dystopian novels in my 10th grade Honors English class, and let me tell you, that's when I read 1984 for the first time. I don't have words to describe that one. It was a full mind, body, and spirit experience for me. George Orwell knew a thing or two about a thing or two. We also read Anthem, which I read very quickly and was underwhelmed. The reasoning behind this was because we read Orwell first. It was definitely a difficult act to follow.
Anyways, we read those two books, and I think that's all. We weren't allowed to read other books that might encourage things like free-thinking or prompt an emotional response out of us. That was forbidden and discouraged. Unfortunately, I quit paying attention in my English classes a lot after that. They were spoon feeding us literature, when at that point I was already eating up books and stories with a fork and knife, and washing down words of wisdom with a straw.
My 11th grade year was the absolute worst when it came to what we were reading in class.
We read Huck Finn, a harshly written, historically infamous piece of work, by the remarkable man that is Mark Twain. I read Tom Sawyer in elementary school, so I was already quite familiar with the character, and with the language used in the book. I was ashamed when, in a school at the time that was 98% Caucasian, our teachers chose to make us read the censored version of the book. It was offensive, to my white teachers, to hear racial slurs.
So, instead of making a lesson out of it, and explaining why the words were used and why they shouldn't be used now, they took a giant broom, swept everything under the rug, and had us read a watered-down version of the original.
This might aggravate some of you, who like to ignore history and create your own ideas of things and why/when they happen, but that's okay. I'm just a person that believes that if we censor literature, it can quickly amount to doing the same damage as burning books, and that it shouldn't be done. It also means that if we keep forgetting and ignoring things that have been said and done throughout history, that they will be doomed to repeat themselves.
Moving along, after that year, I transferred schools. (If you know me personally, or have been following me for a couple of years, you'll know all of the ins-and-outs of it all.)
I found myself in an AP English class my senior year that made me despise books, poetry, and the paper that it was written on. We read wonderful works of literature that year, my personal favorite of the year was Macbeth, by the one and only William Shakespeare. I recommend that book, and of course Romeo & Juliet, to anyone who can read at about a sixth grade level. Read them. Make jokes about them. Bite your thumb at some people, and all that.
(Fun Fact! I was in a group chat my senior year that we named, "Die Thou Egg." It was a joke, taken from Macbeth. We were a bunch of nerds. I digress.)
Aside from that, I didn't read much at the end of high school. I started reading again that summer, random books, books that people got me for my birthday, and so on and so forth.
And Now?
I am currently obsessed with dystopian novelist, Margaret Atwood, and her book "The Heart Goes Last." It's got some more mature content in there, so it's not for the faint at heart.
Other good books that I've found myself lost in this last year:
"The Program" series by Suzanne Young
"The Selection" series by Kiera Cass
Literally any book ever written by Jojo Moyes.
The Riverhaven Series (Amish!) by B.J. Hoff
Turtles All the Way Down by John Green
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Son (and the rest of "the Giver" series) by Lois Lowry
I've really been trying to get into any books I can, and have also recently discovered the world of poetry books. I'll try to keep up with what I'm reading over on my Facebook page, in case anyone is really ever that curious about it.
-----
This is the first of what I hope are many in this series about answering prompts and questions. If you have any for me, please message me on Facebook or email me at victoria.wickline@gmail.com!
Thank you guys, as always, for reading what I have to say. So far, I'm really enjoying what 2018 has to offer, and I cannot wait to see where it takes me.
&Even more than that, I can't wait to share it with all of you.
Come to think of it, almost every book or series that I read at that age was set somewhere in New York. I don't think I've ever realized that before. Huh. You really learn a lot about yourself when you're trying to remember everything you ever looked up to as a young reader.
In the fifth grade, I also started reading works by this magnificent author named Beverly Lewis. She wrote Amish romances, and my mom and grandmother had been reading a series called "Annie's People." A few years later, about seven, this wonderful woman held a book signing in my town. Mom signed me out of school early, and we were among the first in line to meet Mrs. Lewis. She has the kindest heart, and we even told her about how my grandmother loved her books. She signed three or four of ours, but she also asked me to please send her anything I wrote in the future, because she wanted to know of my success when I get there. I might send her a link to this blog, but her books honestly helped shape me as a human being, and are a big part of the reason I try to find kindness in everyone.
 | |||
| My mom and I at the Beverly Lewis book signing in 2015. |
Middle School:
To be really honest with you, I don't remember reading very much in the early part of sixth grade. I had a lot of friends, and had departmentalized classes. However, I apparently was good at something, because I was in a spelling bee.
Towards the end of sixth grade is when we initially moved to North Carolina. The school I went to wasn't my favorite place in the world; I called home sick from the office at least twenty times, no exaggeration. My favorite place to escape? The school library- between the pages of books. One time I asked to go to the restroom, and then spent the following twenty minutes in the library checking out books.
My favorite series was this never heard of series called Camp Confidential, and it was about a bunch of girls going to a summer camp in middle school. This launched me face first into teenage chick-lit. The author of that series is Melissa J. Morgan, and I really admired her work for that somewhat dark period of time in my life.
Other than reading novels sporadically after that, I didn't have a specific interest in authors of books. I was more into the content. However, seventh grade was the year I discovered Stephenie Meyer, and I joined my first "fandom."
(For those of you unaware of what a "fandom" is, it's usually a group of people who are super-fans of the same thing. The topics of fandoms range from YouTube personalities, to musicians, to television shows, and of course, even authors.)
I started reading Twilight, read the entire series in a 72 hour span of time, and then found all of the movies and watched them. At this point in middle school, we were still doing A.R. ("accelerated reader;" read a book, take a test, get points based on the challenge level of the book) and so I used the Twilight books to get all of my points for both semesters.
Another author I really liked throughout this period of my life was Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. She wrote books that followed tweens, teenagers, and young adults throughout different events and experiences in life. (I also enjoyed that one of her main characters had a boyfriend named Patrick, because that was the name of my boyfriend at the time... and well, now. It was cute then, too.)
We also read the Giver, by Lois Lowry, in class that year. It was my entrance into the weird and wacky world of societies that governments thought of as utopian, but were commonly referred to as dystopian. When I first wrote that definition down for class that year, I had no idea what it would start to mean for me as a reader, and as a writer. (I also feel the need to add that I never knew that the Giver was a SERIES- and didn't read any of the other books until I graduated high school. Way to go, me!)
Come to think of it, my seventh grade homeroom won a pizza party because we read the most books in the school (at our grade level) that year. That might be the only time I think that I had any kind of social status in middle school, ever. I was the girl that read like, forty books, and got us in the top three in the school for books read in the county-wide competition.
The year I went into eighth grade was the year that The Hunger Games trilogy was topping the YA charts, and I think that the first movie came out the spring of that year, too. I was the first person in my English/Language Arts class that year to read the whole series, and it was before the series jumped on a waiting list that was 10 miles long. I loved the series, and ended up rereading it my Junior year of high school just because. Thank you Suzanne Collins, for feeding my warped love of dystopian novels early on.
With middle school also came newly published Beverly Lewis books, random books with titles I cannot remember checked out from the library every three-or-four days, and the best class I ever had in middle school (that everyone else and their brother will disagree with me about)- literacy block.
It was an hour or so of reading- every. single. morning.
We took an aptitude test to find our reading levels, and I got placed in a classroom with a bunch of kids who were probably too intelligent for their own good at that age. We read books about science, we read this book called "The Red Badge of Courage," we read some of the Canterbury Tales, we read Beowulf, and so many other books. At first, we read aloud, or we read to a certain point and then stopped to let the class catch up.
Not me.
I almost got myself into trouble, because I read the books so quickly. However, the teacher in charge of us has a sense of humor, and she eventually realized that there wasn't a plausible way to keep me from reading ahead. A couple of other students were doing it, too, but not on the scale I was.
She eventually handed me a book, which I'm not going to lie, I didn't intend on reading to completion. I was just going to read it in class every day to have something to do. Well, I ended up taking the book with me: home, to church, and to every class.
It was called, "The Unexpected Dragon." It is by Mary Brown, and is the most awesome science fiction trilogy that I have read in my entire life. It almost 900 pages long, and if you're looking for a new something to read to make you think- read this. Just do it. It'll change your life.
It took me two weeks to read, despite using every ounce of free time that I had to read it, and it left me dumbfounded at the end. I just hadn't really been challenged to read something so... Crazy?? The good kind of crazy. Again, I completely recommend this book.
After that, I finished out middle school reading whatever particularly drew me in. Nothing too memorable, unfortunately, but that was that.
High School:
When I began high school, I lived in North Carolina, had a lot of friends, and had a boyfriend. These things didn't exactly spell out bookworm, but oh my goodness, was I ever.
Within the first month of high school, I'd read at least ten books written by Nicholas Sparks. I was in love with this wonderful concept of cheesy romance novels, and I read about a dozen more books that were equally as cheesy, but not by Mr. Sparks. His books are amazing, take place in some of the most beautiful places, and tell stories that some other people wouldn't dare to tell. My two favorite books are definitely Save Haven, and the Notebook.
I spent a lot of my lunchtime, sitting on my rear-end in front of a bookshelf, looking for another book to lose myself in. The librarian was incredibly kind to me, and offered recommendations every time she saw me. When I got the news that I was moving, I actually even told this librarian. Turns out, she was from West Virginia, and was even born at the same hospital that I was. That brought me wonderful relief and peace, and suddenly I didn't feel as hopeless as I thought that I would.
So, after I moved, I didn't read as much as I could have. I spent a lot of time journaling, and even more time listening to music. When I did read, it was class-mandated, and I despised being told what to read at that point. What even is the point of reading a good book, if it's going to be ruined with guided questions? Teachers also felt the need to say that books had one set meaning, and for us to think differently was wrong. The school library was much smaller at my new school, and I just didn't find the same joy in it that I had at the previous school.
However, I did go through this period of time when I discovered John Green, where I read every book that he had out at the time, and threw myself into "The Fault in Our Stars." I swore up and down that I would get his autograph, because I love his writing so much, and late last year, I bought a signed copy of "Turtles All the Way Down."
The following year wasn't much better- as my school had a proclivity for banning books.
{I found the word "proclivity" in an online thesaurus- I was originally going to use the term 'fetish,' but didn't want to make some of my more sensitive readers pass out on the ground, so I changed it. This is ironic because of what I'm about to tell you. Stay with me, here.}
We read several dystopian novels in my 10th grade Honors English class, and let me tell you, that's when I read 1984 for the first time. I don't have words to describe that one. It was a full mind, body, and spirit experience for me. George Orwell knew a thing or two about a thing or two. We also read Anthem, which I read very quickly and was underwhelmed. The reasoning behind this was because we read Orwell first. It was definitely a difficult act to follow.
Anyways, we read those two books, and I think that's all. We weren't allowed to read other books that might encourage things like free-thinking or prompt an emotional response out of us. That was forbidden and discouraged. Unfortunately, I quit paying attention in my English classes a lot after that. They were spoon feeding us literature, when at that point I was already eating up books and stories with a fork and knife, and washing down words of wisdom with a straw.
My 11th grade year was the absolute worst when it came to what we were reading in class.
We read Huck Finn, a harshly written, historically infamous piece of work, by the remarkable man that is Mark Twain. I read Tom Sawyer in elementary school, so I was already quite familiar with the character, and with the language used in the book. I was ashamed when, in a school at the time that was 98% Caucasian, our teachers chose to make us read the censored version of the book. It was offensive, to my white teachers, to hear racial slurs.
So, instead of making a lesson out of it, and explaining why the words were used and why they shouldn't be used now, they took a giant broom, swept everything under the rug, and had us read a watered-down version of the original.
This might aggravate some of you, who like to ignore history and create your own ideas of things and why/when they happen, but that's okay. I'm just a person that believes that if we censor literature, it can quickly amount to doing the same damage as burning books, and that it shouldn't be done. It also means that if we keep forgetting and ignoring things that have been said and done throughout history, that they will be doomed to repeat themselves.
Moving along, after that year, I transferred schools. (If you know me personally, or have been following me for a couple of years, you'll know all of the ins-and-outs of it all.)
I found myself in an AP English class my senior year that made me despise books, poetry, and the paper that it was written on. We read wonderful works of literature that year, my personal favorite of the year was Macbeth, by the one and only William Shakespeare. I recommend that book, and of course Romeo & Juliet, to anyone who can read at about a sixth grade level. Read them. Make jokes about them. Bite your thumb at some people, and all that.
(Fun Fact! I was in a group chat my senior year that we named, "Die Thou Egg." It was a joke, taken from Macbeth. We were a bunch of nerds. I digress.)
Aside from that, I didn't read much at the end of high school. I started reading again that summer, random books, books that people got me for my birthday, and so on and so forth.
And Now?
I am currently obsessed with dystopian novelist, Margaret Atwood, and her book "The Heart Goes Last." It's got some more mature content in there, so it's not for the faint at heart.
Other good books that I've found myself lost in this last year:
"The Program" series by Suzanne Young
"The Selection" series by Kiera Cass
Literally any book ever written by Jojo Moyes.
The Riverhaven Series (Amish!) by B.J. Hoff
Turtles All the Way Down by John Green
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Son (and the rest of "the Giver" series) by Lois Lowry
I've really been trying to get into any books I can, and have also recently discovered the world of poetry books. I'll try to keep up with what I'm reading over on my Facebook page, in case anyone is really ever that curious about it.
-----
This is the first of what I hope are many in this series about answering prompts and questions. If you have any for me, please message me on Facebook or email me at victoria.wickline@gmail.com!
Thank you guys, as always, for reading what I have to say. So far, I'm really enjoying what 2018 has to offer, and I cannot wait to see where it takes me.
&Even more than that, I can't wait to share it with all of you.
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