Book It!

Anyone remember those prizes back in the day for reading books in school? I always participated in the Book It! reading incentives, and I always got that personal pan pizza coupon for meeting all my reading goals. Oh yeah. Later it was the Ozzy Reading Club, where the winners got to go to a Kane County Cougars game. I came back with three teeny tiny bats that were PERSONALLY signed by Ozzy. For me, getting these prizes was a given, because even when I was a little kid I LOVED reading. A story my mom always told me was about when it was just the two of us living in our apartment in Texas. By then, my dad had left, and my mom was going to school and working two jobs at the same time to support us. She would crawl home, dead exhausted, and little Mingo would be there with a stack of books, waiting for her to read them aloud. And even though she was about to fall over and pass out, she read me the entire stack of books without fail. She encouraged my love of reading, and to this day I'll grab a book and read it for hours at a time until I'm finished with it. Which actually is a mistake, because then I'm sad I no longer have a book to read... Anyhoo, here's a list of authors I got completely infatuated with at one time or another.

Author #1: Diana Gabaldon
  
My mom was again the one to introduce me to her books, and I instantly fell in love with them. In particular I fell in love with her Outlander series, which focuses on the romance between Claire and Jamie. Claire is a married woman living in Scotland in 1946 when she walks through a cleft of standing stones. She ends up being transported back in time to 1743, where she is almost immediately accosted by her husband's six times great grandfather, a captain in the English army. In order to escape him, she ends up fleeing with a group of Scottish clansmen, and is eventually forced to marry one to protect her from being hanged by the English as a spy. In the course of the first book, she continually tries to escape back to her husband from both the English soldiers and the Scottish clan she has taken refuge with, while falling in love with the young clansman she was forced to marry, Jamie. The series goes on for seven volumes so far, and I'm itching to get my hands on the next one, which probably won't be released for another three years or so. Dammit.

Author #2: J.K. Rowling

Ok, we all love Harry Potter. Or anyway, a LOT of us do. I've heard a lot of people tell their Harry Potter stories lately, so I'll share mine! I actually didn't get into the Harry Potter craze until after the third book had already been released. My mom (again!) brought me the first book and told me that her best friend's daughters absolutely LOVED the books, and that she had found the first one while out grocery shopping and thought I might like to read it. I gave it a shot, and I HATED it. I guess what happened to a lot of other people happened to me. I read the first chapter, got INCREDIBLY bored, and lost interest in it for awhile. It wasn't until much later that I got really bored and restless, and for lack of anything better to read laying about the house, I reluctantly picked it up again. After I continued reading it however, I got completely hooked. I leapt onto the Harry Potter bandwagon, and obsessively pored over every single book. When the movies came out I was actually disappointed though. I tend to be one of those people that never think the movies are as good as the books, and Harry Potter was no exception. I hated the first movie, and didn't really grow to accept them until the third movie came out. After that, I loved them again. But who wouldn't, since Harry has grown so much with them over the years? 

By the way when I found this yummy pic of Daniel Radcliff I also found an extremely, um, COZY picture of Harry and Draco together. Enjoying their bromance.



Author #3: Sidney Sheldon

 

I started reading his books sometime in middle school. At the time, my reading was going unchecked, and whatever dramas or trashy romance novels my mom had on hand, I read. I came across one of his books at one time or another, and became instantly hooked on them. They had the lure of the forbidden. In Mingo's little sixth grade mind, these books were taboo, because they were completely graphic material. They had sex, intrigue, murder, and my innocent brain couldn't process them fast enough. I started trolling thrift stores because I quickly learned that not only were they easier to find there, but then I could buy them for fifty cents and take them home with me forever. I amassed quite the collection by the time I was done: I bought and read every single book he ever wrote. I'm pretty sure I didn't miss any.

Author #4: Stephen King

 

Ugh I freakin HATE clowns!! Even the picture Of Stephen King is freaking me out! But again, I read a ton of Stephen King when I was in middle school. I had a few favorites that I could read over and over again because they didn't freak me out too badly, like The Stand and Dolores Claiborne and Misery. But mostly, they scared the bejeezus outta me. I actually cried when I read Pet Sematary, and I could never completely get through the book It, either. Because I hate clowns. Have I mentioned that?? The book Needful Things also scared the crap out of me. There was just something about all the people in that small town, trading their souls for material things they thought they needed or were important...really really creepy stuff. And yet I kept reading them. *Laying on little couch* "What does this say about me, doctor?" *Doctor purses his fingertips together and then proceeds to stroke his tiny beard intelligently* "Well, Mingo, I believe you are a glutton for punishment. We'll talk about this more at length next week."

Author #5: Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

 

Ok, this is another author I got infatuated with because it was forbidden. I absolutely LOVE trashy romance novels, or book porn, as my sister's boyfriend likes to refer to them. Loudly. In bookstores. When there are several people walking nearby, in listening reach. While I'm holding several. ANYHOO, this book called The Flame and the Flower was the one that began my craze. This is the exact covercopy I found floating around the house, and by the end mine was more moth-eaten and roughly handled than the one in the picture. To this day I read these, since there are tons of them floating around, and since I can't bring myself to bring more than 2 or 3 up to the counter where the smug cashier is waiting to ring up my book porn, having heard Ivan blurt that phrase out to the entire establishment.

I continue to read random authors, but these are ones I always seem to come back to. There were tons of other series I read back in the day; I read the Goosebumps books like everybody else, and I had a serious attachment to Sweet Valley High books too. My lil sister Julie is like me in that she's been a reader for a long time. But where I was reading Danielle Steel and the occasional Anne Rice vampire novel when I was her age, she reads Nicholas Sparks. I can't do that. I HATE that crap. Angry people, love interest, dramatic resolution, DEATH. Sucks, man!