My journey to becoming the reader I am today, is perhaps not the most traditional route. I actually got a later start than my siblings.
All of us were home educated and my mum had a problem with me. I didn't like to read. Anything. Ever.
I could read, it wasn't that I was struggling to understand the words and got frustrated. I knew how, I just didn't like to pick up books ever.
Thankfully, my mum was never one to give up and went searching for some advice. My parent's both travelled to an education show, which had a lot of resources for home educators, and at that show my mum spoke to one of the people there about the problem she was having getting me to read, and his advice? Let me read whatever I wanted.
Taking that advice, my mum came home and tried exactly that. Rather than picking out books for me or using the same early reader books that my siblings had learnt and developed their reading skills with. She left me to choose whatever I wanted.
What was it that I was holding out for? When given the choice of what to read? Well, Barbie magazines.
I was a huge fan of Barbie when I was little, and to me, being able to get the Barbie magazine and devour it's contents, was exciting. But, it didn't stop there. Barbie, was just the beginning.
Once I started, I couldn't stop.
Before long, I was picking up all kinds of books. I read my way through almost everything that Jaqueline Wilson wrote, especially loving the Tracy Beaker books. I'd also pick up a few classics. One of the earliest books I remember loving was Jane Eyre, which is still a favourite today.
Another favourite early on, and still a book I love today, was I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.
My older sister and I both loved this book, and it's one of the few books that I've ever re-read. Finding books like I Capture the Castle helped to spur my new found love of reading even further.
The more great books I found, the more I wanted to seek out and not even reading a bad book could knock my love of reading.
My sister and I used to set ourseleves reading challenges. Putting up lists on our bedroom wall to track how many books we'd been reading and trying to beat each other. Reading became such a huge part of my life and it's never stopped.
Just foward to January 2011 and my discovery of the site Goodreads and I was pulled even further down the reading rabbit hole. Tracking books and collecting data about my reading habits was amazing to me. Getting reading recommendations and connecting with a community of other avid readers fuelled my passion, as did their yearly reading challenge, and before I knew it, I was setting myself goals of one hundred books a year and reaching or surpassing those goals year after year.
Recently, I passed one thousand books read in my lifetime, and those are just the ones I've logged on Goodreads and I'm sure I probably forgot some of the things I read when I was a kid.
I've come a long way from reading nothing but Barbie magazines to the ecclectic mix of fiction and non-fiction that fills my shelves today, and my shelves have grown pretty extensive.
The picture here is a little outdated now, and I definitely don't have any gaps on my four long shelves anymore.
I own hundreds of books, and have had to become strict about reading and then donating or else I'd have no space to move in my bedroom.
But I don't just read the books on my shelves. I also love using the local library. I have a large collection of e-books over Kindle, Google Books, Kobo, and Scribd and I'm an avid listener of Audiobooks through either Audible or Scribd.
Something I've begun doing is listening to audiobooks on triple speed while playing Minecraft and I can easily finish an entire book in one sitting, while building a house or searching for diamonds in the mine.
Simply put, I'll always be so grateful to my mum for not giving up on me and finding something that worked for me, because it's opened me up to a huge and exciting world of literature.
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