Day 3: My First Love

My first love was not a boy that I sighed over or dreamed about. My first love has always been books.

Many of my earliest memories are of me reading. Books were my friends when I was lonely or bored, books never failed me or were absent, books let me leave my life behind and live in another world. As a child I would have just said, "I love reading," but now I know why I curled up in corners with them so often. Being the only child of divorced parents who detest each other, and living with a mother who would pick us up and move at any whim (often involving a man), well, books were my constant in life.

The first favorite that I can remember loving to read is this:



I began to read my all-time favorite series somewhere around 3rd Grade. I devoured this series, and re-read each library book as many times as I could before I had to return it. Walter Farley's many books about this wonderful horse were my gateway to the Wild West stories of Louis L'Amour.



I first picked up this book at a RIF book fair at school during 5th grade. I was immediately sucked into the series and loved it. Luckily for my dad the merchandising wasn't quite as bad in 1988 as it is in 2011, so I didn't own too many Babysitter's club notebooks and school folders. ;)



Pre-teen stories soon gave way to my interest in history, which led me to historical fiction and the story of one of my favorite historical characters, George Rogers Clark. The book below is about the Clark family during the Revolutionary war. The book about GR Clark's frontier adventures is called The Long Knife.

In 6th grade, my social studies teacher decided to set aside a class period each week for reading, and boy, was I excited! No more hiding my books or hurrying in between classes so I could read before the teacher got the students into order. And I will never forget the look on the teacher's face when I showed up with this 1000+ page behemoth:

Yup, officially a bookworm. :)

It was shortly after finishing this book that I discovered romance novels, and all other books fell by the wayside. Twenty years later (good God, has it been that long already?), and I am still devouring romance novels, along with a few other select authors in other genres. ::cough::HarryPotter

And I have managed to amass quite the book collection, although I don't care to think about how much money I've spent.

Of all the things I want to pass on to my daughter, my first love is one of the most important. :)