Do You Like Books?

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” ― Dr. Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!

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Since I became I teacher, I've found myself dwindling in reading activities. One reason is, I'm too busy to read for pleasure. Another, is I have a feeling that this is because I teach the lower forms. I like beautiful and vivid sentences, whereas while teaching, I can only cover the basics.

How does a student develop their vocabulary? This is basically how a student's vocabulary can progress if they want it to:

must --  important --  necessary -- vital -- crucial -- imperative -- indispensable

How do you go up this ladder of vocabulary? By reading. Sadly, some people stop when they know the word 'important'. And some people stop when they learn the word 'vital'.

There really is no other way though. So today, I would like to share on my interest in books.

When I first started reading seriously in upper primary school, I loved books by Roald Dahl. Later, I became a fan of an author named R.L. Stine. He wrote horror books. I can't watch horror movies, but I loved reading horror books. I could picture the ghosts myself and make them as scary or non-scary as I liked. 

When I came up to secondary school, I graduated to an author named Christopher Pike. He also wrote horror. It was then that I also found out that when I liked one author's style of writing, I wanted to read more of their work. So naturally, I became a collector:

(this isn't my personal Christopher Pike collection since I gave my books away to charity, but this is very similar to how it looked like)

I loved Christopher Pike's way of telling stories. They were twisted, and scary, and made me feel a bit dizzy afterwards because of his imagination. His stories were usually about teenagers and their problems. 

Some of them were a bit too weird though, and quite depressing sometimes. So at the same time, my mother introduced me to Enid Blyton's novels about students living in boarding schools/hostels.

My mother grew up reading her books. They're timeless. I loved the series. And I became a big fan of Enid Blyton's books. She wrote a lot.

As I grew older, I think I also began to think about boys more. And so I started reading the famous Sweet Valley Series. First the Sweet Valley Twins...

 

Then the Sweet Valley High... 

And I followed the Sweet Valley twins to University.

There were so many novels from the Sweet Valley Series. They followed the life of twins Elizabeth and Jessica who had very different personalities, living in a town called Sweet Valley. The 'Twins' series were about their life in primary school. Then 'High', in high school. And of course, in University. The books were very popular back then, even more popular than Twilight! Since there were so many, I didn't ask my mother to buy them.. Instead, I just borrowed them from the School Library.

But then I began to feel that I had followed the twins too much already, it wasn't like they were following my life. So I looked for another book... another author. And I found her:

This is The Mediator series. It follows the life of a teenager named Suze, who just moved into a new town. She happens to be a girl who can see and talks to ghosts. And it turns out, there is a ghost living in her room. A hot, handsome, sexy ghost with a six-pack from the cowboy days, and spoke Spanish. It was so much fun to read! I would wait at the book shop for her books to come out, the same way people use to wait for Harry Potter books. However, since she only wrote six books for this series, I had to find something else soon.

By then, I was in Form 4 and I was aching for something new. As you can see, my interests went from horror.. to high school romance... to funny horror high school romance. And then, I found..:

This. The Vampire Diaries by L.J. Smith. There are four books in this series. I fell in love with the characters in the story extremely fast. See, I thought Vampires were cool even before Twilight, okay? Twilight ruined it. Anyways, the story follows Elena, a beautiful girl who had just moved from her old school to a new town. In the town, there lived a vampire (yes, also hot and sexy and delicious) named Stefan. They fell in love and then Stefan had to tell her his secret. Dun dun dunnnnn! To make the situation worse, Stefan's bad-boy older brother vampire Damon (also very hot, very sexy and very delicious) came to town to ruin their romance! Haiyaa. Who does she choose?

The thing that made me love L.J. Smith's series, was the way she described the characters and the scenes. She really turned her stories into beautiful fantasies. Most importantly though, her vampires were scary and horrifying. Not sparkly. I was very happy when the series was made into a TV series too. Have you heard of it? The casting was perfect. They used such beautiful actors and actresses.

Very beautiful people playing Stefan, Elena and Damon.

However, I stopped watching after Season 2 because Elena didn't choose the brother I liked. In the books, she did. So.

That's basically my reading history throughout secondary school. I'll talk about the more mature reader I became in the next entry.

=)