My Childhood of Reading

So today I thought I would share with you my childhood of reading. I think people assume I’ve always been a reader but that is not the case. I don’t know if any of you are interested but I thought it may be an interesting topic to post about. Looking back now, I would have liked it if I had read more as a child, but I didn’t and I can’t change that. So I thought I would briefly talk about my childhood of reading and share some of the books that I remember loving when I was younger.

 

I think I mentioned in a previous post that I was told that I have dyslexia and elements of dyspraxia when I was eight years old. For anyone unfamiliar with these things, dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty that primarily affects a persons ability to read and write/spell. Dyspraxia is also a specific learning difficulty but it affects co-ordination and movement. The way I think about it is dyslexia is more of the mental stuff and dyspraxia is more about the physical side such as movement and co-ordination. I was at least a couple of years behind my classmates in both reading and writing at the time, and I had to have private tutoring. This knocked my confidence alot, which meant that I didn’t really enjoy reading. My mum would read to me, but other than that I just didn’t read at all. It wasn’t until my late teens that I started reading again and it wasn’t until my late teens/early twenties that I began to really expand my reading tastes.

 

So here are some books that I remember loving when I was younger:

Meg and Mog series by Helen Nicoll and Jan Pienkowski

Katie Morag series by Mairi Hedderwick

The Mousehole Cat by Antonia Barber and Nicola Bayley

The Lightkeeper’s Lunch by Ronda and David Armitage

Dr Seuss’s books

Sheltie series by Peter Clover

A Puzzling Day at Castle Macpelican by Scoular Anderson

A Puzzling Day in the Land of the Pharaoh by Scoular Anderson

Macpelican’s American Adventure by Scoular Anderson

 

As I have mentioned in previous posts, it was the Old Kingdoms trilogy by Garth Nix that got me into reading fantasy and reading as a whole later on. I first read them when I was a teenager and I started reading some other fantasy as well. As a teenager I did a lot of rereading as well! I had four fantasy series that I continually went back to – the Inheritance cycle by Christopher Paolini, the Old Kingdoms trilogy by Garth, the Black Magicians trilogy by Trudi Canavan and the Pellinor series by Alison Croggon. I also really enjoyed the Bartimaeus sequence by Jonathan Stroud. I think because I was going through a hard time in my life as a teenager, I loved the escapism that fantasy gave you. It was during my mid to late teenager years that I started to try out some classics as well. From there, I eventually got to where I am now – reading a whole lot more books than I ever thought I would. Anyway that is a brief look into my childhood of reading. I didn’t read much myself when I was younger but I was always encouraged to. I highly recommend all of the books mentioned above.

 

I hope you are all having a great day and I will see you next time.

 

Pippa