Top Ten Tuesday (62)

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Best Bookish Memories

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. It’s awesome. Every Tuesday, the lovely folks over at The Broke and the Bookish post a top ten list topic so that book lovers like you and me can pour over our shelves and make our own lists. You can check out all the other Top Ten Tuesday‘s on their site!

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How to narrow down a lifetime of wonderful bookish memories to just 10?? Unbelievably hard! So many of my favorite memories throughout my life could be traced in some way back to a book, or were augmented by books, or are of me reading a book. I’ve decided that the only way I can possibly look at this list is to split it up a little bit between memories of book-related things and events, and actual memories of specific books themselves.

Bookish Events

Waiting on line for Harry Potter books

I feel like everyone is going to have something like this on their lists today. Because really? I’d never done this before, and I haven’t done it since. It was a singular experience for me. (Well, singular in that I only ever did it for Harry Potter books, but I did it three times.) I went to the Borders–which no longer exists–near the mall and survived on basically adrenaline and anticipation alone for hours. Best feeling. BEST.

Book Expo

Woo Hoo!! I love going to BEA, and I am so fortunate that it’s so close to me. I remember the first time I went two years ago. It was overwhelming but amazing. There are so many things and people, and the place is huge and crowded. I went with two friends from library school, and we hadn’t worked out any kind of plan or anything. We just kind of…went. BEA is seriously like a book nerd crackhouse. In the best way possible, obviously.

Materials for YA

This was one of the classes that I had to take to get my MLIS. I loved it beyond comprehension, although there was a woman in it who hated every book we read and was horribly judgy of people who had the unfortunate taste for a book she deemed awful. But it was basically a class of READING, and I discovered my love of YA because of it. Serious game-changer for me. My whole degree was a game changer, but this class–and it’s companion, Materials for Children–had the deepest impact on me.

Opening night of The Fellowship of the Ring

OMG FRIENDS. Do you remember going to see The Fellowship of the Ring in the movie theater? I do. I was a junior in college, and I had just come home for winter break. The movie came out on my mom’s birthday, so we all went to see it. I was completely captivated. I had only just read the books within the last year, and I was DYING from all the nerding out that was going on. This was a HUGE moment in my burgeoning geekery. Huge. Also, GREAT MOVIE.

My blog!

There are very few recent bookish memories I have that trump finally getting up the nerve to start my own blog. I’m not going to go on and on about it, but I remember being so incredibly nervous before publishing my first post! But I usually lose motivation to keep going with these kinds of things, guys, but not this time.

Books!

Graceling

I read this book right when it came out, just before I started library school and took the aforementioned Materials for YA class in the spring of 2009. I felt super validated that I had actually read this one, LOVED it, and then discovered that it was on the syllabus in class. I might have squeed, or made some other embarrassing noise. But this book really and truly changed my reading habits, it changed my ideas of what a good book was, and most importantly, it opened a door that I hadn’t known was closed.

Lord of the Rings

Honestly. I mentioned before that I read these books for the first time when I was in college. I seriously stayed in on Friday nights while my friends all went out because I just wanted the dorm to myself so I could read about Frodo and Sam and the elves and Aragorn in peace. I have clear memories of my senior year–senior year!–reading The Return of the King on a weekend night curled up on that ugly, uncomfortable dorm couch totally engrossed. This series made me love fantasy.

Harry Potter

Obviously. I would stay up all night reading each Harry Potter book as it came out, although like lots of people my age, I wasn’t on the bandwagon right away simply because I wasn’t in touch with what was almost strictly children’s literature when the first few books came out. My mom was the one who actually bought the first four books for herself (she had a friend with young kids who raved about them), and I wound up stealing them. My sister–who doesn’t like to read–is OBSESSED with them, and my dad? He listens to the audiobooks in his car, he watches the movies EVERY time they’re on TV, and he read all the books, even though reading is kind of hard for him since he had a mild stroke a few years ago. These books are magic (forgive the ironic pun).

Game of Thrones

I can’t remember how I first heard about these books, but I’m almost positive it was because I saw something about HBO making a TV show from a series of fantasy novels that set my nerd alarms off. I took Game of Thrones out of my library because it was a BEAST and I wasn’t sure if I would like it. I bought the other three books that were out at the time before I even finished the first, and instantly became a mega-fan for life.

Twilight

I know, I know. These books get a bad rep sometimes. Are they perfect? No, not at all. Are they any of my favorite books? Nope, not that either. But I remember reading a review in People magazine and thinking, “I could give this a go.” I bought all four books at once–yes, I am a gambler like that–and devoured them. And then my mom and sister read them, too. I can’t deny the importance these books played in my YA reading.