Magic starts with the turn of a page

I'm thankful for literature.
I am a huge reader. From the time I was a baby, my mother would read to me for a couple hours each day. By the time I was 2 years old, I could recite books by memory. Reading time with my mom was special to me, now that I look back at it. She read the whole Little House on the Prairie series to me, and I loved it. I made the first move of reading on my own when my mom tried reading "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" to me and I refused to listen. Then I snuck the book into my room and read it on my own. And then read the entire Narnia series.

From then on, all I would do was read and read and read. I loved Nancy Drew mysteries, The Boxcar Children series, The Magic Treehouse series, and other odds-and-ends books. My teachers would give us points for how many pages we read each night, and I would often have the highest number in the class.

By the time I was in 6th grade, I had exhausted just about all of the books that interested me in my school library. It was only February, and I still needed to get more AR points. I had been stubbornly refusing to read Harry Potter because I didn't like having people tell me what to read, and so many people had been telling me to read it. However, they were worth a lot of AR points... so I begrudgingly checked out the first book of the series. From the very first few pages, I was captivated. And thus, I found my favorite book series of all time.

Throughout middle school and high school, my taste in literature got a bit more mature. I read all 9 of "The Work and the Glory" books... and then read them again. And again.
I discovered a love for Jane Austin.
I fell in love with more in-depth books such as The Count of Monte Cristo, Life of Pi, and The Kite Runner.
I still read simpler books though... like (I admit) the Twilight trilogy or the Percy Jackson series.
I grew to love Shakespeare.
I started reading more "churchy" literature, such as The Infinite Atonement, The Holy Temple, Jesus the Christ, and Our Search for Happiness. I loved reading the New Era magazine. I became intrigued with what I learned from Bruce R. McConkie's book Mormon Doctrine.
And I'm still going. Unfortunately, the amount of non-school-related reading I do nowadays has decreased dramatically, and I find other ways to spend my freetime... and I think that's because I'm in a better social environment than I was back home. I was a full-blown bookworm! It's not that I tried being anti-social... I love people. But books were very good friends of mine as I was growing up, that's for sure! And I got plenty of "people time" when I went to church activities or had play rehearsals.

I still love reading, even if I find "better" things to do with my time other than read. Well, not necessarily better things... just other things that are just as fun and beneficial to me. I really should start a new reading project sometime though.

I'm thankful for the creative minds who have come up with my favorite stories. I'm thankful for the journeys I've been able to embark on through a good book. I love reading! Love! Not like, LOVE! [name that movie...]