I haven’t always been a big reader. When I was younger, reading didn’t come very easily to me. My parents used to read to me a lot. We’ve still got all my childhood books in the office of my parent’s house – Ten in a Bed, The Cherry Dress, Old Bear, Noddy, Winnie the Pooh. My parents kept reading to me pretty late on – they read the first two or three Harry Potter books to me, and then we got all the books on cassette tape so I could go back and listen to them.

At some point my parents started to buy me more books on tape to listen to before I went to sleep. I had trouble sleeping, so I used to listen to books on tape as I lay in bed – looking back, I guess that was my reading before bed. The sound of someone telling me a story used to make me drift off, which was also a bit of a pain because the next night I would have to rewind the tape to find where I had fallen asleep and pick back up from that point. I listened to most of the big books that came out during my late childhood and early teenage years on tape – like Sabriel, The Wind Singer, Northern Lights – and I would have likely preferred to have listened to all the Harry Potter books on tape if there hadn’t been such a race to finish them.

Physical books didn’t become a thing I wanted to try until I was in my early teenage years. I used to find reading hard. I don’t know whether I found it difficult to sit down for a long time and concentrate on something, or whether the act of taking in a story through my eyes rather than my ears – which I had become so use to doing – made it hard for me.

But the first books that got me into reading physical books were – and don’t laugh – the Charmed books… Remember Charmed? That 90s TV show about the three sisters who discover their witchy powers? One of my friends at the time was obsessed with that show. I watched it along with her, and I think something about it must have grabbed me – I mean, the idea is pretty cool, but it would not be the sort of thing I would watch now! But as I watched the show, I read the books they published alongside the TV show. I think that was the first time I started searching out books I wanted to read on my own. I think my parents despaired a little at my choice of reading material, but they were happy that I was starting to read physical books.

From there I started reading the books that were big at the time, like Lion Boy and A Series of Unfortunate Events. There were two books that I think made me really fall in love with the world of stories when I was in my late years of primary school and the early years of secondary school, and those were the Redwall books and also Eragon. I can’t remember buying the first Redwall book, but I remember going into the little independent book shop in my local town to pick up the next book in the series – I ended up collecting the whole series, but now only have kept my favourite books. I remember buying Eragon on a shopping trip with a couple of friends. I bought it because it had a dragon on the front cover! Those two series have stayed with me more than any series from my childhood, and I think they really shaped me into the nerdy person I am today. I mean, reading all the Charmed books was sort of a hint that this was going to happen, right?

My reading habits from my early teenage years until I was in my early 20s didn’t change much. I read a bit, mostly picking up books I had seen recommended by other people, or whatever was the hot topic at the time, or picking up books by authors that I had already read and knew I liked their books. My mum bought me a couple of books which she had enjoyed, such as those by Maeve Binchy, and a couple of friends bought me books, as well as family friends in the hope of me discovering something new.

But I didn’t start choosing what I wanted to read, and discovering unknown authors by myself until I was in uni. With my own money to spend and with the ability to walk to a bookshop whenever I wanted, I started picking up books from their ‘buy 1 get 1 half-price’ YA table if I liked the look of the book. I picked up my first Maggie Stiefvater book, Shiver, from that table, and I also think most of Michael Grant’s Gone series. I also randomly decided I wanted to read the 2011 Booker Prize shortlist when I was at university, just to stretch myself, and ended up loving The Sister Brothers. My university course also had required reading – as university courses do – so I read books like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, A Clockwork Orange, The Shipping News, and The Ipcress File.

Then when I did my post-graduate course, that’s when I really started reading. Like, reading a book a week sort of reading. At the time I lived around the corner from a Waterstones, and reading became my ultimate escapism in a part of my life I really didn’t enjoy. That was when the YA scene really exploded and all the big name authors we know today – especially those from America – hit the big time. In that year I read Divergent, most of Jenny Downham’s novels, Throne of Glass, The Maze Runner, Half Bad, Cinder, Fangirl, Uglies, and The Darkest Minds. I felt like I really discovered YA in that year.

In that year, I also started collecting manga. The first season of Attack on Titan came out when I was at university, and I was so desperate to find out what happened that I started collecting the manga. Then when I was doing my post-grad course I got sucked into Naruto, which really helped me through a tough spot in life. Also too impatient to wait for the anime to come out, I started collecting the manga. My manga collecting took off when a friend and I decided we wanted to create out own web comic. So I could get an idea of how comics should look, I picked up the first volumes of a couple of manga series – Blue Exorcist, Hunter x Hunter, and Bakuman. And now, 7 years on, I’m in the middle of collecting 28 manga series… Ah, time really does make fools of us all.

These days, I get most of my book recs from the internet, whether that’s from social media or listening to podcasts. The Book Riot podcasts are my ultimate source for book recommendations these days, although it’s frustrating when they recommend something I want to read that isn’t being released in the UK. The problem with this is that I have such a huge lists of books I want to pick up. Sometimes I wish I had a narrower taste in books!

What is your journey to becoming a reader? Comment down below. Let me know.