Reading was an addiction for little me. I can remember, as a ten-year-old, reading S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders at night. I'd hide beneath the covers, lying on my back with a flashlight on my shoulder to give me enough light to read. I'm not sure how many times I read it, but Ponyboy, Soda, Johnny, and Dally all lived with me through my middle school years.
childhood books you still read today
It was a story so alien from my upbringing that I was instantly captivated. The characters were undeniable, the story unrelenting. How could you not feel something for them all? I still break it out and read it periodically. While I know there were multiple covers, mine had the cover in the picture below.
Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold.
The other book that stands out to me is the first true horror novel I ever read. The book? The Shining. I found a copy of it in the garbage can outside the teacher's lounge when I was in sixth grade. I read it. I lived it. I didn't sleep well for a month.
I liked writing scary things. I had written a short story about a mad axe man hiding in the woods, chopping up little kids as they went to school, and hiding their body parts in a small, run-down shack. I was a third-grader. It terrified the kids in my class, and I got in trouble, but it also made me fall in love with scary stuff.
Enter The Shining.
This was when I realized how much there was to read beyond my little school library. I started reading anything scary. From Oscar Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray to Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, I was starved for anything scary, anything fantastic. (side note: my mom let 10-year-old me order Shark Attacks: 150 True Accounts from the Book of the Month Club and it terrified me because IT HAD PICTURES!)
Much to my delight, after I read The Shining, I realized Stephen King had other books to terrify me. I still read it once a year.
Love that those early books inspired me to be a storyteller.
Leave the light on. Some of us are still writing (and a little scared).
Write ON!
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