I wasn’t a very typical child I strove for abnormality, I wanted to stick out and be the outlier in almost everything I did. But, it never turned out that way, due to my extremely shy personality I followed the crowd in tidal waves, not trusting my own thoughts to keep me afloat I used others as my life rafts for the majority of my time in middle school. The one thing that I had that was my own was books, it was sort of a guilty pleasure of sorts, even though I swore through my teeth that I hated the things. Even when I would get that little spark of happiness or that spine tingling feeling when I would pick up a new story and flip through the pages in less than a day. But, from fear of being called a nerd, or a geek or be out cast I pretended they were devil spawns like everyone else. That even included my parents, but of course, it was difficult to just not read, we had reading test and quizzes it was required of us to read, so I stuck to the one thing I knew that wouldn’t turn heads, books like Goosebumps and Magic Tree house was my saviors. They were small, containing two-hundred pages at best and popular among middle schoolers at that time.
Do to me playing the part for so long of a book avoider I became accustomed to those books and anything higher in lever began to scare me. Most of my classmates complained about how difficult the books were, filled with complicated words and page after page of complete boredom. So, I believed that for a long time, until the fateful day my friend gave me the novel Maximum ride and the angel experiment by James Patterson. I was weary at first refusing her offer and trying to give the novel back, it was a good three hundred pages more than my typical story and the cover didn’t look that interesting. She was persistent though standing her ground and insisted that I at least read the first page. So, I did not want to be rude, it was safe to say it was the right choice. The very first sentence caught my attention almost immediately and a sentence turned into the page which turned into a chapter and so on. It was amazing, fantastic, beyond great. The book contained so much action, plot and an actual story that I almost felt overwhelmed. The books detail was far better than half of the books I read before and I got the familiar spine tingling exhilarating feeling that I received from the others books I read. It also was the story that made me realize that fantasy stories were worth being a nerd for.
Personally, I can relate to a portion of this. I understand being the nerd that always read (because I do exactly that myself) and wishing people would just overlook the fact that you enjoy reading. And James Patterson – amazing author. If you haven’t read them already, I suggest you read his series that begins with “Confessions of a Murder Suspect.”
I have read that book and it was amazing, but I had no idea it was a series.