Reading Across Genres I

I read lots of SF when I was a kid. I also liked mysteries (the Hardy Boys more than Nancy Drew, probably because I wanted to be a boy). I really liked historical fiction, too. I hated history in school, but I really liked learning how people lived in the past.

As a pre-teen, I read Are You There God, It's Me Margaret at least a dozen times. My favorite book of all time, though, was a Little Women/Little Men flip book: two books in one, and you just flipped the book to the other side after you read one. I would read and flip, read and flip.

Despite my best efforts, I never could get into the Chronicles of Narnia as a kid; I tried The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe several times, but never got all the way through the series until I was in high school and learned the books could be read as a Christian allegory, which made them much more interesting. To me, at least.