To Read or Not To Read

You may or may not have heard of This is Where it Ends , a debut novel by Marieke Nijkamp about a school shooting spanning 54 minutes that made it to the New York Times Bestsellers list. If you have, great! If you haven't, even better, because I'll even give you a biography about the amazing author of the amazing book (that you need to read ), Marieke Nijkamp. Marieke grew up in the Netherlands, and she still lives there. She has degrees in Philosophy, History and Medieval Studies. From the FAQ page on her website , it says that she can speak a bazillion languages. Well, it's only Dutch, English, German, French, Latin, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew, but hey, it's not like that seems like whole Eastern Hemisphere or anything. That's pretty much the basics. I did quite a bit of research and found that Marieke did her research , too. I was interested in her writing process for this book (because it was such a great book), and I was surpr...

Hello, hello! New school year calls for new blog posts and I'm super excited to write this one: an autobiography of myself (obviously) as a reader. This will be fun. Why not start from the very beginning? I started reading when I was super young--just like everyone else--but the first time I remember reading is when I was introduced to the Harry Potter series. Cheesy, I know, but completely true! I mean, I fell deeply in love with Harry Potter to the point where my mom wouldn't buy me the sixth Harry Potter book unless I read fifty other books first. You would not believe how fast I flew through those fifty books. Some people are probably reading this and thinking "Fifty books! What? Why? I've not yet read fifty books in my whole life!" and I completely understand where you're coming from. After finishing the Harry Potter series and being completely depressed, there's this sort of gray area from 4th grade to the middle of 6th grade. I don't remem...