I don’t remember when I started reading or when I got my first library card, but reading has always been a core part of my identity. Unlike other people who may have fallen off in high school and college when assigned reading was at its peak, I’ve always come back to my books when I need peace and an escape. I was lucky to have a mother who instilled a love of reading in me, and who was always happy to take me to the library on the weekends so I could fill up my arms with new books to read. Let’s discuss my evolution as a reader today, shall we? What was 10-year-old Stephany reading and how does that compare to 20-year-old Stephany and 30-year-old Stephany? It’s been a wild ride.

Elementary School

Once I was old enough to pick out books on my own, I gravitated toward genre series fiction. Give me all of your books about bratty twins, 13-year-old baby-sitters, champion gymnasts, orphans, horseback riders, and kids solving mysteries. I was Here For All Of It. Some of my favorite series included:

• Sweet Valley Kids/Twins
• The Baby-Sitter’s Club
• Goosebumps
• The Gymnasts
• The Boxcar Children
• The Saddle Club
• American Girl
• Sleepover Friends

Just looking at the covers of all my favorite book series from my childhood makes me want to reread all of the books, but I know they won’t live up to my memories. (I tried reading the first book in the Sweet Valley High series a few years ago and y’all, Jessica and Elizabeth are TERRIBLE.)

Every Saturday, I would check out 12 books from the children’s section (the most I was allowed to check out at one time) and read them all throughout the week so that I was ready for a new set of 12 books by the next Saturday. At some point during this journey, my mom started making me read one biography every week as a way to balance out all of the silly genre fiction I was reading. But that was fun, too, because I got to read about my favorite gymnasts, figure skaters, and people from history. No prob!

Middle School

I continued reading many of the same series in middle school, although I added a few young-adult series to my repertoire, like Sweet Valley High. Technically, though, my mom didn’t want me reading Sweet Valley High since she thought the content wasn’t appropriate for a 12-year-old. Now that I know the content of some of those books, I don’t blame her. They were dealing with some crazy issues!

At this time, I found myself starting to gravitate toward Christian fiction, too, like the Mandie series and the Christy Miller series. I enjoyed these books so much and loved that they were discussing faith and religion in a way that meant a lot to me. The Christy Miller series, especially, dealt a lot with purity culture. Oh, and of course, I went crazy for the Left Behind series. There was a “kids” version of the series (called Left Behind: The Kids) and I had the entire series in paperback and flew through it so quickly. I wasn’t one to read thriller-type books like this, but it was such a phenomenon in the late 90s/early aughts and I was fully aboard the train.

I don’t think I advertised my love for reading in middle school. I remember that we had SSR (silent sustained reading) periods once a week school-wide, and we were encouraged to bring a book from home. I think I started bringing my own book towards the end of middle school, but was too embarrassed about my love for reading to do so in 6th and 7th grades. My language arts and reading teachers had big bookshelves bursting with books that we could “check out” during class time, so I would usually pluck a book off those shelves during SSR periods.

High School

My love for reading—and my love for hiding my reading—continued into high school. At this point, I started reading more YA books and I remember really, really loving the Love Stories series. Did anyone read this series in the 90s/early aughts? They were like teenage Harlequin romances and I couldn’t get enough of them! My library had a whole rack of these stories and I read them like candy, probably reading some of them multiple times. I also kept reading Sweet Valley High and other genre series about people in high school. I also read a lot of Christian fiction—anything Robin Jones Gunn or authors in that vein.

One of my favorite memories of this time is that my mom started to let me read adult fiction. We would still go to the library together on a near-weekly basis, and we would split off to our separate sections of the library: me to the teen section and my mom to the adult section. And when I was done, I would join her in the adult section where she would usually have a few books picked out for me. Often, these were Christian fiction books, which is the majority of what she read at the time. I fell in love with Terri Blackstock, Tracie Peterson, Dee Henderson, Karen Kingsbury, Kristen Heitzmann, Beverly Lewis, and so much more. I loved these books and still have a fondness for them, although I don’t think they’d hold up to my reread as the person I am today. But I’m glad I got to read these books when I did; they truly fueled my love of reading.

This was also the time I discovered the world of romance novels, and romance novels that had S E X in them. It started when I found a set of romance novels in my great-grandma’s house. I don’t remember why I was there or how I found the novels, but I spent one afternoon laying on the bed in her guest room and devouring a book that involved a man delivering a woman’s baby on the side of the road, and then the two of them reconnecting a few months later. He spent a lot of time kissing her breasts, that’s what I remember most from that book! Ha. It was fascinating to me. I found another romance novel that was similar to that one, but involved a whole bunch of interconnected stories and I basically just skipped to all the sexytimes. (Horny teenager alert!) It was around this time that I also found out that my mom loved Harlequin romances, but would hide them from me. I found her hiding place, though, and during summers, I would spend my days devouring these romances and carefully setting the book back in her hiding place so she didn’t know I was reading them. Ha!

It seems funny to me to think about how women hid their love of romance novels at this time. It was a different time, though, and the romance genre wasn’t what it was today. Plus, my mom and I were conservative Christians and we didn’t even TALK about sex. (Her version of “the talk” was to hand me a book about it.) I’m sure she felt like she was doing something wrong by reading a romance novel, or maybe she didn’t but didn’t think those books were appropriate for me at that time. Who knows?!

College

I maintained a pretty good reading pace in college, but college is where I struggled a lot with my faith. As a result, I read a TON of Christian self-help books during this time. It was prime time for women in their thirties to write books to girls in their late teens/early twenties about how to stay pure and how to “fall in love with Jesus.” And listen, those books were what I needed at that time. They gave me hope and guidance and inspiration. But they also made me question my life and if I was really being pure by reading romance novels. After all, wasn’t I supposed to save myself for marriage? Why was I reading books where unmarried people were having sex? Throughout this time, I would decide that I was no longer reading romances, only books written by Christians. And then… I would miss my romances. So I would go back to them, and then feel so guilty, as if I had failed my future husband and God and myself by reading these “secular” books. Ugh. My poor little college self! (There were Christian romances but ugh, they were so cheesy and poorly written, and I just couldn’t get through them.) My reading life was very chaotic at this point, with a lot of internal angst on what I “should” be reading.

And Beyond

Not much changed after college, and I continued to read the same books as always: Christian books with the occasional romance thrown in there. I didn’t even talk about books much on my blog! As an example, in 2020, I wrote 50 blog posts in my “Books” category. For the first three years of blogging, the only book posts I wrote were book reviews for TLC Book Tours (remember those, friends?!). It wasn’t until 2014 that I started writing monthly book review posts and started to be a little more vocal about my reading life.

In real life, I was still pretty quiet about my love for reading. I didn’t advertise about it, and though I always wanted to bring a book with me to work to read on my lunch break, I felt silly doing so. I guess I just didn’t want to be the weirdo who sits alone on her lunch break reading. Once I had more friends at work, though, and they happily advertised their love for reading and would read at their desks during their lunch breaks, it was almost as if I had the permission to do so myself. This was also around the time when Bookstagram became more of a big thing on Instagram and I started listening to more bookish podcasts. And talking about books with other people meant getting book recommendations and learning that there was a whole wide world of books out there beyond what I was reading. (I also think being part of TLC Book Tours and joining a book club helped me, too, as it introduced me to many books I wouldn’t have otherwise picked up myself.)

Today, I feel like I read much more widely than ever before. I’ve stopped reading Christian books entirely because, well, the Christian church has changed a lot in the past decade and I want very little to do with it now. I still love romances and no longer feel guilty for reading these books anymore, even the ones with very steamy sex scenes. But I also love thrillers and mysteries and literary fiction and YA and contemporary fiction and historical fiction and memoirs and social justice books. I love that I try to seek out experiences and cultures that are so different than my own. I love that I can be a recommendation source for others. And I love knowing that, in another decade, my reading life may look completely different than it does today. Readers are people and, as we evolve, so too does our reading.