Booking Through Thursday - First Time

I would have liked to have got this post up earlier but I've been super busy all day what with driving home from my great-auntie's house and then going to help my Gran with some ironing and *then* being dragged along while my sister and mum went to physio and whatnot (thank gawd I grabbed a book to read while we were there)

"What is the first book you remember reading? What about the first made you really love reading?"

I gotta confess that even though I'm not quite 20 my memory of my childhood is so exceedingly poor that I can't remember at all what was the first book I read for myself. I just seem to have been reading all my life and I can't pinpoint when and how it started. I know that I loved Enid Blyton books - like many other people - when I was younger it was more the fairy books but when I was around 7 or 8 I reckon the Secret Seven books were my favourite. I also remember reading this series of books about ballet, I did two years of ballet lessons from when I  was 5 but I've never really been graceful enough or balanced to be a ballerina, but I enjoyed these books nonetheless.

The book that I vividly remember being the catalyst for my reading even more voraciously was Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. I can't recollect who gave me the book but it was in '97 or 98' not long after it came out and I've probably never been more obsessed with a series of books than with Harry Potter, it literally infected a huge part of my childhood. From when I was 7 until I was 17 I pretty much lived for the release of the next book although during that time I did expand my range of reading quite a bit, I'd not really read much fantasy before Harry (as far as I'm aware, I have no idea unless I go and grill my parents about it) but over that ten years I've read the Chronicles of Narnia, His Dark Materials and lots of other books that-I-can't-remember. I feel rather guilty that it's only been since last December that I've read The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit which I really should have read yonks ago but I can't change the past and I've read them now and that's all that matters.

It is a great shame that I don't remember the *very first* book I ever read and I may have to reminisce with the parentals one day about my reading habits, cos god knows I didn't get my love of books from either of them so I'm rather intrigued to know where it came from. What I would really love to do is go down to my local library, where I've been going for-evah, and ask them if my lending record goes as far back as the mid-90's and if they could actually print me a copy of everything I borrowed cos it would be amazing to see what I read back then and whether I remembered any of them. But I reckon if I did the librarians would look at me pretty funnily *hehe*

All this thinking about my childhood reading has really made me regret giving away all the lovely hardback copies of Roald Dahl books that I had, I'd lost the illustrated dust covers to them years ago but they were in mint condition still (excepting that game of MASH I'd done inside the cover of Matilda - don't ask me *why* I committed sacrilege like that I was a weird child), gah if only I could get them back. *sigh* I'll just have to buy a set of paperbacks for perpetuity and future offspring - who *will* have a love of books beaten into them :P.

Well anyways this has taken me a while and I really need to do some book reviews!
TTFN
LadyV