Here’s the last of my pop culture confessions (after movies, TV, and music). Some of my reading secrets:

1. The night before my junior year of high school, I stayed up until like 3am reading the Lovely Bones. I just couldn’t put it down. Oddly, I haven’t read the book since then.
2. I have read and re-read these books over and over again: the Harry Potter series, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Series, and Summer Sisters. I think the Hunger Games trilogy will soon be added to that list.
3. I could barely make it through book 1 of the Twilight series (and never even bothered with any of the others). I found the writing so terrible that I actually laughed out loud at a few points. Please, please don’t ever be the kind of person who compares Twilight to Harry Potter. There is no comparison.
4. My mom and dad used to take turns reading to me at night. I especially remember reading the Goosebumps series, the American Girl books, and the Boxcar Children series.
5. When I was forced to read Bridge to Terabithia in the 5^th grade, I hated it. When I read it a few years later on my own, I loved it, and I cried.
6. I once read the entirety of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and completed a lengthy project on it in one night. Yes, I am the ultimate procrastinator.
7. On the AP English exam, almost none of the prompts referenced any of the books I’d read (and I read a lot of them for AP English). I ended up writing about A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (which I absolutely hated), but it must have worked because I got a 5 on the exam.
8. The two books I cannot for the life of me finish are Great Expectations and War and Peace. I have started reading these books on multiple occasions, and have yet to make it through either. I took a Russian Lit class in college, and our professor printed off certificates and gave us Russian cookies to celebrate our “accomplishment” of reading War and Peace. Ooops.
9. Despite my War and Peace mental block, I really love Russian literature (though I always feel pretentious saying so). One of my very favorites is Eugene Onegin.
10. Everyone loved “An Infinite Work of Staggering Genius,” but I thought it was really pretentious. Two thumbs down.