Book Blogger Appreciation Week 2016 - It's Back!

So, thanks to Adam at Roof Beam Reader and Michelle at True Book Addict, I discovered that I've been living under a rock  and missed that this was being brought back by The Estella Society. I'm going to see if they'll still let me come out and play.

Our first mission:

Day 1: Introduce yourself by telling us about five books that represent you as a person or your interests/lifestyle.

Um. Right. Five. Only five. So...I'm going to do a little tour (as much as possible with five books) showing where I've been and where I am now as a reader and a collector.

So--my reading life really began with

When I was in second grade, my mom gave me her small collection of the tweed covered Nancy Drew books that she had received as a Christmas present one year. Sure, I had books before this--but the Nancy Drew series was the first one that I actively collected on my own. I would save my allowance money and buy them whenever I could. 

From there I moved on to the classic mysteries. The edition of Sherlock Holmes shown below was my first introduction to the Great Detective:

Nancy was my gateway to Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, and all the vintage mysteries that I loved then and have since returned to. I read a steady diet of mysteries (with small snacks of various other genres) from second grade through sixth grade. Then I discovered science fiction. Again, it was the vintage work that grabbed my attention:

I worked my way through Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula Le Guin, Sherri S. Tepper, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, and others. Science Fiction was my go-to pleasure-reading genre until I finished college. But, while completing my undergraduate English degree, I discovered my love for classic literature (primarily British):

Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Eliot, H. G. Wells, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and others became my favorites--with a particular affinity for Victorian and early 20th Century.

And then....when I left college and got married, I returned to my first love--mysteries. Our first apartment was in a tiny little town with what seemed like the world's tiniest public library. But the Spencer Public Library had the most amazing collection of vintage mysteries.

I'm pretty sure that Elizabeth Daly was the very first author I checked out (and I'm pretty sure it was the book above) and she started me back on a mystery journey that hasn't stopped. I'm constantly adding to my vintage mystery collection. So--if you ask me what kind of blogger and reader I am--I am a mystery blogger first and an eclectic blogger second. I'll read everything from science fiction to the classics to historical novels to history and biography. But if I had to choose one genre for the rest of my life? Mysteries--no question.