Blogoversary Bash: Day 3

Today is the third day of my Blogoversary Week! I've been blogging for three years now and to celebrate I asked some of my best book blogging buddies if they wanted to celebrate with me. Today my bookish bestie Kat co-blogger at My Shelf Confessions is sharing her

Top Three Childhood/Teenage Books

Firstly, I want to say a huge congratulations to my darling friend Karin on her third blogoversary.   I owe her blog a lot, after all it's blogging that introduced us, but it was Eurovision that soldidified it. Happy blogoversary Karin!! xx

Now, onto my Top Three Childhood/Teenage Books

As a child, I could be found in one of three places:

a) At my grandmother's house poking though her bookshelves.

b) At the library, checking out as many books as I was allowed.

or, c) Barricaded in my bedroom reading my library books, or books "borrowed" from my grandmother.  I say borrowed in inverted commas because, honestly, many of them I never returned to her.

From those years of hiding from three younger brothers and reading anything and everything, there are three books that really stand out in my memory:

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

I remember my grandmother buying me a beautiful leather-bound edition for my birthday when I was 9 or 10 years old.  I then proceeded to read and re-read madly until it looked like an antique leather-bound edition from the amount of times I read it.  I'm not sure what happened to it exactly, but I have a feeling it's in storage at my brother's house in Australia.

Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden

Yes, this series was published when I was a kid, and I cannot tell you how excited I was when Quercus started republishing them in 2011 as I finally had the opportunity to go back and read the whole series again.  Particularly though, the first book was the one that really stuck with me - as a bunch of Australian teenagers find themselves fighting for survival after their country is invaded, I was only a couple of years younger than the main characters when I started reading the series.  I was SO in awe of them and everything they did.  And I'm pleased to say when I started re-reading the series in 2012, it was just as great as I rememebered.

Oh, and this was the first series that I was ever aware of release dates for, way back before the internet made series stalking so easy.  I used to go grocery shopping with my mother every Saturday morning just so I could go to the newsagent and check whether the next book had been released.

Morning Glory by LaVyrle Spencer

This one is a little strange for a childhood reading list, but I think I was only 13 or 14 when I found the abridged version of this book in one of my grandmother's Readers Digest condensed editions.  It's one of those historical fictions that you think are going to be a bit of a bodice-ripper, but I remember being so swept away by the simpleness of the romance - the main character is a reclusive widow who meets an ex-con with a huge heart and they fall in love just before he goes to war and there's actually very little bodice-ripping.  I then found the full length version in a bookstore and re-read it until it fell apart.  I found another copy a few years back to re-read and still loved it just as much.

There we have it - my three top childhood/teenage books.  Looking at the variety in genre of these three, I'm really not surprised my tastes ended up so eclectic!

Thank you Kat  for sharing your favorite childhood books with us today. I know none of them but I think I should change that soon. I cannot wait for Eurovision 2015 and I will never forget Eurovision 2013 when we both discovered that Twitter Jail wasn't just a rumor but that it really exists :) Come back tomorrow for my blogoversary post and a little celebratory giveaway.