Teaser Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by Ambrosia at The Purple Booker. Here are the rules if you want to play along:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This week’s teaser comes from The Vicious Circle by Katherine St. John.

The Mexico City airport was boxy and punctured with round windows that let in light from all angles, like a giant cheese grater.

..

I sat up, bleary eyed, to a forest of legs. The throngs of passengers had multiplied in the hours I’d been on the ground; the airport was overrun with people moving in different directions.

Flying makes me so anxious. Just reading about it makes me want to jump out of my skin.

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Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic is:

Ten Ways My Reading Habits Have Changed Over Time

This one has really made me think. I know it has changed a lot, but actually taking a look at the ways it has over the years was a bit challenging.

1. Going back in time to when I was a kid, I read CONSTANTLY. Just ask my mother – I wanted to stay inside and read all day long. I had the reading tastes of a kid, of course: lots of Sweet Valley Twins and Sweet Valley High, The Baby-Sitters Club, Fear Street, and many others of that ilk. I would hide away for hours with book characters that felt more like friends than fiction.
2. I stopped reading for a bit towards high school, since I was getting very serious about my music and traded reading books to reading sheet music for piano, flute and oboe. I really didn’t read much at all in those years.
3. My senior year of high school was a bit of a revelation to me as I took my first AP classes, one of which being AP English Literature. I had read some of “The Classics” before and had never really enjoyed them, but this particular class really opened my eyes. I also had an amazing teacher, which really helped a lot. This is where I fell in love with Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
4. I was a young adult in my early 20s when I read my first official fantasy novel, Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings. From there, I branched into other popular fantasy and science fiction authors, like Anne McCaffery, Mercedes Lackey, Orson Scott Card and Mary Stewart.
5. Then came the Harry Potter years. They were everywhere and I couldn’t get enough (literally – while waiting for new books to come out, I went through so many fanfictions about Hogwarts!)
6. I went back to college in my late 20s to get my Batchelor’s Degree in English Literature. Obviously, I read a LOT and was introduced to many, many new authors and genres. I started leaning heavily into more literary fiction, or more “serious” fiction, and probably got a bit snooty about it.
7. 2010 – joined GoodReads. I will say that, while it does have it’s faults, GoodReads has been one of the best reading tools I’ve ever used. It has helped me keep track of what I read, when I read it, and helps answer any question I might have about a book, a series, an author, etc. This wasn’t when I first started trying to keep a yearly reading goal, but it was definitely the first time I was super serious about it.
8. In November 2011 – the blog begins! I had a few places before this where I kept up with books I read and wrote very intermittent reviews (LiveJournal, mostly – I miss that place sometimes!), but it was November 2011 when this blog was created in it’s current form.
9. It was probably somewhere around this that I started reading YA, particularly because I started watching the Vlogbrothers on YouTube. For anyone who doesn’t know, this is the channel run by John and Hank Green. I started reading John’s books and his books led me to other YA authors, such as Maureen Johnson, Libba Bray, and Stephanie Perkins. I started attending YallFest, an annual book festival in Charleston, SC with dozens of authors hosting panels and book signings.
10. Fast forward many years until now. I will try just about anything. I still love fantasy and speculative fiction, still love YA, still love my slightly pretentious literary fiction, but I’ve also started reading more genres: mysteries, thrillers, historical fiction, memoirs, and the occasional non-fiction book. If it’s on the page, I will give it a shot.

There we go! I don’t know if that’s exactly how this topic was supposed to go, but this is how my brain put it together. Needless to say, my reading has changed quite a bit over the years, for many different reasons. It’s definitely been a journey!

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Please leave your teasers and top tens in comments!

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Categories: Teaser Tuesday, Top Ten Tuesdays

Tags: books, teaser tuesday, top ten tuesday