October 2, 2012

Top Ten Tuesday (21)

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

This week's topic is
Top Ten Older Books You Don't Want People to Forget About


Okay, this week I'm going to do something a little different.  There are so many backlist books that I love, but I want to take a minute to appreciate where the YA genre was when I was actually the age of the intended reader.


When I was younger, YA was a never-ending landscape of series books.  You know, those ones that would come out like, once every month.  It all started pre-YA for me with the Baby-Sitter's Club (of course), The Bobbsey Twins, and Nancy Drew (The Secret at Solaire is still my favorite).  When I moved into the teen shelves of my library it was Fear Street, Sweet Valley, Nightmare Hall, Love Stories...the list was never ending.  I used to devour these books.  Every week I would go to the library and browse the shelves for new additions to my series and new series to start.  I would sit and read straight through them in a few hours.  The plot was never particularly complex, nor were the relationships within the books.  The main characters were usually not that likable.  (Who do you root for in the SVH books, really?  Everyone is the worst.)  Why did I even read these books again?  Most of the time you didn't even have to read them in order.  


On the same level as the series books were the series that either spun off from tv shows or from which tv shows were born.  I'm mostly talking about the Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels (which they recently repackaged) and the Roswell High books.  Just thinking about the Roswell books makes me want to go down to my basement and dig around to find them so I can reread the series right now, TBR list be damned.

To this day my basement is full of these books.  I just can't part with my old SVH books or BSC books.  I actually bought a bag full of Love Stories at my last library sale that are currently residing in the trunk of my little VM Beetle.  I bought that repackaging of the Buffy books, even though I still have the originals packed away somewhere.  Am I ever going to read them again?  Maybe not, but I'm a nostalgia whore.  I can't help it.  I can't forget these books that I read in my formative years.  YA has come light years from where it was then, but we should remember where it was because it really wasn't all that long ago.

1 comment:

  1. Oh yes! I read the Love Stores series. And I LOVED Roswell!

    Check out my TTT.

    Sandy @ Somewhere Only We Know

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