Top Ten Tuesday: Books I wish I would have read as a kid

Happy Tuesday! Today’s topic are books I wish I would have read when I was younger. And for me that basically translates to ‘YA I wish I would have read when I was an actual teenager’. Whatevs.

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by ThatArtsyReaderGirl!

City of Bones, Divergent, Miss Peregrine’s, Kiss of Deception, and Cinder are all well-known YA books that I unfortunately read in my mid-twenties. I can appreciate them for what they are and I did enjoy them for the most part, but I know if I would have read them a decade earlier than I had, I would have been obsessed.

Orange is another one I wish I would have read as a teen. I did read a lot of manga during that time, but this obviously didn’t exist in the mid 2000s. I still really loved it now, but I don’t have the nostalgic love for it like I do a lot of manga I talk about. Ready Player One was another one that would have been good for when I was about eighteen. I liked the book well enough when I read it a few years ago, but I couldn’t get into the melodrama love dynamic. But as a teen I would have been all smitten, hah.

Two I wish I would have read as a kid in particular are the Amulet series and The Hobbit. Amulet, because it’s a comic that honestly has a plot that I would have loved at twelve, not so much at twenty seven, when I actually read it. For the Hobbit, I wish my dad would have read it to me as a kid. He read the Lotr books and had this book. He even encouraged me to read it on my own, but I really wish he would have read it to me. By the time I actually read it, it was last year, so I was what, 28? And unfortunately I didn’t care for it.

And finally, the book where I think I missed the window by a lot was Fangirl. Why? Because I read this last year and didn’t care for it too much, mostly because I couldn’t get into the mindset of the main character. But I know, I know if I would have read this at sixteen or eighteen, I would have adored this book like everyone else. I’ve always been one for fandoms, but at that point in my life, I was in so deep. So deep. It would have been the perfect book to obsess over. And I just… missed the window.

Man, I’m old.

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And that’s it! All of these books as mentioned are ones I’ve read in my twenties and wish I read earlier. I know there are ones I haven’t read at all because I know I wouldn’t enjoy them now when I would have at 13. That’s a whole different list, though.

Happy reading!