My Guilty (and not so guilty) Book Confessions!

It's no secret that I'm a huge book nerd. It's also no secret that I'm a really bad book nerd. I love books, and I love reading, but I rarely actually sit down and spend time with a good book these days. It's my own fault, really. I spend all my spare time online, playing video games or reading blogs and forums, and any time I would have once dedicated to reading - on the train, in the car, in the bath, even - I now spend watching shows on my tablet. I'm a pretty bad book nerd! And yet despite that, I keep buying new books! Yes, even after I promised on here that I'd stop. I'm sorry! (Not sorry).

I've been watching a bunch of Booktubers lately and some of them have been discussing 'book guilt', lately, which is mainly the guilt of buying new books when you have an entire shelf of unread books sitting there, begging for attention. My 'TBR' (To Be Read) pile isn't so much a pile... it's more a mountain. And considering I went out yesterday and bought four more books I don't think it's going to get smaller anytime soon!

And so, with that confession already out there, I thought it might be fun to finally own up to a few other secrets I've held onto over the years!

I haven't read all the Discworld books.
I'm a huge fan of the Discworld. Living just down the road from Wincanton, a town legally twinned with Ankh Morpork, it's difficult not to fall in love with the books and the characters that live within them. I've been a huge Discworld fan since I was a teenager and read Good Omens for the very first time (not a Discworld book, I know, but it's the one that started the ball rolling!). However, unlike most of my friends who are also all big fans, I've not read all the books in the series. In fact, I've hardly read any. I have a shelf full of them, all the art books, I own THUD, the tabletop game, and I was fortunate enough to meet Terry Pratchett numerous times, but I've only read a handful of the books themselves. The ones I have read are mainly the Death and Guards-themed books. I need to actually focus on reading the others, I know, but as I said earlier, I'm really bad at reading books!

I only read 1984 because of a Phoenix Wright fanfic set in a similar world.
And in fact, it kind of started my whole love of dystopian fiction. I've always been a fan of post-apocalyptic stories, but it took a fanfic to teach me there was a whole genre dedicated to dystopia! How embarrassing is that? I can't even remember the fanfic anymore, but I remember falling in love with the horrible, oppressive feel it had, so I ran out right away to find a copy of George Orwell's 1984.

Relatedly, I had no idea how 1984 ended, despite even having a degree in English, for crying out loud!
I never read 1984 in school. Heck, we didn't even touch Animal Farm. I somehow missed this hugely vital part of the English curriculum. I knew vaguely what it was about, but I didn't know how it ended. Yes, I know it's one of the most famous endings in literature but I'd somehow let it pass me by.

Funny anecdote time! The first time I read 1984, I was on a long train journey up North to visit my friend, Katy. The train stopped outside the station for a while and I was a few pages away from the end, and I in my naive, uneducated state wondered how the heck Winston Smith was going to save the day. I know! I had a few pages left and I genuinely believed he was going to win, take down Big Brother, save the day, save the world. What I got was... well, the ending of 1984. The train pulled into Manchester and I was completely numb! I met my friend, who thankfully is a huge book nerd herself and of course she'd read 1984, and the first thing I said was how I'd literally just finished the book. With that, she put an arm around me and simply said; "right, we're going to the pub."

I'm kinda-sorta obsessed with Sweet Valley High!
Yeah, I'm just really digging myself into a literary hole here, huh? All that stuff about 1984 and now this? Yep! A few years back, I found all my old Point Horror and Fear Street books and started devouring them! I loved them as a young adult, and really enjoyed reading through them again whenever I had a few moments. However, I found I was enjoying all the nonsense teen drama far more than the, y'know, brutal murder, so I set out to find books that focused more on that side of things. I remembered that we had a whole rack of Sweet Valley High books in our school library, so I set out to find some whenever I went to second hand stores. I found some, and immediately became hooked! I now own so many of them we have to store them all over the house! I just love the wholesome, simple tone so many of them have and I'm always flipping through them when I'm feeling down or a little blue. I read Sweet Valley High for the same reasons I love 90210 or Gossip Girl; simple escapism. I always wanted to be a teenager in an American high school as a kid, cheerleader, going to prom - and, yes, while I know these books and shows are far from a realistic example, I really don't turn to them for realism!