This weekly book meme is brought by Top 5 Wednesday on Goodreads.
Happy Wednesday! What She's Read was on a little bit of a pseduo-haitus over the summer. I still posted reviews, but had a hard time keeping up with some of the other features I usually like to be a part of. I found it was hard enough to find time to just read to begin with.
I'm glad to be back for this Top 5 Wednesday with books I wish I would have read when I was a little younger to either help me learn a life lesson, gain confidence, get a new perspective, etc.
While I've always loved to read, I somehow got into this weird mindset in my teens where I somehow convinced myself that I should only read classics and Important Canonical Books (so, we're mainly talking a lot of dudes). It isn't that I now wish I hadn't read those books, but I wish I'd allowed myself more leeway in branch out to different genres and popular books before I got to college and beyond.
Some of these books may date me a little (and two of them are super recent, so you know I couldn't have read them when I was much younger even if I had wanted to) but scroll through the gallery to check out my choices!
A few notes:
Basically, I wish I'd been reading Margaret Atwood for my entire life
They Both Die At The End is such a lush, gorgeous, smart book and I wish I could have seen young adult fiction like that when I was a teen
Reading And I Darken as a teen would have been completely rocked my world and helped me better understand myself as a writer
84, Charing Cross Road is the most delightful book in the world and I can't believe it took me so long to ever even hear of it
While I read and loved some of Joyce Carol Oates' short stories when I was a teen, I never thought of her novels, or it didn't even register that there were novels to read. Blonde would have been right up 16-, 17-year old Ashley's alley, with its heft and its totally bonkers writing style.
What are some of the books that you wish you could go back in time and read sooner? Let me know!