Welcome to Bookworm Island

Welcome to my first blog post! Thank you so much for taking the time to check it out! First post of course is the introduction. So, hello there friend! My name is Jenna and I am 24 years old. I am married to my high school sweetheart and we have two rescue dogs who are the lights of my life! I work for an audiobook publisher and books are my favorite thing in the whole world. I mean i LOVE books. A genuine bibliophile if you will! I have loved books as far back as i can remember. Isn’t it crazy how memory works though? The overall love of books is there but if you were to ask me every book I have ever read there is no way I could tell you, but if you were to ask me that question i would have a greatest hits playlist in my head showing my glimpses of that love. A random night reading by flashlight with a cool summer breeze coming in my window. My mother’s voice reading to my sister and I while we lay in our bunks, picturing the princess in the story saving herself. Sitting in our high school’s library during my free period, loving how thoroughly I am able to drown out the world by drifting into another. If you were to ask me the question “Jenna when did you know you loved books?” I could answer that one in a heartbeat. If you have ever seen the movie Inside Out, you can picture how my core memories that created my Bookworm Island may look. Little moments - flashes of memories. I figured the best intro to this blog would be to introduce you to the foundation of my Bookworm Island.

Core Memory #1:

I am a small child with short, unruly dark curls. I am running around our front yard at my childhood home while the adults lay the foundation for our new front porch. In my hands I carry around a small, thin yellow book with a Dalmatian wearing a firemen‘s hat on the front cover. For a moment in time, it was my most prized possession... until it ended up inside the poured concrete of that porch on accident. To this day when i step onto my parents’ front porch I wonder if some day someone will demolish that porch and find that little book incased in its tomb. Will they know it was some little girls starter point for a life long love of books?

Core Memory #2:

I am in elementary school - I am in third grade. During this year, two important events occur in my reading journey.

1. My teacher assigns a year long assignment that we are to write book reports for every book we read this year. The same year that i discover my love of chapter books - so naturally I read many books and write many reports... too many reports apparently. She brought my parents in for a meeting about my book reports and how she suspected that I wasn't actually reading that many books. Honestly I think my parents had doubted it at first too.. i mean it was a significant amount of books for a third grader but they had actually spent time engaging with me when I wrote the book reports, quizzing me on what happened in the titles and it was discovered that I really was retaining the stories. I was just a fast reader. This is the first year i vividly remember “falling” into stories so completely that I would forget the world around me. So thank you to my parents for sticking up for me to this teacher and believing in me as my love grew. And to Ms. W - look at me now! A career in publishing and i read WAY more books in a year now than when I was in your class! Would you like some book reports?

2. We participated in a special school project that taught us the process of writing and publishing books. We each wrote and illustrated our own story and then at the end of the year we received a few copies of our “published” hardcover books. I think this was the first time i realized that I would love to work in the world of books either as an author or in publishing. So thanks for that one Ms. W - this assignment was your redemption arc in my story.

Core Memory #3:

This one is a collage of moments throughout middle school and high school. I always had (have) a book with me. A quick escape whenever possible to some far of land, where I get to feel stronger, braver, more capable as I help solve some dire situation. Here is where my love of Fantasy titles was discovered! This core memory holds faces of some old friends. One who obsessed with me over a mutual love of a Vampire series that was popular at the time (no - not twilight.. although it is a guilty pleasure read of mine.. that’s a story for another time!). Thank you to this friend, it was a key part of my love of paranormal and fantasy genres. And the other friend, who had to literally ground me from books in certain classes to force me to focus. Thank you for making sure I didn’t flunk out of school. It is much appreciated!

Core Memory #4:

My grandparents have listened to books on tape for as long as i can remember. They listened to them on drives together and my grandpa still listens to audiobooks now all these years after she passed away. When i was younger I didn’t see the appeal. I couldn’t focus on the stories that way and so for a very long time I just didn’t try to listen to audiobooks at all. But in college my dad recommended me giving them another chance and now after discovering that I can listen to them on 1.5x or 2x the speed I adore them! The missing part for me was the speed - please refer to Core Memory 2 aka the discovery of fast reading. I am hands down an audio bookworm like my grandparents. It allows me to so fully engage in the stories that I read that I catch myself making facial expressions, movements, or reciting lines of characters. I forget I am not actually there. You can not convince me that it isn’t some sort of magic how written words from someone’s brain can take me to a world that have never existed. It’s for sure magic and I love it.

The other side of this memory though isn’t so magical. It is the ridiculous argument that audiobooks aren’t reading. I find this core memory divided in two, flickering between the discovery of my love of audiobooks and a moment a few years back when I was talking with an old classmate‘s mom in my neighborhood about our love of books and I briefly mentioned my goodreads yearly goal and how close I was to reaching it. She seemed very impressed UNTIL i mentioned how audiobooks had been a game changer for my reading goals. At this point she was no longer impressed and instead tells me how that isn’t actually reading. I was dumbfounded at first. Then I felt guilty thinking I had somehow unknowingly broken some rule of the bookworms club. Was listening to books really not reading?? The guilt was harsh, I stopped listening for awhile and went into a bit of a reading slump where I just didn’t read at all because I felt like I cheated. Until one day I started working in the magically world of audiobook publishing last summer. Then i realized how AMAZING audiobooks truly are and how ridiculous the controversy over if audiobooks count as reading really is. Haven’t folktales, legends, and myths been passed down through verbal storytelling for centuries?! This is the moment my stance that reading is reading no matter the format as long as you get to feel the magic of storytelling was born.

Core Memory #5:

I promise that this is the last one! I hope I haven’t lost you yet because this is probably the most precious core memory of them all. Referring back to Core Memory #4 - my grandparents love books as well. This nurtured my love of books without them even realizing it. They so thoroughly understood my love of books that they didn't even question my Christmas list my freshman year of highschool - all books.

That Christmas i knew in my gut was going to be the last holiday I spent with my grandma and I knew I wanted it to hold something special for me. Even then I understood that books were the most precious thing to me and so naturally I asked for some. Books from her that i could carry through life with me - a memento of a woman who encouraged my love of reading without even meaning to just by loving them herself. I asked for a Bible, a fulll box set of a paranormal series i was obsessed with at the time, and a copy of Romeo and Juliet. They got me all of them. I actually ended up receiving two copies of Romeo and Juliet from them that year. I know, i know the two copies thing sounds odd but it was because I had wanted a normal copy of the first Shakespeare play i had ever read and my grandparents also decided to gift me an English to French edition because I had started taking French my freshman year and loved it. That small edition to my gifts that year is still so special to me. Honestly after she died later that winter I quit French. I quit a lot of things for awhile consumed by the pain but every book I asked for that year sits in the room I write this in right now and 24 year old me thanks 15 year old me for thinking ahead for how much I would cherish such gifts. One day when I actually write a book of my own it will be dedicated to my grandparents. My fellow lovers of books.

So that’s it! That’s my bookworm island! Welcome! Honesty like I said at the start of this, it seemed like the best way I could think to introduce myself and this blog! This blog won‘t be a normal book blog chalked full of book reviews. It will be more of a travel log through my personal reading journey and I hope you enjoy following along!

Until next time,

J.