Follow Friday - February Has Twenty-Eight Days, Usually

It's Friday again, which means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Hands and Home and Me My Shelf and I.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: Talk about the book that most changed or influenced your life.  (Was it a book that turned you from an average to avid reader, did it help you deal with a particularly difficult situation, does it bring you comfort every time you read it?)

Once again this is a difficult question for me to answer, mostly because I have read so many books that it is difficult to single out just one. But I'm going to pick The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings because those are the books that really launched my passion for reading. I was always an avid reader, devouring piles of books as quickly as I could get my hands on them. I read Encyclopedia Brown, the Great Brain, Danny Dunn, and numerous other books before I pulled The Hobbit off the shelf, but Tolkien's works were the first books I read that weren't specifically aimed at me as a child reader, but rather aimed at readers in general. On one night in the summer between the fourth and fifth grade year I read The Hobbit, and then over the next week I read The Lord of the Rings. And from then on I was hooked. I still read Encyclopedia Brown books and classic children oriented books like Toby Tyler and Alice in Wonderland, but from that point forward, my reading choices would include books pulled from my father's bookshelves: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Anderson, Tolkien, and Delany among others. From then on I wasn't just a kid who liked to read: I was a reader.

Go to Previous Follow Friday: Twenty-Seven Should Be Sacred to the Minbari
Go to Subsequent Follow Friday: Twenty-Nine? Hey, That a Prime Number!

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