My reading experience: Part One

I am a bibliophile, a bookworm, a book-lover, an avid reader, a book-creator, a poet, and more. But the thing is that nobody in my family is a book reader. If we collect the books I've read last month and the books my family read since their infancy, I'll have double the number of books. So how did I get the 'germ' of reading. Well my grandmother was and is an avid reader herself and her reading 'germ' came directly to me, jumping over my mother.
So now you are wondering: At the time you were the only one reading in the family how it was possible to become a reader by your own?

Well everybody in my family (cousins, aunts, grandmother) <-- see all of them women; were giving me books as presents on my birthday, or on my name-day. So they knew my love for reading, so their presents most of the time were books. I have books with dedications from 1995 (I was 8) up the 2000's then the presents became money, with which I was buying more books.

And yes I was reading tons of books but my mother was, how shall I put it, was worried for my excessive reading so I ended up hiding my book under the pillow or reading with the lights off. One time my mother caught me (no, it wasn't porn) reading one of her books (something between drama and romance) and she told me that that book was not for children. I never saw it again. Anyway, if you restrict something you never succeed, you are making it stronger.

So I became a stronger reader and from picture books I started reading children's books, and then young teen fiction like:




or

or .
So, slowly I was moving from picture-books to children's / young teen's books. While still in high-school I started reading books (the majority of them fantasy books) that were either YA or adult fiction like:

,

, and

.

My adult books that weren't fantasy where the ones that we had to read at school and some of them are part my top 10 books like:

and

.

Then I went to the army and there I began reading Dan Brown, other YA books and then it came the time where I had to choose what to study at the university. I ended up with English language and literature and from that point my second reading experience began: reading in English. So up to 2009 I was reading almost exclusively in Greek, and from 2009 onwards I'm reading almost exclusively in English (wider variety, cheaper) But how I shifted from Greek reading to English reading, you will find out in the second part of my reading experience