Top Ten “Gateway” Books/Authors In My Reading Journey

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by the awesome and wonderful people over at The Broke and The Bookish

Gateway books/authors is a tough topic… I think maybe because we actually have to think hard about our reading lives and really analyze when things happened for us. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice to do, but also sort of hard to pinpoint a lot of things! Which is why we don’t have ten picks LOL

Jaime’s Gateway Books/Authors

Leigh Bardugo / Shadow & Bone – got me interested in the Fantasy genre. I hadn’t picked anything up in this genre prior to her story

Veronica Roth – Divergent was one of the first dystopian books I had read and really opened my eyes to the genre, quickly making it one of my favorites!

Tracey Garvis Graves – I’m not big on much outside of YA … at least that’s what I thought. Then I picked up a book called Covet by Tracey and I was blown away. Not only did I love it but it really had me looking outside the YA Genre for the first time. Women’s Fiction here I come!

Twilight – for as much as some people despise it, It really opened up a lot of doors for me. It got me back into reading, it got me back into writing creatively, it brought me some of my closest and most amazing friends and it kickstarted my love of creating graphics.

Erin’s Gateway Books/Authors

The Hunger Games – I think I mentioned this on one of our Spotlight Sunday posts but this is the series that really got me back into reading. It had everything and really made me want to read more.

Colleen Hoover – She writes books that make me happy. I read Slammed two years ago and still count that book (and Will) as one of my favorites. Yeah, her stories don’t work for everyone but they work for me and I will probably read everything she ever writes.

Vampire Academy – These books were one of the first series related to vampires that I read and I loved every minute of them. If I didn’t have a million other books to read you can bet I would do a re-read of this series just for the fact that I can get more Dimitri. If you are looking for something that is YA and vampire related, this is a good one to begin with.

Across The Universe/Beth Revis – Science Fiction – No…this isn’t the L. Ron Hubbard version of Sci Fi (not that there’s anything wrong with that…) this is the light version and some of the first books I read in this genre. I loved that they weren’t too sciency (if that is a word) or “out there” and it was truly an interesting idea.

The Lunar Chronicles/Marissa Meyer – If you are looking for an introduction to the fairy tale retelling genre this is a great one to start with (in my humble opinion). Meyer takes the original stories and makes them her own. You get just enough of the original to recognize where they originate from but when you mix in cyborgs, space travel, and some of my favorite characters (read: Carswell Thorne) the stories are wonderful all on their own.

Let us know in the comments some of your gateway books/authors – what opened the door for you in your reading life?