Follow My Book Blog Friday #8

Follow Friday is hosted by Parajunkee's View and Alison Can Read.

Q.How have your reading habits changed since you were a teen?

The biggest change to happen since I was a teen was the rise of the internet. I was about 16 when internet cafes started to appear in London, so I used the internet sometimes, but I didn't have it in my home yet. The internet has done both good and bad things for my reading: The good is that I am introduced to books that I never would have heard of, I am able to get hundreds of other opinions on the books I read, tweet authors and get tweeted back and of course, blog. The bad is that a lot, if not all, of the time that I spend on the internet (which is far, far too much - the internet is obviously a famous time-sucker) I would have spent reading as a teen. When I was younger I had more free time and it pretty much all was spent reading, but now with work and social commitments, I spend less hours reading per day.

Strangely, though, I don't think I read less overall. As a child through to a teen, my reading choices were quite narrow and I mostly stuck to popular series like The Babysitters' Club, Sweet Valley High/Twins, Sunset Island, Point Horror/Romance and Katherine Applegate's series and I read a lot of these books over and over, without ever branching out much. Now I read a huge variety of books and authors and read about 80 new books a year. It's still my goal to hit a hundred! I just have to get off the dang internet sometimes!