Project Reflection

Creating this blog was eye opening for me! Personally, I do not recall reading many YA books as a Young Adult. I know that may sound strange, but from what I can recall, I graduated from Children's Transitional Fiction around age eight or nine, when I read my first Stephen King book. From there on out, it was pretty much either Stephen King or a different horror author I was reading - all throughout my Young Adult years. This continued into adulthood, and I would estimate that ~95% of the books I have read as an adult have been horror.

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But heading into library school, I knew once I received my MLIS degree, I wanted to be a Children's Librarian. At least I thought I did. Now that I have taken courses on "materials for children" and "materials for young adults" I believe I'd rather be a Young Adult/Adult Librarian! All of the books I read for this blog were AMAZING! Same with the other materials - the movies, tv shows, podcasts, video games, etc. I don't remember much about the quality of YA books when I was the "YA age" but I can tell you that right now they are incredible! And there are so many to choose from! The one pitfall I could see myself falling into would be that I would focus on reading YA horror too much, and to be an effective Young Adult/Adult Librarian, I need to read across genres. So when a teenager comes to me looking for a specific type of book, or a specific type of graphic novel - if they're asking me for a YA romance novel, I do not want to have to tell them that I don't know what's best for them. So I definitely have to spread my wings and read across ALL of the YA genres. And creating this blog has helped me to see that!

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A lesson learned this semester while creating this blog: Listen to your teachers kids/teens! My professor for this course told us we better get going on this blog right at the beginning of the semester, and I thought I was doing a good job by getting all of my books read, movies watched, video games played, etc. But I waited too long to do my blog posts, and by the end of the semester, I had to do almost all of them at the end. So I had done all of the legwork for the blog, but I had not been working on the final project the entire time. My professor Lisa warned us of this, and I kind of listened, but I should have listened to the whole thing and been doing my blog posts as I finished each book, or watched each movie. So take a lesson from me, and avoid yourself some stress -  whether you're a parent reading this and you're avoiding things you have to do at work, or you're a teen who has a big school project coming up. If you're allowed a set period of time to do something, try to use the entire period of time - it will save you a lot of grey hair in your future.

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Thanks for checking out my blog!

RG