How the Journey Began

So, I am sure you are wondering, “What is this blog about exactly?” I know when I first came up with the name I thought, “People are gonna think this is some awesome blog about a road trip or something across America.” Well, regretfully, if that is what you were hoping for, this is not it.

This is actually about my decision to undertake a monumental task. As an education major, it is good for me to become familiar with young adult literature and because of this need to expose me to YA lit, I was given an assignment to read ten young adult books over one semester. Inevitably, this searching around for book choices lead me straight into the craziness I am about to enlighten you to.

During my search for books, I came across a series that I remembered I had adored when I was younger called Dear America. Since I had finished the ten books I needed to read for the course, I said to myself, “Hey, why don’t I try to read all of the Dear America series books?!” Little did I know that that would mean I would need to read seventy-eight books…yes seventy-eight. You see the series has quite expanded from when I was a kid. I remember reading the original Dear America series books which were diaries from the perspective of young girls at different times in America’s history. Then came The Royal Diaries which were books written in the perspective of young royal girls from different countries and time periods. From this over abundance of girl narrators it was obvious that the next step would be to come out with a boy version of the series, which the publishers did with My Name is America. These books being journals from the male perspective during different times in American history. See, I thought it stopped there, but I was wrong. The publisher came out with another subseries known as My America which is more focused on the earlier parts of American history and are the first of the subseries to contain multiple books from one character’s perspective.

When I was younger I only read from the original Dear America series and The Royal Diaries. That leaves me with the whole subseries of My Name is America and My America to tackle not to mention the rest of the books from the two series I had been exposed to. I had read seven books from The Royal Diaries and fourteen from the original Dear Americas. Thus leaving me with a huge stack of books to get through!

Originally, I wanted to read all of the stories in chronological order but this proved to be difficult since being a college student has left me pretty much broke. So, I did not have the luxury of buying each book in chronological order. I had to sit down and strategize which library I could get each book from. At the end of my planning, I realized that I will hopefully only have to buy ten books out of the whole seventy-eight!

Now let’s just see how long this all takes me!