Feature and Follow Friday: Reading Habits

Feature and Follow Friday is a blog hop hosted by Parajunkee and Alison can Read

This week's question: How have your reading habits changed in the past few years? Did you get interested in a new genre? Do you read more? Less? Why do you think your habits changed, if they did.

My Response

I think now I'm actually reading less than I used to. I'm also now more into science fiction and dystopia than I was a few years ago. When I was younger, all I would read was contemporary YA.

In high school, I basically lived in the library. We had a weird high school setting where they gave us freedom to do our work or to procrastinate because the school was designed to help us prepare for college. I took advantage of this and saw to it that I read every interesting book I saw. 

I remember in middle school things were all weird because you had to have a teacher's permission to enter the library. What?? I had just moved to America and I was trying to go check out a book during lunch time at my middle school and the librarian told me I needed a teacher's permission. Is this a regular thing? Why would they do that?

 In Jamaica, I usually just went to library during lunch and it wasn't a problem with my teachers. 

Freedom to explore the library was one of the reasons I loved my high school. It was pretty cool. All you had to do was sign out of class and write down where you were going and you could spend the whole day at the library. I became friends with the librarian and joined my school's book club. It was bliss!!! 

I still spend a lot of time in the library at college, but...college libraries are slightly different than high school libraries. My high school library was filled with novels about adventure, romance, and fun. Then you get to college and the library is filled with all these boring textbooks. In fact, there is one shelf, I kid you not, ONLY one shelf designated for "leisure reading." 

Funny story! My friend and I were ecstatic on the first day of school when we saw our gigantic library. We were prepared to start reading books immediately. Then, we started browsing around and looking in the library's database for new books to read. We were shocked that there were no books to read just for fun. That's when we finally found that one shelf entitled "leisure reading." I think I should've known that it wouldn't be just like high school, but I don't know, I was just expecting something different. *sigh* I still read a lot, but not half as much as I used to. I'm making an effort to change this year. 

What about you guys? Do you read more than you used to or less? Plus, just out of curiousity, did you need a teacher's permission to use the library when you were in middle school? Is that a normal thing?