Top Ten "Gateway" Books/Authors

My picks for the Tuesday Top Ten, as invented by The Broke and Bookish.  Today's theme, Top Ten "Gateway" Books/Authors In My Reading Journey (so your list could be a mix of a books that got you into reading, an author that got you into reading a genre you never thought you'd read, a book that brought you BACK into read).

Today's list is really small; because there isn't much I don't read...Which makes the books' gateway status  so much more impressive.

The Map of Time by Felix J Palma --I picked this book up because the cover was beautiful and the summary sounded intriguing. Historical-fiction meets science fiction. I didn't know at the time, that the prose would be beautiful, the themes intense and well thought out, and I certainly didn't know this would be the book to introduce me too, and get me hooked on, Steampunk.

 Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist -- When I was a kid, I gave a Stephen King book a shot... Personally, I didn't like his writing style. When I was a teen, I read Bram Stoker and thought Dracula was shockingly beautiful for a horror. But for the most part, I stay'd away from horror novels. Until I found Let the Right One In and John Ajvide Lindqvist. I love the complexity of his characters, the emotional attachments that surround his villians. And now, I walk into the Horror section of bookstores with confidence, looking for scares that are more than the sum of their plot twists...But mostly looking for Lindqvist-New-Releases.

 The Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer -- I know what you're thinking... That book? But what you have to understand, is up until this book, I hated Romance and all its sub-genres with a passion that defied all logic. When this book was first rec'd to me, I said, No way in Hell! But then a year later, I was bored and got it on clearance anyway.

The trick to loving this book, is not overthinking it. You overthink and you start to notice things, like the writing isn't that good, the characters are kind of flat, Bella and Edward's relationship could be consider kind of unhealthy...Underthink it instead and what you have is a contemporary fairy-tale with vampires, complete with happily-forever-after, and that's just kind of refreshing in a world where bad things happen for no good reason, divorce is at an all time high, and sex sells faster than free puppies.

At least now, when people recommend me a book that turns out to be Romance, I give it a shot. Because you never know what a particular author's point of view, will or won't do for you. And if it turns out the book isn't good, and the author's clearly an imbecile, I can always close it and donate it.