What happened to those memories?

For a while I've been thinking about what the types of books I tended to read at certain points in my life.  While I think I have a pretty good handle on the types of things I've been reading for the past five years, as I head backwards my ability to recall the types of things I was reading really falls of.  It gets particularly iffy when I think back to my late elementary school years.

I think the problem that I have with my elementary school years is that the few books that I do remember reading were likely a little abnormal.  By the end of grade six, for instance, I remember having read the Michael Crichton books Jurassic Park and Sphere.

But I don't think I was only reading mass market thrillers.  At some point after grade four and before junior high I read a number of Hardy Boys books, as well as some Farley Mowat (and for the American side of the spectrum Johnny Tremain).  And of course there also Lois Lowery's classic dystopian tale The Giver.

At some point, maybe around the time I was reading Jurassic Park, I recall a kid at a science camp being asked what he was reading.  I still remember feeling a little juvenile and inferior when he responded with "The new John Grisham."  It also seemed a somewhat pretentious response, but that mostly came from the delivery.

Not that I think it had anything to do with fellow camper's comment, but at some point around the end of elementary school and the beginning of junior high I started reading John Grisham novels.  But when was this and how does it fit into the timeline?  And why can't I fit this into my personal reading trajectory.

Maybe what shocks me the most is that I know that from late elementary school through to the end of high school I was doing quite a bit of recreational reading - unfortunately I can't seem remember pull too many of the titles on demand (though I do think I am pretty good at knowing whether or not I've read a book if it is presented to me).  Maybe the problem is that reading choices were really quite haphazard and that my development as a reader wasn't quite as linear as I might like to imagine it being.    It's probably this lack of linearity and coherence that makes it hard to recall.  Reading choices didn't flow from any particular prompt or necessarily lead to further reading in an area.

I should probably just accept that idiosyncratic choices were nothing more than that, and that it doesn't really matter that I didn't work my way though categories of works in any particular way.  Maybe I should just consider myself lucky that  was able to sample widely and didn't prematurely limit my tastes by labelling myself a fan or aficionado of a particular genre (an affliction I am still stuck with today).