This year has been a year full of reading! Most of these books are from my two literature classes I took this year, but as well as some outside reads that I think many people would like. I love to read, but I also find reading books that I don't particularly enjoy, or that are hard to read, well, hard to read. So, these books are all easy to read, as well as extremely enjoyable, well at least to me (: I hope you guys can check out any of these as well.
*In the order I read them, not the order in which I enjoyed them*
1. Ambrose Bierce's Short Stories - Ambrose Bierce is extremely dark, and I love it. He actually reminds me of Edgar Allen Poe. The ones I've read were about war, and they are so fun to read and so hard to put down. They make you think so much, and I really like the way he writes.
2. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain - I read the Adventures of Tom Sawyer when I was younger, and Mark Twain has always been one of my favorite authors, so when we were assigned to read this book, I was super excited! It's about Huckleberry Finn, a young boy living in Missouri who comes into a lot of money. He decides to run away with Tom Sawyer and his guardian's slave Jim. His dead beat father comes back, and gains legal guardianship of Huck. Huck knows his father will take the money and spend it on booze, so he tries to keep it from him. Huck ends up faking his own death and runs away to an island where he meets up with Jim, the slave. This book is about morality, and anti-slavery, kind of disguised as a children's book. It causes you to think so much, and it is such a step forward, especially for the 1840s. This is definitely one of my favorite novels.
3. Kate Chopin's Short Stories (Story of an Hour, Desiree's Baby) - These are short stories written post civil war in 19th century America. Short stories are always interesting reads because they're short enough to read in one sitting, and they usually have a twist ending which makes you always anxious to read until the end. I think that Kate Chopin's stories have some of the absolute greatest twists of any short stories I've ever read.
4. The Fault In Our Stars by John Green - Warning, this book will make you cry. I know this book as gotten a lot of grief since it was made into a movie, which I haven't seen by the way, but it was a good read. I read it in two sittings. It's about a teenage cancer patient named Hazel who falls in love with a boy named Gus, who is in cancer remission. It is extremely cute. I cried my eyeballs out, so I refuse to watch the movie and experience that again.
5. Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky - This is one of the first books where I was introduced to reading about mental illness. This is a sort of coming of age book about a boy named Charlie in high school. You've probably seen the movie starring Emma Watson and Logan Lerman, and while I know it was directed by Stephen Chbosky himself, but I find the book so much better, and I think that Logan Lerman was a poor casting choice. Now that I'm in college, I don't really enjoy reading books about high school, but this one was a huge exception. It also talks about music by the Smiths, which is one of my all time favorite bands, so that was also a plus.
6. Flannery O'Connor - Oh my goodness. Flannery O'Connor is such a strange author, but I loved everything about what I read. I read a couple short stories, and they are dark and pessimistic, but have a religious motif and they are just crazy interesting. This stories, like Kate Chopin, have crazy twists. I really look forward to reading more from her.
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as other Fitzgerald Short Stories - Surprised I hadn't read this book until this year? Me too! To be honest, I did not love the way this story happened, I just loved the way the book was written, which is why it's on this list. There's a long list of must read American novels, and this one is on there for a reason. It is a very short book and an easy read. I also haven't seen this movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. His other short stories are really interesting. My favorite is Babylon Revisited, which is about a father trying to get custody of his daughter, after losing custody after the stock market crash.
8. James Baldwin - Huge African American writer post WWII. I have a blog post from when I read this this year, and if you want to check it out, you can click here. I read excerpts from Going to Meet the Man. This was kind of crazy for me to read, and it really made be appreciate who I am and where I am.
9. Coraline by Neil Gaiman - This is probably the only book that I've read after watching the movie. I watched the movie years ago, and I loved it. It was pretty creepy for a children's movie. I was having trouble sleeping some nights this summer, so I decided to read this book. Kind of a bad idea because this book is SCARY. It is very short, like 120pages or so, and supposed to be a children's book, but it a creepy book. It was way creepier to read than it is to watch, which is why I loved it so much. I haven't read many scary books in my life, but this one makes me want to read more!
10. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte - I've seen this movie and read this book before, but we were assigned it as a read for my lit class this semester. It was so interesting to be able to dive into a book that I enjoy so much. It's a coming of age story about a young feminist in the Victorian era. There's a cute love story in there too, which is always a plus for me.
11. Sorrow of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - This was another book we read in my lit class this semester. I was renting this book, but I loved it so much I ended up buying a copy. It was absolutely amazing. It's an epistolary about a young romantic who falls utterly and completely in love with a married woman. Before this year, I didn't really know what romanticism was, but I learned that I am a huge romantic, and reading this book kind of makes you realize that that isn't really that great of a thing. The first 75% is written in 1st person, but then at the end, it's 3rd person and you get this context that kind of pulls everything together. This book helped me learn so much about myself, as well as learn from some of the downfalls of being a romantic.
12. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway - When I started reading this novel, I was sure I wasn't going to like it, being a war novel about being a man and whatnot, but the more I read into it, the more I loved it (it also has a love story in it which you know I love). I found myself relating to the books hero, which is so strange being that is probably one of the most unlikely comparisons a person could make. This book is about an American man named Fred Henry who lives in Italy when WWI breaks out, so he joins the Italian army. He falls in love with a girl named Catherine Barkley. There's just a lot of drinking, sex, and tragedy in this novel, and I ended up loving it.
13. To Live by Yu Hua - This story is like a first hand account of the timeline of Chinese communism. It was a wonderful read as a history lover. It's about a man who has everything and loses it all to gambling, then gets forced into the Chinese civil war on the Nationalist side, but the communist side captures him and lets him go home. Then he experiences the ups and downs of communism. It was a different read, being that there wasn't a love story in this, but I still really enjoyed it. It also made me cry, but that's not very hard to do.
These were my favorite reads of this year! I hope you can check out any of these, and if you do, let me know what you thought about them. I would also love to hear any of your book recommendations. I'm always looking for something new to read, even though I have a huge stack of unread books. New books are always more exciting than the ones you already have.
<3
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