I'm supposed to be studying right now, but I just wanted to update the world on one of the most beautiful places ever:
It's a certain Reading Room and it has become one of my favorite places on earth. It's quiet, eerily quiet, as in I just dropped a pen and it echoed across the room, quiet. But it's also got that cozy feeling, like drinking a mug of hot chocolate or finally having gone over to a friend's house so many times that it's as if you live there.
That great feeling.
I just love libraries, they possess such an adventurous, yet grand aura. The fact that they can hold so many worlds and it's up to you to decide. The greatness of people who have left their legacies in an object that weighs merely a pound (unless it happens to be War and Peace, in which case, it weighs 2.8 pounds).
I do believe I realized this love when I was but a wee youngling, watching Beauty and the Beast and the scene where the Beast gives Belle the library came on and I realized that that could be the best gift someone could ever give me.
Coolest thing ever.
Yes, I've come to terms with being a dork. In fact, I'm listening to the Lord of the Rings and Narnia soundtracks as I'm typing this.
Anyways, I could spend hours in here.
But, as no one has updated Facebook in a while and I'm done searching for movie tickets for the midnight premiere of Harry Potter 7, I'll leave you a list of some of my favorite books:
1. Chronicles of Narnia (C.S. Lewis): Without a shout of a doubt, my favorite books ever since I was little. Out of the seven, I'd say The Last Battle is my favorite.
And while I'm at it, let's just claim C.S. Lewis as my favorite author. The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity are my favorite "Christian" books.
2. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card): I love its originality and just the fact that it's plain awesome. If you read this, be sure to read the sequels
3. The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins): Freakin' awesome is the only way I can describe said book. It explores what would happen if war and reality TV become one.
4. Give a Boy a Gun (Todd Strasser): Written in a series of interviews done after a school shooting, this book changed my perspective about people and outsiders
5. Anything ever written by Lemony Snicket: The man is just hilarious. Whenever I read anything by him, I end up wishing I was as funny as this guy. If you want to get into the holiday spirit, check out his Holiday-themed children's books, The Baby in the Manger, The Lump of Coal, and The Latke Who Wouldn't Stop Screaming.
6. Redwall (Brian Jacques): Fighting mice and peaceful woodland creatures that live in an Abbey. This book made me believe that animals could talk and I desperately wish that I could be a character in one of his books because they live such fantastic lives. Also, each species of animal speaks a different dialect from the UK
7. Missing Piece Meets the Big O (Shel Silverstein): I love this book. It's truth is so clear yet simple. It's a beautiful masterpiece. Read it here.
8. Speak (Laurie Halse Anderson) and Perks of Being A Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky): I didn't read these books until this semester but they look at teenagers' lives in an interesting way
9. Under the Overpass (Mike Yankoski), A Million Miles in A Thousand Years (Donald Miller), Drops Like Stars (Rob Bell) & Unlikely Disciple (Kevin Roose): I included these together because they're all in the Christian non-fiction category.
**Under the Overpass is about two college guys who decide to become homeless for a few months in major cities. Their book is about life on the streets and how people treated them.
**A Million Miles is interesting as it's somewhat of a sequel on Don Miller's Blue Like Jazz. After Miller wrote Blue Like Jazz, he hit a slump in life and started to realize how to actually live a life that's worth living. I like it because it doesn't have answers, it just tells of how one man found something to live for.
**Drop Like Stars is actually a picture book. I'm not a Rob Bell fan, but this book is a different side of him. It's about suffering, pain and grief. It doesn't try to explain why God does things, it just shows that we are all humans who are all broken.
**Unlikely Disciple is just straight-up amazing. Kevin Roose, an "unsaved" student at the very secular Brown University, goes undercover at Liberty University, one of the most conservative Christian universities in America. Going to a conservative Christian university myself, this book was entertaining on how the Christian scene is seen by an outsider.
10. Classic Books: Little Women (Louisa May Alcott), books by Mark Twain, The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkein) and Candide (Voltaire):
**Little Women--a book every female must read. A rollercoaster of emotions--I threw the book across the room and was truly upset when Beth died--but incredibly joyous nevertheless.
**Mark Twain--I just love the way the man writes down southern dialects perfectly. Like Lemony Snicket, every time I read one of his books, I wish I was as hilarious as that man. **Although I'm really not a fan of the LOTR books, I absolutely loved The Hobbit, unlike the LOTR, it's actually quite amusing.
**Candide is a different book, you will probably not understand what's going on some of the time---neither did I, but I think his irony is fantastic.
**Later add-in: Little Billy's Letters (Bill Geerhart): I can't do justice in describing the real life hilariousness of this book, but the main gist of it is, in the 1990s, Bill Geerhart was an unemployed screenwriter in his 30s. While he was looking for work, he kept himself amused by pretending to be a young, ten year-old boy and wrote letters to famous actors, political figures and even criminals and composed the responses from them in this hilarious book. Check out some of his letters here
