During the cold months and rainy days, all I want to do is grab my favorite drink, grab a blanket, curl up, and read a good book. My reading style changes depending on what I am feeling. I read romance, autobiographies, historical fiction, urban fantasy, mystery, and psychological thrillers. Currently I’m reading: “The Nightingale”, “Spare”, “While Time Remains”, “Verity”, and “Memoirs of a Geisha”. Here are my top three recommendations for my fellow book lovers.
Note: some of these book’s touch on very difficult subjects, and some of them can be hard to read.
“In Order to Survive” by Yeonmi Park
I will automatically recommend this book to someone if they want to read an autobiography. This book is written by Yeonmi Park about her life in North Korea, her struggle to escape to South Korea, and eventually the United States. This book made me feel happy, sad, mad, and anxious the entire time. At the very end of her book, she talks about the speech that she gave in front of the One Young Summit. Reading it made me tear up, but listening to her speech made me cry. The speech can be found here. After reading her book, it made me realize that we as a society take a lot of things for granted, and that there are people who do not have the things that we have or the opportunities that we have.
“It Ends with Us” by Colleen Hoover
I am not going to lie. I am a fan of Colleen Hoover’s writing, and “It Ends with Us” was the first book of hers that I read. I was not expecting what the book was going to talk about or the situation that the main protagonist was going to be involved in. For those who do not know, this book deals with domestic violence. I was not prepared for it at all. Around the time that I ended the book, I had to write a paper for my government class. It was a research paper on any topic. At that time, Roe v. Wade had just been overturned, and I knew that a lot of students were going to write on that or on gun control. Instead, I wrote about domestic violence. I decided to write about it because (1) I had a feeling that it was a topic that not a lot of students would write on and (2) I was inspired by “It Ends with Us” to write my government paper on domestic violence.
“Murder on the Orient Express” by Agatha Christie
For my murder mystery book lovers, “Murder on the Orient Express” would be a good book for you to read. Agatha Christie is known as the Queen of Mystery, and she definitely deserves that title. This book follows Belgian detective Hercule Poirot on a luxury train known as the Orient Express. One of the passengers on the train was murdered in the middle of the night, and there was no way on or off the train. That would mean that the murderer is on the train, and it is up to Poirot to figure out who the murderer is. I am not going to lie, I thought it was one passenger because of the evidence that pointed to them, but it was not them…I am not going to spoil anything else about it. But I highly recommend reading this book.