I love books. I’m a definite story teller and story collector. Anything, from movies to TV to the back of cereal boxes, I will absorb myself into the story and that will effect my mindset for that day. So I’d like to share my favorite books (because they are the most solid form of stories) with you along with a short synopsis to hopefully get people to read and love them like me.

“The Knife of Never Letting Go”: Please disregard the intensely pretentious title and read it. This book is the first in the Chaos Walking trilogy, which follows the story of Todd, a 12-13 year old boy on the “New World”. In his town (Prentisstown, named after Mayor Prentiss), there are no women and all the men’s thoughts are broadcast to everybody else. They call their thoughts-out-loud “Noise”. Todd gets sent away from Prentisstown just before he turns 13 and becomes a man, and everything gets intense. Todd finds a girl in the swamp who has no Noise and they both have to run to Haven to get away from the Mayor and his army. Pretty intense.

“Horns”: *explicit content in this book* The movie adaptation of this book just came out starring Daniel Radcliffe, but it is no Harry Potter. In the book, the main character Ig Perrish wakes up one day discovering that he has grown horns. Before you click out of this tab, let me explain how brilliant this is. Told through flashbacks, we learn that Ig’s girlfriend Merrin was raped and murdered in the woods, leaving Ig as the only suspect. When Ig begins growing horns, it is a year after her death. When he goes to the doctor to get the horns looked at, he discovers that people tell him their darkest temptations, and he can convince them to follow through with it. If you aren’t catching my drift, Ig is turning into Satan. With many symbolic instances and a crazy awesome plot, this book is sure to make you think.

“Unwind”: This book is the beginning if a series, but I have only read the first one. In “Unwind”, there has been a second civil war over abortion. The solution as a comprise, between the Pro-Life and Pro-Choice armies, is to make it illegal to abort babies, but they can be unwound between the ages of 13 and 18. This means that their parents would fill out some forms and the child would become a live organ donor, without completely killing the child. The main character, Connor, was going to be unwound when he escaped from home, picking up Risa and Lev in a tranquilizer shoot out with the JuveyCops. Risa and Lev were both set to be unwound as well, but Risa because of budget cuts in her State Home (StaHo) and Lev was raised as a tithe, or specifically told he was going to be unwound since he was born for religious reasons. These three work together (and against each other) to avoid being unwound and fight the world.

“In The After”: The first of two in a series, “In The After” is a slightly less cheesy take on an alien apocalypse. The main character Amy is a teenager who gets stranded at her house as the world ends and aliens that she calls “Them” kill off most humans. Since her mother was a crazy paranoid government employee, she has an electric fence around her house, which keeps Them out. The aliens have intense senses of hearing and are attracted to light, so she vows to silence and darkness. She finds a toddler at the supermarket while she’s raiding for canned food and adopts her, calling her Baby and forming a sign language for the two of them to use. The book develops around their change in lifestyle and the future of humanity, or what’s left of it.

These are just my favorite books that I’ve read in the past year. There are many others which I want everybody to know about, but my space is limited here.