My Favorite Things - AP Literature Post #1

        Let me just say, deciding what my favorite books are is one of the hardest tasks anyone could ask me to perform. I love to read. In all honesty, sometimes all I want to do is forget about everything going on in the world, sit on a couch and read all day long. There are so many good books out there, that it's truly difficult picking a small group of favorites. After a LOT of thought, however, I finally came up with a pretty decent list of my very top choices. So, here are my top ten favorite books of all-time:

1. The Entire Percy Jackson & The Olympians Series (Sorry - I couldn't choose just one)
2. Heir to Sevenwaters
3. Divergent
4. The Mark of Athena
5. Flame of Sevenwaters
6. Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows
7. The Hunger Games
8. Valley of Fear
9. Ender's Game
10. Peter and the Starcatchers

        This list was so hard to create. I had to leave so many amazing books off the list to keep it a decent size. As you can see, I am a fantasy person. I love adventure stories and all of that stuff. Other genres interest me as well, but fantasy is my all-time favorite. I am very intrigued by anything considered creative writing - poetry, short stories, fantasy novels - I love to read them. Now to explain a bit about why I chose these specific books over the others. For one thing, I loved all of their plots. All of them had a good base plot line - one that fit and made sense with the context. Some of them had surprises along the way as well that I wasn't expecting at all. Whether those surprises were good or utterly tragic (the Hunger Games trilogy comes to mind...), they aided the plot lines along the way and added a whole new element to the story in question.    

         Along with the amazing plots, these books have amazing character development within them. The characters created by the authors all have distinct personalities and habits, and they truly keep the audience reading. From a girl leaving her home faction just trying to find her place in society to an extremely intelligent little boy who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, the characters all have true bravery and a good knack for distinguishing the difference between right and wrong. In all of these books, the main characters are pushed into the worst situations imaginable, yet they always fight for what they believe in, even if it means giving up something important along the way.
        I also appreciate the way all of them are written. All of their authors' writing styles appealed to me, which I find hard in some other types of books. The writing flowed smoothly and guided the stories to their full potentials. I hate it when I am reading an amazing book but the writing style is terrible. That can make the story seem too slow or just plain confusing.
        While AP Lang taught me the value in works of nonfiction (which I had not opened up to until last year), I still can't help but return to the fiction that I have come to love so much. I guess you could call it my "comfort genre". It allows me to take a break from actual worldly problems and analyzing the text (not that that's a bad thing) and just sit down, relax, and enjoy what I am reading, getting lost in the pages of a priceless piece of fiction.
         Well, I guess that's it for my rant about fantasy books. AP Language was very interesting and I am glad that it taught me to think in a different way. I now look forward to AP Literature and the books we will read within this coming school year. I can't wait to see what we will learn next! :)