One of my favorite things about getting to know people is finding out what books they like. Reading a book is such an involved process for me; I fall for some characters, cry with others, and wish to high heaven I could be friends with (or sometimes throw something heavy at) many of them. When I find someone who adores books as thoroughly as I do, I hunger for their recommendations because they often recommend things I might never have read otherwise. The following list comprises many such books that ended up counting among my all-time favorites. Perhaps it will help you too step out of your comfort zone and read something you would never have expected to find appreciation in.

Paper Towns by John Green
This may sound cheesy, but I find cheesy things often sound cheesy only because they are true. It’s not that it changed my life per se, but this book helped me sort though a lot of things in my life at the precise time I felt it was right that I understand them. It deals with a smart, somewhat geeky 17 year old named Q navigate the turbulent time right before and after high school graduation, especially in relation to his quirky, badass neighbour Margo Roth Spiegelman. In some ways, this book is a modern adventure novel for  teenagers. It always baffles me how adults can write about the idiosyncratic state of being that is teenager-dom so long after having participated in it, but John Green captures the spirit of authenticity with startling clarity.

A couple of side notes:
1. Try to get a copy with the map cover art, not one of the two versions with girl’s face on them, because I find that you inevitably come to think of the cover girl as Margo. I think it is imperative to your experience with the novel that your idea of Margo is entirely your own and remains uninfluenced by outside sources.
2. This book, and others by John Green, may or may not have something amounting to special surprise inside. If you buy this book, flip through all the copies that particular bookstore has out; you’ll understand what I mean if you find what I’m hinting at.
3. In case you were wondering, this book is where the title comes from. If you read it, you’ll discover the humor.

The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins
I recommend this with some hesitation, but not at all because of the quality (which is more than remarkable.) Rather, it is more of a warning. Maybe it’s just me and my weakness for superbly crafted novels, but I became so entwined in the fictional lives of the characters that I was sobbing at the end of the series. This may not sound like a glowing endorsement, but rather I think if a book (or any art form really) can manipulate my emotions to such a great extent as that, it’s a testament to its success.

This series is about a post-apocalyptic society called Panem, which comprises 13 districts radiating out of a central Capital. The thirteenth district was utterly demolished after an attempted anti-Capital uprising, and as a messsage to future dissent, the remaining 12 districts are required to send one boy and one girl a year to a brutal last-competitor-alive-wins tournament called the Hunger Games. Katniss Everdeen is thrust into this situation after she volunteers to take her younger sister’s place and is forced to compete against a boy who once saved her life in her own District 12, as well as other more dangerous threats. The series as a whole follows her struggle against the simultaneously cruel and strangely decadent Capital city in a whirlwind of twists, tears, and triumph.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
This beautifully crafted novel, much along the same vein of Mockingjay (the third installment of Hunger Games), is a very emotional experience, given even more power and authority by being set in the very real Molching, Germany, at the height of the Third Reich. The narrative is given a unique flavor from the viewpoint of Death personified, a bluntly honest narrator who follows a Liesel Meminger’s hunger for reading. Beginning with her new life in a foster home at age nine, Liesel goes through dangerous scrapes and narrow escapes to get her hands on any books she can after the finding The Gravedigger’s Handbook at her younger brother’s funeral and teaching herself how to read. Tragedy after tragedy, her love of reading and writing endures.

One of my favorite books, The Eyre Affair, was once described as “a love letter to books” which I think is a most apt description for this novel as well. If you have a passion for books, you will love this one.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
A fun read for all the gamers and conspiracy theorists out there. It always amazes me how much fiction can do with a setting like reality, but Doctorow doesn’t disappoint. It’s sort of like 1984 updated for teenagers and the blossoming youth culture therein. Fast-paced and fun but with a continuous thread of mystery, this novel follows 17 year old hacker ‘w1n5t0n” (aka Marcus) and his friends getting embroiled in the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation of a terrorist attack in San Francisco. After one of his friends isn’t released, Marcus incites other like-minded malcontents to go not so much outside of but “in between” the law to protest their sudden lack of freedoms and find out what’s really going on behind heavily guarded doors.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
This thrilling adventure is primarily set in not so much an alternate reality but more of an additional one. Like the muggle world and the magical world of Harry Potter, this novel creates a world that exists beneath modern London, unbeknownst to the average citizen. It plucks one of the most average specimens possible (“Richard”) and plops him directly into a world he is utterly unprepared to survive in. It isn’t necessarily a magical place, but it is certainly odd and otherworldy. Gaiman’s talent to take ordinary places and things and give them new meaning is the ultimate source of enjoyment in this book.

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“It’s no wonder truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” – Mark Twain

I like to think of fiction as a special version of reality. Fiction is inherently made up of lies, and yet it has a power unlike anything else, because it presents reality not actually as it is, but rather as it should be. Good fiction is beautifully organized into logical patterns, without any of the chaos of real life.

The basis of all fiction is the concept of plot, and understanding plot is an important step toward exploring how the fictional world is organized. Plot, put simply, is a causative system. In a plot, things happen because of each other, like cascading dominoes. You can write fiction without plot, but the result will simply be an unrelated series of events, which will seem far less engrossing to the reader. E.M. Forster created an example in which he stated that “The king died and then the queen died” is an example of a story, whereas “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The first is not a plot because the events are completely unrelated to each other. In real life that’s how things happen a lot of the time: not all events effect new events, and things can occur unexpectedly. The world of fiction is an entirely different animal: though a plot can be unpredictable, it must never be illogical. Things happen because of other things. (Fiction in which things occur for no reason is melodrama, and it’s generally considered a bad thing.)

The world of fiction is filled with significance in a way that the real world is not. This is demonstrated well by Chekhov’s famous gun example, in which he stated that a gun should not appear on stage unless it will be fired later on. This doesn’t apply only to weapons, though. Any object which appears in a story must serve some function. If a character has a fast car, he should have a reason to drive it fast later in the story. A mysterious statue should be the hiding place for the stolen money. A weird rock that the protagonist trips over should turn out to be the Cosmic Orb Around Which the Universe Revolves (the very thing which the Evil Neptunians from Pluto are looking for). If only real life was like this! I keep a sharp knife here on my desk, and all that does in the third act is open packages for me. We don’t get foreshadowing in real life, at least not at the minute scale it occurs in fiction. That allows me to keep a knife on my desk without worrying that I’ll have to use it against armed robbers, but it also means that I won’t find the lost diamonds in my houseplants, no matter how prominent they are.

Fiction imitates reality, to be sure, but it’s a special imitation, one that’s meant to be better than the original. We want the world to be more like fiction. We like to imagine that the world makes sense and that things occur for a reason. In bad times we ask why we deserve the things that happen to us, as if we lived in an intricate plot in which our pasts caused the disasters of the present. We look for omens in everyday life, searching for anything that might give us a glimpse of the future. Life is uncooperative, though, stubbornly maintaining unpredictability and events that occur for no good reason. We want the world to be more organized than it is. We want it to be predictable, to make sense. Fiction allows us to experience the world as we want it to be, rather than as it actually is. That’s the beauty of it.

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I was recently gifted a copy of this 1936 George Orwell novel by a professor who had inquired about what I wanted to do in life (which seems to be a common, dreaded, and hard-dying question in any college’s English wing). I responded that I’d “like to write,” and her eyes lit up. What was it, that I’d like to write, she asked. It was at that moment that the fatal word escaped my lips: “Poetry.”

She laughed – I’ll always remember the way her lips curled into that evil smile – and she ran into her office. She was back in seconds, and this tome was in her hand.

“Read it,” she said, “over break. And let me know if you change your mind.”

My fate seemed sealed.

This book is one of the most depressingly hilarious books that I have ever read. In it, Orwell portrays protagonist and poet Gordon Comstock as he wages his “War on Money.” The novel critiques the pride and lack-there-of to be found in every social class, and examines the societal and artistic cost that a person must pay in order to succeed in life.

Comstock, rather fatally to both his craft and nearly all of his relationships, believes that one cannot be artistic while holding down a “good job.” In his mind, it is one or the other; one cannot have both.

In order to devote time to his poetry, he quits a “good” advertising job and settles in as a clerk at a book store, where he earns the bare-minimum amount of money on which one could live. The depression of such a barren existence prevents him from completing any work, and he flounders.

As with most conundrums constructed in the human mind, it comes down to pride. Would pride and artistic conviction win out over the Money God? Read the book to find out. For Orwell fans of any age; aspiring poets and artists of every kind; for any person simply looking for an entertaining and hilarious book to read, I highly recommend this compelling and incredibly well-written book.  The question that it raises is as poignant now as it was in 1936: can money and art coexist and, if not, then what will the artistic future of our society be?

- Tim Stobierski

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