My favorite books from different categories, The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo and My reading journey

 

It’s almost been a year since I started reading. Initially, I picked up classics and mid-way through the book I had to rely on audiobooks to complete them. To being with your reading journey with classics isn’t a wise choice if you aren’t well versed with the language. Still, mind-blowing books like Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, A Christmas Carol, Animal Farm, Metamorphosis etc. Inclined me towards the beautiful and complex world of literature. And so, not to exhaust myself by just reading classics while I lacked the maturity to understand them, I shifted my attention to the ‘bestsellers’.

 I read The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, Dear John by Nicholas Sparks and Looking for Alaska By John Green back in the fall of 2020. I loved them all and being honest, I’m not big fan of other John Green novels, but I’m still in love with the LFA. But soon, I got bored of YA genre for that time period and then immersed myself into the multiverse of Stephen King. This happened after I joined a virtual book club during Halloween.

Reading King made me commence with my writing too. For that I’ll always owe a lot to Mr. King. His style of narration is so unique that once you get familiar with it, reading becomes so much fun. Along with King, I got addicted to Neil Gaiman’s fantasies that helped me to escape my anxiety provoking world.

 Fun Fact: I read combined 36+ stories by Neil Gaiman and Stephen King in the past ten months.

Okay, but to be a writer, I had to expose myself with other genres and authors too. Limiting myself to King and Gaiman paved my way to a major reading slump. As whenever I tried to read a book by any other author, I kinda took time to adjust to the pace of the story. It eventually made me keep the book down no matter how intriguing its plot line was. Now, it’s the other way around. I read more books by other authors no matter how much I crave for an engrossing King story or a soothing Gaiman tale.

Why am I writing this post then? Hehe. Was reading “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” By T.J Reid today and then my pops arrived from work. He started scrolling through the web and watched random videos at an ear-drum-obliterating volume and so I had to stop my reading unwillingly. Anyways, I’m reading this book on my second-hand 7^th Gen Kindle and I’m 20% done with the story. Our protagonist is a very fun and anxious person. Her first-person narration is very appreciable as well. This is definitely a page-turner, but I doubt if everyone would love it or not, because we live a world where all the lit-critiques toil hard at finding out flaws of any book they read. In layman terms, they are the so-called Goodreads reviewers. Talking about my opinion, so far the story has been very interesting. Let’s see how it’ll turn out to be.

Before I end this post, here are some of my favorite books from different categories. After reading more than a hundred and fifteen books, I feel I’m eligible to make such lists.

 

 

Classics:

§  Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

§  The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

§  Frankenstein – Marry Shelly

§  Tempest – William Shakespeare

§  The Man Who Was Thursday – G.K Chesterton

§  Sir Gawain and The Green Knight – Gawain Poet

Young Adult:

·        We Were Liars- E. Lockhart

·        The Outsiders - S.E Hinton

·        Looking for Alaska- John Green

·        The Book Thief – Markus Zusak

·        The Catcher in The Rye – J.D Salinger

·        We are okay- Nina LaCour

 

Romance:

·        Dear John - Nicholas Sparks

·        Me Before You - JoJo Moyes

·        One day – David Nicholls

·        The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern

·        Love Story – Erich Segal

·        By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept – Paulo Coelho

 

Short Stories / Novellas:

·        The Little Prince- Antoine de Saint Exupery

·        Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka

·        Tales of Mystery and Terror - Edgar Allan Poe

·        Granny - Anthony Horowitz

·        Charlie and The Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

 

My Stephen King Reads:

Diamond Tier

·        The Stand

·        The Dark Tower Series

·        IT

·        On Writing

·        Night Shift

·        Misery

 

Gold Tier

§  Christine

§  Revival

§  The Shining

§  The Dead Zone

§  ‘Salem’s Lot

§  Insomnia

§  Dr. Sleep

§  The Dark Half

 

Silver Tier

v  Joyland

v  Mr. Mercedes

v  Pet Sematary

v  Cujo

v  Rage

v  Carrie

 

 

Neil Gaiman Tales (Ranking out of the books I’ve read so far):

 

1        The Graveyard Book

2        Norse Mythology

3        Neverwhere

4        Stardust /Fortunately, The Milk

6        The Ocean at the End of the Lane

7        Coraline

8        Smoke and Dust

 

Other books that I loved more than I thought I would:

      The Street Lawyer – John Grisham

      Toffee - Sarah Crossan

      Safe Haven – Nicholas Sparks

      The Prophet- Kahil Gibran

      The White Tiger – Arvind Adiga

      12 Rules for Life – Dr. Jordon Peterson