Recommendations for fellow bookworms

If you're looking for quick, easy reads during the holidays, I recommend the two books I loved most in the past year. The first is John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. I read it right after Peter Heller's The Dog Stars and the two couldn't be more different. I was just on a star kick, I guess.

I read The Fault in Our Stars the weekend before I started my new job. If you know where I work, you'll know that reading about adolescents with cancer was good preparation for me. It was fiction of course, but it provided a viewpoint of teenage cancer that we don't often see.

It's been made in to a movie that premieres June 6, starring Shailene Woodley. I'll be seeing this one in theaters (and I see maybe three movies a year in the theater - tops!). Maybe you've never heard of Shailene. She starred in The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and aboslutely dreadful show on ABC Family that I could not stop watching until the final season (which I still need to do). She was the only redeeming factor on that show. She'll also be starring in my other favorite book-turned-movie in 2014...

The Divergent series sounds a lot like The Hunger Games. Set in dystopian Chicago, 16-year-olds must decide whether they remain faithful to their families and upbringing by remaining in their original "faction," or if they want to start over with a new life, abandoning their families and friends for good. There are five factions - Abnegation (selflessness), Amity (peace), Candor (honesty) Dauntles (brave), and Erudite (knowledge). There's fighting and death and love, but the aside from those aspects, it's nothing at all like The Hunger Games. The subsequent books, Insurgent and Allegiant are equally as good. So good that I actually pre-ordered Allegiant (I NEVER pay for books) and it was delivered wirelessly to my Kindle in the wee morning hours the day it came out. By the time I got to work that morning, I was about 50 pages in.

I dragged my dad to Catching Fire on Thanksgiving night, and without having read the books or see The Hunger Games, I expected him to be totally lost and bored. He was not. We had a great discussion on the ride home about how clever Katniss is and how technologically advanced the Capitol is. But admittedly, my favorite part of the movie was actually the preview for Divergent, which premieres on March 21. I'll be seeing that one in the theater, too!

I don't anticipate either movie will be nominate for an Oscar or a Golden Globe, mostly because the target audience is probably the 16-24 age group. And based on my love of these two books, I'm guessing I still identify as a 24-year-old. It was one of my best years!