Top Ten Tuesday (1)

Hosted by the Broke and the Bookish.

Top Ten Books That Make You Think (About The World, People, Life, etc.)

Dreamland

by Sarah Dessen

This book is simply beautiful and very dear to me.

This book is filled with tragedy. Our heroine, Caitlin, has a sister who runs away from home, a mother tries to replace her by trying to make Caitlin into everything her sister was.

Caitlin finds herself dating Rogerson, a dangerous drug dealer and gets caught up in drugs and co-dependency. And finally, after dating for a while, he starts to physically and emotionally abuse her, but she can't find the strength in herself to leave him.

This book has a bittersweet but realistic ending. It was very powerful and dear to me, as I have a past of drug addiction and abusive relationships. Caitlin is a character that I can relate to and I often found myself hurting and crying for her. Definitely worth reading, if you haven't already. Or re-reading if you have. 

The Red Queen's Daughter 

by Jacqueline Kolosov

This book drew beautiful parallels between light and darkness, and made me think on the fact that not only do we all sin, we all have the potential to be either good people or bad people. We all have good and evil inside of us. 

Uglies 

by Scott Westerfeld

This book certainly made me think about how our media and society today favors beauty and how beauty is defined by little more than fantasies. (I won't say much more than that, being a raging feminist, I could go on for hours...)

Don't Breathe a Word. 

by Holly Cupala

I love this book for a lot of the same reasons that I love Dreamland, but with one difference. The type of abuse featured in this book is emotional abuse, which is just as deadly as physical abuse, and sometimes more scarring. Emotional abuse has a stigma in our day and is not given the attention it deserves. To break someone down on the inside and destroy who they are is unforgivable and the effects last a lot longer than any bruise or scar. (I'm not trying to make physical abuse seem like any less serious. Often the two go together. I just feel like physical abuse gets all the attention.)

All These Things I've Done
by Gabrielle Zevin


I've seen this book posted and raved about on book blogs and fan sites for months now. So finally, I picked it up. (Well, I downloaded it on my kindle...)

It was AMAZING. and thought provoking. It made me think about the way you can't allow people's past, their family, or their upbringing marr your judgement. Beauty can shine out of darkness just as easily as horror can come from things that are beautiful.

To Kill a Mockingbird

First of all, I have a confession to make... When I first started typing this, I wrote To Kill a Mockingjay... only when I looked it up on goodreads to snag the cover art did I catch my mistake...

Back to the subject, I don't think it's all that necessary to explain this one. To Kill A Mockingbird is not only a classic, it's beautiful and groundbreaking. I've always loved reading about slavery and the abolition OF slavery. This book is fantastic.

The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

ANOTHER classic? I know, I'm sorry.
This book, despite being kind of depressing, really made me think about people. You can never know, with people. You can't fall into the habit of expecting the same things from people, because they will always surprise you.

The Immortal Rules
by Julie Kagawa

I loved this book. I'm getting really tired of vampires being sparkly and nice, and in this book they were as they were always meant to be. Brutal and inhuman.

What this book really made me think about was just how blurred the lines are between good and evil. 'Evil' is just so subjective. There is potential for every good person to be evil, and there is just as equally a chance for evil to become good. I LOVE IT.

Mere Christianity
by C.S. Lewis

It would take me a really long time to talk about I learned from this book. It is fantastic and though provoking and fascinating and just plain great. Go read it.

And Then There Were None
by Agatha Christie.

This book is just plain genius. It didn't really make me think about people, myself, etc, but it was DEEP and complicated (in the best way) and man it made me THINK and I still didn't catch the plot twists. Like, any of them. and I'm GOOD with plot twists!