If you’re in search of what book to read next, look no further! Fall always puts me in the mood to curl up with a good book. I’m not sure if people still read for fun or if Netflix has completely consumed our generation, but if you do here are a few of my favorite books.
1. Perks Of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Ah, this is a feel good book, that I love so much I pulled my senior quote from it,
“So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.”
It’s based in Pittsburgh (my home), so thats pretty cool. If you’re feeling nostalgic this is definitely the book for you.
Quotes:
“I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning.”
“I am very interested and fascinated how everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other.”
“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
“So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.”
“There’s nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons.”
“I walk around the school hallways and look at the people. I look at the teachers and wonder why they’re here. If they like their jobs. Or us. And I wonder how smart they were when they were fifteen. Not in a mean way. In a curious way. It’s like looking at all the students and wondering who’s had their heart broken that day, and how they are able to cope with having three quizzes and a book report due on top of that. Or wondering who did the heart breaking. And wondering why.”
2. Looking for Alaska by John Green
Once you read one John Green book you’ll have to read all of them, like I did. This is my favorite book by him though. If you’re in the mood for a mystery this is the book for you.
Quotes:
“It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.”
“So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricane.”
“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that the future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
“People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn’t bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn’t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn’t even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.”
3. Forgive Me Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick
Warning: Once you start this book you will not be able to put it down. Trust me, take my word for it. I started this book one night in high school and stayed up until the next morning reading it because I needed to know what happened.
Quotes:
“You’re different. And I’m different too. Different is good. But different is hard. Believe me, I know.”
“Did you ever think about all of the nights you lived through and can’t remember. The ones that were so mundane your brain just didn’t bother to record them. Hundreds, maybe thousands of nights come and go without being preserved by our memory. Does that ever freak you out? Like maybe your mind recorded all of the wrong nights?”
A long, but important quote:
“Don’t do it. Don’t go to that job you hate. Do something you love today. Ride a roller coaster. Swim in the ocean naked. Go to the airport and get on the next flight to anywhere just for the fun of it. Maybe stop a spinning globe with your finger and then plan a trip to that very spot; even if it’s in the middle of the ocean you can go by boat. Eat some type of ethnic food you’ve never even heard of. Stop a stranger and ask her to explain her greatest fears and her secret hopes and aspirations in detail and then tell her you care because she is a human being. Sit down on the sidewalk and make pictures with colorful chalk. Close your eyes and try to see the world with your nose — allow smells
to be your vision. Catch up on your sleep. Call an old friend you haven’t seen in years. Roll up your pant legs and walk into the sea. See a foreign film. Feed squirrels. Do anything! Something! Because you start a revolution one decision at a time, with each breath you take. Just don’t go back to that miserable place you go every day. Show me it’s possible to be an adult and also be happy. Please. This is a free country. You don’t have to keep doing this if you don’t want to. You can do anything you want. Be anyone you want.”
4. All the Bright Places- Jennifer Niven
Last, but not least, my absolute favorite book in the whole entire world. I own two copies of this book, one for me and one to lend to people and I also have the PDF on my laptop. If you’re in the mood for a good cry this the book for you– I cannot recommend this book enough. I’m going to attach the free PDF I found of this book below if you want to read it.
http://www.superbooks4u.com/classics/u6368.html
Quotes:
“You are all the colors in one, at full brightness.”
“The great thing about this life of ours is that you can be someone different to everybody.”
“It’s my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.”
“We are all alone, trapped in these bodies and our own minds, and whatever company we have in this life is only fleeting and superficial.”
“I know life well enough to know you can’t count on things staying around or standing still, no matter how much you want them to. You can’t stop people from dying. You can’t stop them from going away. You can’t stop yourself from going away either. I know myself well enough to know that no one else can keep you awake or keep you from sleeping.”
“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”
“She is oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. The same elements that are inside the rest of us, but I can’t help thinking she’s more than that and she’s got other elements going on that no one’s ever heard of, ones that make her stand apart from everybody else. I feel this brief panic as I think, What would happen if one of those elements malfunctioned or just stopped working altogether? I make myself push this aside and concentrate on the feel of her skin until I no longer see molecules but Violet.”
If you decide to read any of these, let me know what you thought 🙂
Love Always, Meghan
(If you read all of these, maybe you’ll figure out which one I got, “Love Always, Meghan” from.)
Meghan Totzke 
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