More Goodreads

Well, I have succumbed to not one, but two book crazes. I recently finished reading the Twilight saga, and surprisingly, I really enjoyed it. Yes, it's written for the YA crowd, but this was still good to me. I wasn't so much interested in the supernatural aspects, which is to say, the vampires and werewolves/shape shifters, but the story itself.
See I tend to enjoy stories about journeys, whether physical ones like in The Lord of the Rings or The Dark Tower, or internal ones like, for example, Twilight. Bella starts out as a misfit new girl in school and then falls in love. Her journey, choosing between Edward and Jacob, becoming a mother, and really deciding what's the most important in her life, was fascinating to me.
I'm Team Edward, by the way :)
The other book craze that caught me is The Hunger Games. It's not so much that there's a movie coming out soon, but I've seen several friends on Facebook recommend it, and several members of an online book club I belong to also liked this trilogy. Well, I'm now in the middle of the third installment, and it's such an exciting story.
Katniss lives in a far-distant future North America, where the government rules with an iron fist from the Capitol. There are 12 outlying districts. To prevent another uprising like the one that happened years ago, resulting in the obliteration of a 13th district, the Capitol forces each of the districts to send a boy and a girl between the ages of 12 and 18 each year to the Hunger Games, a nationally televised event where the 24 teenagers are locked in an arena, which changes each year, and forced to kill each other, until only one remains. Katniss' younger sister is chosen, so to save her, Katniss volunteers to compete in her place.
It's a violent story, but also compelling. You know Katniss will survive, but how? How will she go on afterwards? Katniss eventually becomes the symbol of national rebellion, reluctantly. I liked the second book, Catching Fire, just as much as the first book. So far, Mockingjay is interesting. I haven't gotten to much action yet, but it's obvious it's coming.
I'm hoping to finish Mockingjay tonight.
I would recommend both of these series to my friends and family who enjoy reading. Even though they're written for a younger audience, I know many people my age and older who have read them all.