One of my absolute favorite past times is reading. I just love a good book. I adore a great series. And strangely enough, I am loving that some of my favorite reads are being turned into movies. I'll link all of the books to their GoodReads pages so that you can read more reviews and the book excerpts there.
My favorite series this year goes to The Caster Chronicles. The books start out with Beautiful Creatures (the movie version hits theaters in February). I love these sort of paranormal/young adult fiction/kind of romance novels.
If you have read Twilight, The Hunger Games, Divergent or anything in that genre that you really enjoyed, these are for you. It's not as much as a love story as Twilight, yet not as removed from the love story as The Hunger Games is. It's so different from everything I've read before and very well-written.
My only gripes are that some of the things that happen are fairly predictable, and at the end not every little thing is completely tied up in a nice, neat package. That's not to say that the ending isn't satisfying...it is. But, I'm the type of reader that likes to have all of the loose ends nicely tied up for me and not left to my own imagination (since it's not my world). I've read a few things online that say some of these unanswered questions will be answered in the movies. Hopefully that is the case!
Beautiful Creatures (The Caster Chronicles, complete series)
This next one is actually a devotional, but it is so completely different from any devotional I've ever read. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I bought several copies for Christmas gifts. Sarah has a beautiful way of re-phrasing scripture and making it so easy to relate to and understand. Each passage that she interprets is followed by the actual Bible verses that she is talking about. A big thank you to my Twitter friends for recommending it!
If you're looking for a great, easy to understand and relate to devotional for this year, you have got to read Jesus Calling.
Here (on the otherside) is a book I found for free on Amazon one day and decided to read. The sequel, There, has just been released and I can't wait to read it. I love scrolling through the top 100 free list on Amazon. I will say that the cover is a bit misleading - it almost looks like it would be a scary book, but it's not at all. The synopsis on GoodReads explains it far better than I ever could, so be sure to check it out!
Austenland was another book I found either free or really discounted one day on Amazon - in fact, I looked just now and it's only $1.99. I purchased it quite awhile ago and then forgot about it because I started reading the Caster Chronicles. Anyway, at the start of Christmas break I got really sick and spent a lot of time in bed reading, and this was one of the books I read. It was surprisingly good! I liked it so much I started doing a little research on it and found that there is an un-related sequel out and that they are making a movie out of it starring Keri Russell.
I've mentioned this in the past, but if you don't have a Swagbucks account, I highly recommend it! You can sign up using my link here and earn points by using it as a search engine, taking the daily poll etc and then cash those points in for Amazon gift cards. It's so easy, and I can't remember the last time I paid out of pocket for a book! I have a tutorial on how to use Swagbucks here.
What's your favorite book of 2012?
PS - If you want to read my tutorial on how to loan a kindle book via Amazon, it's here!
