Reflections On The Books I've Read Last Year.

On the news, when it turns midnight on New Year's Eve, what do they do? They play some of the worst music ever written, and Gangnam Style, which doesn’t even count as music. That’s how they celebrate a new beginning; they squash it with the crap of the previous year.

Before this, they show the highlights of 2012. What may the highlights be? The Queen’s diamond jubilee and the Olympics. I understand that they have been major events in the last year, but they now seem like a broken record. So I told myself “once it’s 2013, they’ll find something new to talk about all the time”. Somehow, the image of Olympic athletes when I turned on the TV on New Year's Day didn’t help.

So I tried to think through my favourite memories of 2012. And I realized that practically all of them were book related.

So here goes:

1: my friend coming to stay for a couple of days during the February half term.

2: finishing CONSEQUENCE.

3: finishing the whole trilogy.

4: reading the hunger games for the first time.

5: when the idea for the character of Phoenix popped into my head. If it wasn’t for her, I would have used my original storyline ideas, and CONSEQUENCE would have gone nowhere.

6: writing the first chapter of CONSEQUENCE.

7: walking across a bridge before my first radio interview. It was above a busy road, and I was terrified of falling, but I felt so free and alive. It got rid of all the nervous energy before the interview.

8: reading Divergent.

9: talking to my friend on the phone last Monday.

10: getting seven novels for Christmas.

Seven out of ten are book related.

But I think more than the book related memories, are the books themselves.

I have read a lot of books this year. Most of them became some of my top thirty-two favourites (I can’t narrow them down to any less) and those books have become such a part of myself.

So here’s another random list. In descending order, the books I read in 2012 that stayed in my mind:

7: Between Shades of Grey. (Note: this book has absolutely NOTHING to do with Fifty Shades of Grey.) This book is set in a Soviet Prison camp in the 1940s. It’s a story about suffering and loss. When people saw me reading it, they assumed it was another book. Awkward!

I’m not sure why I loved this book, because the story was horrible. It was about the annexation of Lithuania in 1940something, and it was so sad that I cried for about half of it. But it made me think, and I love books that make me think.

6: The Percy Jackson series: I judge things; that is a fact. I judge things before I know I’m judging them. So when the main character is a pre-teen boy, and there’s a 9+ sticker on the back of a book, I’m not generally inclined to read it. I did, and I’m glad I did. This book taught me not to judge by my assumptions.

5: The Book Thief: I haven’t actually finished this one yet. I’m about 220 pages into it, but I have this awful habit of skipping ahead. I saw this quote towards the end of it which was: “I have hated the words, and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.” That quote, I presume, is about books, but for me, it sums up writing.

4: Atonement: I don’t know in what way this book affected me, but it’s one of my favourites. It’s horribly sad, but it’s got so many quotes about writing, and I love that.

3: The Girl in the Mask: this book doesn’t make it to my list of top thirty-two all time favourites. It’s not one of my favourites, although it is a good book. This book is where I first heard about the Persephone myth. I was right in the middle of my Hunger Games obsession, and I was rereading the Hunger Games trilogy, because I couldn’t find anything else to read. Mum and dad took me up to a bookshop, and I got three books. This was one of them. This is a book about a girl in eighteenth century Bath who goes round as a highway man. But there’s a masquerade ball, and she’s made to dress up as Persephone, as a mockery of the situation she’s in. I didn’t know much about Greek mythology at the time. I knew about this guy called Zeus who turned into a swan so he could seduce his wife. Seriously? Is there any logic to that? And that’s basically all I knew. When I read a book called Sovay, I started researching the French revolution, because I wanted to know more. When I read The Girl in the Mask, I researched the Persephone myth. Not because it had a great impact on the story, but because it fascinated me, and I needed to know more. So, if it wasn’t for that book, I never would have written CONSEQUENCE.

2: Divergent. Generally the first book on my list of all time top thirty-two favourites. Never before has a book made me think so much about myself. Although the world it’s set in is dystopian, I couldn’t help loving that world. I loved that people were sorted into where they would fit best, who they were going to be. I loved the idea of a whole area full of just smart people, or just brave people. Cos that’s the closest to getting humans to be perfect that you’re gonna get. Of course, that system was beginning to crumble by the end of the book, but it’s stuck in my mind for eight months. I think the thing I loved most was the strength of the characters. They weren’t perfect. But their imperfection helped other people.

1: The Hunger Games. Before I read this, I only cried at a couple of books. I spent half this book with tears in my eyes. For a book which focuses on teenagers being forced to kill each other, there’s something deeply human about it. I couldn’t read it without thinking “what would I do if I were in Katniss’s situation?”

It’s been eleven months since I first read it now, and although I can no longer call it my all time favourite book, it’s always there, in my mind. I have read it five times, and each time, it’s just as good as the first. This is the book that opened my eyes to dystopian fiction. This is the book that made last year for me.

I found out about The Hunger Games because of a Taylor Swift song. And I bought the book of it on the thirtieth or thirty-first of last January. I had a moment of indecision before buying it. I wasn’t sure if it would be my kind of thing, and I almost didn’t get it. If I hadn’t, my whole year would have been entirely different. It changed how I think of books, and how I think of myself.

I was a little too obsessed with it, earlier this year. Now that obsession has died down a little, but I still love this book. Whenever I read it, I have to remind myself just how dark it is, but maybe that’s why I love it. It makes me think, it makes me disgusted at how horrible humans can be. It makes me want to write something equally dark, just to see if I can get people to react.

So I think The Hunger Games deserves first place in this list.