Hollow Chest by Brita Sandstrom

What happened to civilians after World War II? We all know what happened to Germany and the treaties everyone had to sign, we know the numbers and names of the battles. What the history books don't go into much detail about is the moral effect this war had on everyday people.

Follow the story of young Charlie and his cat, Biscuits, as he waits for his brother to come home. And he does - but there's something wrong about him. His grandfather, a WWI veteran, talks about some mysterious wolves - but then doesn't remember what he said. Charlie befriends an old woman who feeds pigeons, and all together they try to figure out what his brother lost in the war - besides his literal leg. 

This book is a window into the lives of London civilians during and after World War II.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky

You've read Harry Potter (If you haven't, shame on you. If you've only watched the movies, don't even try talking to me). You've probably noticed that most of the characters were… fairly idiotic. Why didn't Voldemort use a gun? Why didn't Dumbledore send owls with ticking bombs to all of the confirmed Death Eaters? Why does Quidditch have a snitch? 

Read the story of Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, who grew up in a household with two loving parents and more books than one could count. He's a "bright" child who's a bit too old for the other kids his age. He gets sorted into Ravenclaw, makes friends with Draco Malfoy, and firmly decides to figure out the secrets of Magic. Because Magic is another Science, right? But his enemies don't sleep either, and stuff gets more dangerous as the year goes by…

This book tells solely about his first year - but that's all you need. Read about a New and Improved Hogwarts, learn Harry's Methods of Rationality, and/or read Rationality: from AI to Zombies (I wrote about this book in one of my earlier 10 Book Reviews).

About the Author: Eliezer Yudkowsky is an AI-researcher, and has written many books about Rationality and other topics. He has a website, lesswrong.com, so go check it out. 

Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint by Sing Shong (Also a comic book!)

If you want to know more than I do about this book, ask John F. This really long (as in more than 500 chapters long) story is about a guy named Kim Dokja who is basically a nobody living in Seoul, South Korea. He is absolutely in love with a book called "Three Ways to Survive an Apocalypse", and he's read it many times. When one day, his own world begins to spiral into the world of the book, Dokja is the only one ready to act, and one of the few smart enough to save himself from the horrors that our world faces. But will his luck hold? This is not your average "guy got trapped in a video game", even though it has very similar themes. It's a much more complex and twisted "guy got trapped in a video game" book. 

This book keeps you hooked by always poofing into existence a new scenario you couldn't've expected, and the solutions to many of them are fairly unorthodox, but then again, Kim Dokja is an expert in this world. It's such a shifting landscape that everything comes as a surprise, and there's a lot of good plot and (very literal) character-building going along between all the battles.

Please note I have not finished this book yet (am on chapter 300 or so), but I'm working on it! 

The Tale of Hodja Nasreddin by Leonid Solovyov (Originally in Russian, which is the language I read it in)

Who's Hodja Nasreddin? A famous fairytale (but no magic!) character in Turkey. He is a hardened traveler and an avid upholder of justice. There have been many tales told about him. For example,

Once Hudja Nasreddin bought two pounds of meat. His wife called some of her friends over, and together they ate the meat. On the next day, when Hodja asked where the meat was, she told him the cat ate it all. Hodja weighed the cat. It weighed exactly two pounds. "Huh," he says, turning to his wife. "If this is the cat, where is the meat? But if this is the meat, then where is the cat?"

There are many other hilarious stories about this quirky man. But these stories don't come as one story! That's what the Tale of Hodja Nasreddin comes into play. This is a single, and very long, story about Hodja Nasreddin and his stay in his hometown, Bukhara. But the town is nothing like the happy, rich place he grew up in - so he decides to take matters into his own hands.

This book is filled with shows of intelligence, interspersed with hilarious stories of Hodja's previous escapades, telling one about the good-hearted people and those with rot in their chests. Warm and lovely, family-friendly. I loved this story.

Light in the Ruins by Chris Bohjalian

Villa Chimera, Tuscany, Italy. World War II. Follow the Rosatis as they try to survive during the turbulence of the end of the second world war, where "By 1944, if the Germans weren't lining you up against a wall and shooting your for protecting the partisans, the partisans were lining you up against a wall and shooting you for collaborating with the Germans."

Florence, 1955. The war has ended and most of the Rosatis have survived the experience. Someone is out there to fix that.
This book switches from perspective to perspective-in-another-time to the italicized point of view of the murderer.

The author drip-feeds us information, and I was very literally unable to stop reading it. I found myself wildly guessing about who the killer was, and of course, all my guesses were wrong. It's only right at the very end where you figure out who is systematically (and gruesomely) murdering the Rosatis, and what really happened to the characters that never made it out of the war period alive.

1880 Springfield by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Prologue

      In 1880, the Springfield Armory of Springfield, Massachusetts, sent roughly one thousand new Model 1880 trapdoor .45-70-caliber rifles to Army troops stationed on the American frontier for testing in the field. The factory and the US Army hoped the new rifles would be an improvement over Springfield's Model 1873 rifle.

      This is the story of two hundred and fifty of those Springfield 1880s.

Set in post-Civil-War USA, this book tells the story of 250 rifles stolen by an ex-captain, who took off with them into Mexico, to a mysterious Cañon de los Dolores. The lieutenant who lost them and a previously imprisoned marshal are forced (well, made an offer they couldn't refuse) to set out to retrieve those rifles. They have until July 4 (Independence day) to recapture the four wagons with the rifles in them. But they have contestants - Apaches, ex-Confederates, and others are all vying for the Grand Prize.
I read this book not only because I wanted to be more ready for my APUSH exam in May, but also because I seriously expected it to be good. And it met my expectations! Well, more-or-less, since I read a much more fascinating book just a week or so before (Light in the Ruins), but it was very captivating anyway. This book is a fairly typical Western action book, but there's a lot more to it than just shooting and the desert. As I learned the histories of the characters, I very literally began rooting for my favorite ones, I even said "yay!" once when the stuff that I wanted to happen happened. You'll fall in love with the characters, and maybe even learn a thing or two about stealing wagonloads of rifles.

Doomed by Tracy Deebs

There are many people out there with divorced parents. Pandora is only another one. When her father (who she barely remembers) sends her twelve photos taken when she was little, obviously she opens them up. What she doesn't know is that the code behind these photos is all but innocent. When she opens them up on her computer, she inadvertently lets out a "worm" - like a virus but much, much worse. Most of the internet shuts down in days, and Pandora and her new-found friends find themselves on the run from everyone - the police, the FBI, and a bunch of other scary-sounding government organizations.

This is a fast-paced action novel about a race to find the one man responsible for this horrible crime (okay, I'm not sure whether "broke the whole internet" is featured as a crime, but if it happens, whoever did it won't get away). I really liked this book because of the jumpscare equivalents. It could probably make a fairly good movie.

The Princess Bride by William Goldman (also a movie! The movie is pretty good too, but the book is better)

You've heard of the Princess Bride. Either that, or you've heard the line "My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!". If you've wondered where the line came from, now you know.

Princess Bride is a story about love, death, and finding each other. It may as well be accompanied with a disney song about staring into each other's eyes across an ocean of distance, but there isn't one. Yet.

A Treason of Thorns by Laura E. Weymouth

Six great magical houses of Britain. Wow, you think. So cool. But each house needs a caretaker - and the Burleigh House hasn't had one for years. Violet is afraid it will kill her - afraid it has already killed her friend who was in the House when it closed itself off to her and the rest of the world. And of course, there's a lot more to this tragedy than one would think.

There is a lot of mystery twisted into the thorns and vines on the cover. Usual storyline: a mystery, "the government is lying to you", and a time constraint.

The Anchoress by Robyn Cadwaller

When I saw this book on the library shelf, I thought "Man, that must be a made-up word. I wonder who could write a story about a made-up word AND title the story with it." Well, as it turns out, "anchoress" isn't a made-up word. An anchoress was a Catholic woman who is consensually walled into a small cell, locking herself from everyday life (referred in the book as a "living death") to dedicate herself to a life of prayer.
The book is set in 1255 (yes, this year is stated on the blurb). It is about an anchoress, Sarah, who has more-than-religious reasons to lock herself away in the anchorhold to, along with having the time to pray for everyone in the town, protect her virginity which she will give to Christ. 

Learn more about this particular aspect of Christianity than you would in probably any history class, find out why a young woman would do such a horrible thing to herself. It's a fascinating story. 

What not to read:

Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann & Kerascoët

The cover is a lie. For context, the cover is a cute little girl in a forest setting. She is much smaller than the grass and plants. She has a blue-polka-dot dress on. She doesn't look capable of violence at all, right?

A few pages into the book, we meet more of these tiny people. Some of them are even smaller than the girl, and some are giants compared. They have just lost their home… which was a dead girl's body. I should have stopped reading right there. These cute people continue to try to survive, gathering seeds and berries, befriending mice and other animals. We start to see horrifying things that aren't much expounded upon. Cannibalism and other themes show up, passed by these centimeter-tall people as if they were a normal occurrence.

I read this and should not have read this. This is not like Homestuck. This is not a "Lord of the Flies"-like comic book. If you want to be haunted by those memories, read it if you like.