9: Looking For Alaska by John Green

I have read a few other books by John Green and I really love his writing style and genre of young adult literature. When I first started reading it I already assumed it was going to be amazing and it even exceeded my expectations. The story is about a guy named Miles Halter who is just starting to go to boarding school and has absolutely no friends. But he makes friends quickly with Chip "Colonel", Alaska Young, and Takumi. He has a hobby of collection famous peoples' last words and he falls in love with Alaska, who has a boyfriend that she loves.
This story makes me think of how it feels to go off to college and have to make new friends and discover things about yourself you can't find in your comfort zone. Although, I haven't 'gone off' to college, this book really makes me want to have that goal in life to experience. Also, I found that Looking for Alaska doesn't end just the way you wish it would, and neither does life.

8: Proof by David Auburn

As soon as I read about what the play Proof was about I had to read it. I really love mathematics and so I felt like I could really connect with the main character, Catherine. Catherine is a math major and her father, Robert, is a mathematical genius who has slowly gone mentally downhill as he ages. Catherine opts to stay with her father while her older sister, Claire, moves to New York to live. Eventually her father is so sick that Catherine has to stop going to school.After he Robert dies, one of his students, Hal, visits the house to go through the 101 notebooks that Robert wrote in.
Catherine thinks that she has her father's talent and also, his mental instability. Hal thinks he found something amazing and thinks Catherine knows what it is. It's like a detective story, which I thoroughly enjoy. I found that sometimes you might be so caught up in thinking that you have to be a certain way that you actually cut yourself off from what you really want.

7: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

I knew before I read this that it was supposed to be about a girl that's depressed, which made me believe I wouldn't like it very much. My best friend read it and convinced me that I would love it, which she usually is right, so I did end up reading it. The story is about Esther Greenwood who is a college girl that is fantastically smart and beautiful. She wins a fashion magazine contest by being a writer which lands her a trip to New York where she gets to know the twelve other girls there. including Doreen. Slowly she starts to lose her mind and swirls into the dark funnel of insanity.
I've had issues with depression all throughout my life and so I tend to steer clear of books like this for fear I might realize how much I relate to them. In this case, with Esther's decisions and reasoning, I found that I didn't relate to it as much as I thought I would. Although, some quotes from the book did strike a chord with me. It's good to know that just because you have similar issues with a character doesn't mean that everything else is similar.

6: Archer

Archer is in it's second season right now on FX, and it's hilarious. It's all about the main character, Sterling Malory Archer, the world's most dangerous secret agent. Sterling is an agent for ISIS: International Secret Intelligence Service in New York City and his mother is the head of ISIS. Lana Kane is the other top secret agent who also happens to be Archer's ex girlfriend. The whole show is completely ridiculous and funny with a lot of dark humor and sarcasm.
At first I didn't really care for the show until a friend of mine convinced me to watch a whole episode, by which the end of it I became a fan of the show. With Archer's smooth pick-up lines and constant vanity, it shows that with even the most important moments of your life are better off with some silly humor.

5: The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami

This book of short stories is translated into English from Japanese and it's a little on the dark side of humor. Most of the stories start out with really strange situations of Japanese people and their lives. At first, it was hard to completely get into reading it, but after the first story ended I didn't really want to put it down. Since then I've read it multiple times. The stories are so good that I find it hard to pick my favorites, but if I had to it would be Sleep and The Second Bakery Attack.
Sleep is about a women who finds herself unable to sleep for seventeen days. In that seventeen days she begins to do things while her husband is at work and her son is at school that isn't exactly her normal routine. She ends up drinking bourbon, eating a ton of chocolate, rereading the book Anna Karenina, and going for swims in the gym pool. This story reminds me of my days in high school where I would find myself doing random things due to insomnia. I feel like I could relate because it's something you don't want to tell anybody because it's nice to be out of the normal routine.

4: Sleeping in the Forest by Mary Oliver

I thought the earth remembered me,

she took me back so tenderly,

arranging her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds.

I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,

nothing between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths

among the branches of the perfect trees.

All night I heard the small kingdoms

breathing around me, the insects,

and the birds who do their work in the darkness.

All night I rose and fell, as if in water,

grappling with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

I've studied Mary Oliver's poems before and I picked this one because I haven't ever read it before. Mary Oliver is a transcendentalist and most of her poems are about nature. This particular one seems to be about sleeping on the forest floor. In the first few lines she is conveying that she is in one with nature so that she feels completely comfortable just lying down on the earth of the forest like nature is an entity and they are old friends. This makes me wish I felt that way about nature.
The last few lines make me think that while sleeping she became one with mother nature in spirit and in mind. It's about the "luminous doom" of having to wake up and be separated once more from nature. This is how I feel about sleep in general, which is that waking up means I have to go back to reality which isn't as sweet as feeling like you're being part of the world, with your mind shut down. To think of it that way could also mean a symbolism of death. As you shut down your body, you become one with the very nature that made you a separate entity.

3: Amelie

Amelie has been my favorite movie for a few years now. It is in French, with English subtitles of course, but it's meaning is universal. It is about a French girl who grew up without any friends because her father was a doctor and thought that she had a heart condition and deemed her unfit for school. Then her mother dies and her father becomes a complete recluse. Though she gets older and moves out while working at a bar called the Three Windmills. Through a series of odd events she becomes interested in helping the people she is in daily contact with but doesn't really know and may be falling in love with a boy she "feels an affinity with".
I related to this movie so easily because I'm just like Amelie. I help other people to the point where I don't ever help myself. You can't fail if you don't set any standards for yourself or if you don't try because you're scared. But then again, you can't win either. This movie definitely made me realize that to get anything worth living for you have to take a risk.