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.