This book pretty much sums up my life and I highly recommend it to anyone who knows what a cat is. It is that good.

I love stories that leave absolutely no loose ends. In Holes, Sachar goes above and beyond this by meticulously weaving together the story of Stanley Yelnats, an unlucky young boy whose cursed no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather has somehow landed him in Camp Green Lake, a boys detention center, where he is forced to dig holes all day in the blistering heat. This is a story where absolutely nothing is random and everything is carefully connected. I recommend it for both children and adults; it is one of the most carefully thought through stories I have read.

American Psycho is one of my favorite books. There are numerous reasons why I think this is strange, namely I don't spend my nights at trendy NYC clubs desperately hunting down cocaine, or waste hours analyzing which of my friends has the most impressive business card and why, or have vivid fantasies (or realities...who knows?) about chopping people up and keeping them in my freezer. Patrick Bateman does and, for some reason, I can intimately understand his psyche. Ellis's exploration into and presentation of the mind of a serial killer is eerily realistic, even if it is fiction.