11 books from high school you should read now

In honour of #WorldBookDay, I thought I'd come up with a list of books we all know from high school but probably didn't pay too much attention to -- but now that we are mature (as we mature, the relationship matures with us) we are ready to appreciate the writing, the style, and the complexity of the characters in these novels. 

How I Met Your Mother has all the answers

My all-time favourite book to revisit is Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. I read it because it was on a list of mandatory reading at school in Grade 10 and I chose it at random. The first line is so simple and captivating, and every time I read it I have a new appreciation for the way Du Maurier can create atmosphere out of diction, and describe the haunting Manderley estate in dreamy detail.

Below is a list of books (and two short stories and a play) that I continue to learn from every time I re-read them:

1. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
2. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
4. Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease
5. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
6. Chronicle of a Death Foretold Gabriel Garcia Marquez
7. Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro
8. Disgace by J.M. Coetzee
9. Hills like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway
10. The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe
11. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre

There are so many more but these are the ones I go back to for different reasons. Some because I love the stories and the characters and the settings. Others because I enjoy the captivating writing, the word choice, the sentence structure. But mainly because they are all entertaining and moving and remind me of when I read them for the first time!

Don't be afraid to #getnerdy on #WorldBookDay !