Dark Reading....

The books I am going to share with you today are dark. They are about dark subjects, but they were both great reads. I know that they are not for everyone... 

 

Both books have been compared to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. But, I must say, I enjoyed these two reads better than those books. You was so creepy and written with technology as the main stalking utensil. Both books jumped into the action and they were both page turners and cut into my sleep at night...because I stayed up reading. Both of these books lead you down a dark, dark path and then turn...to even a darker path. Considered yourself warned if you decide to pick up one of these thrillers.

 

And please do not say, "I can't believe Katie read these books!" I read lots of different books...feel good ones, to dark ones. I just happen to read two dark ones in a row.  Two good thrillers, as I would like to refer to them as!

 

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You by Caroline Kepnes

 

From debut author Caroline Kepnes comes You, one of Suspense Magazine’s Best Books of 2014, and a brilliant and terrifying novel for the social media age.

 

The narrator Joe Goldberg is a smart young man, a sort of descendent of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield from Catcher In The Rye. Too clever by half you might say. He works in a bookshop in New York’s trendy East Village and is a walking compendium of American Lit. Knowing, superior, he judges the customers by what they read. 

 

In comes Guinevere Beck, a student on a writing course. She’s clever too, beautiful, sexy, girly, perfect. Joe is determined to have her, even to the extent of going to Ikea with her and assembling her new bed. Greater love hath no man. 

 

His obsession extends to spying on her, stealing her phone so he can monitor her texts and emails and reading her tweets compulsively as he scours her social media for evidence that she feels as strongly about him as he does about her. 

He follows her correspondence with her girlfriends, develops a special loathing for one called Peach and twists with jealousy when Beck (as she prefers to be known) enjoys a #girlsnightin eating cupcakes with her chattering chorus of companions. 

 

Then there’s Benji who is the man in Beck’s life, a self-obsessed and dim-witted entrepreneur in the soda water business who has to be dealt with, somehow...

 

Even though we know that Joe is a psycho he is a very amusing one and the chronicling of how he gets to first base and beyond with the skittish Beck follows the familiar course of many a romance in the world of young, middle-class, Starbucks frequenting New Yorkers. 

 

A terrifying exploration of how vulnerable we all are to stalking and manipulation, debut author Caroline Kepnes delivers a razor-sharp novel for our hyper-connected digital age.

 

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The second book I recently finished was:

The Luckiest Girl in the World.

 

Twenty-eight-year-old narrator Ani FaNelli is living what she thinks is the perfect life - "cool job, impressive zip code, hungry body, and the kicker - dreamboat fiancé." But from the first page, when she imagines plunging a steel blade into husband-to-be Luke Harrison, it's clear that whatever she exhibits to the world around her, something inside Ani is dark and broken and desperate.

 

Something happened to Ani when she was a high school freshman at Bradley, an exclusive Philadelphia prep school. Back then she was TifAni FaNelli, from the suburbs, with dreams of fitting in with the old-moneyed crowd at Bradley which leads TifAni to make a lot of bad decisions in her first few months at Bradley, but what ultimately happens is horrifying and beyond her control. 

 

 Even so, the events of 2001 are what define Ani in 2014 - however she appears to Luke and her friends, in many ways she is still a fourteen-year-old girl struggling to make sense of a horror she can't escape.

 

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Well, if a thriller is on your list, then I would recommend to pick up one of these two reads, but I warned you!!!