At the beginning of the year I setup a reading plan for my first five books. It was just an experiment to see how I liked having my books already chosen for me. The first five (Night, Legion, The Universe Versus Alex Woods, Tower Lord, and Firefight) went great. All of which ended up being either good or excellent reads.

What a wonderful book. I honestly felt like a kid reading this book. It's just so much fun. I loved Brandon Sanderson's first novel in the Reckoners series, Steelheart, and somehow Firefight continues the charm of the first. What I love about Firefight is that Sanderson is able to capture just the right tone for this series about normal people fighting super heroes.

Over the last couple of years I've started to really dive into the fantasy genre. One of the books I particularly loved was Blood Song by Anthony Ryan. I went into Tower Lord (the follow-up to Blood Song) with extremely high hopes. Unfortunately it didn't live up to any of the starting blocks of the first book.

It's very rare that I fall in love with a novel from the opening couple of pages. From the narrator (who sounded a little like Hugh Grant) to being set in England, to a story that is both relatable and extraordinary all at the same time. The Universe Versus Alex Woods is everything I love about reading a novel. It's both deep and comical. It has a depth of understanding that most books only scratch the surface of. 

I read a lot of Brandon Sanderson in 2014 (3 of my 26 books) and enjoyed all of them. On a recent Audible sale I picked up both Legion and Legion: Skin Deep without even reading the description of the book. After listening to the very short Legion I can say that its a very different Sanderson then I've ever read. Instead of his normal hardcore fantasy writing with complex magic systems, Legion is a relatively tame mystery. 

I read Night when I was in High School and absolutely loved it. It's one of the few books from my youth that I remember. That was over ten years ago and I was excited to start off 2015 re-reading Night. There is really nothing I can say that hasn't already been said. Hearing about Elie and his family, and his town willingly board these trains to the concentration camps even with a rabbi telling them about the Nazi's atrocities is one of the toughest things to read.