“To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.”

Gifts by Ursula Le Guin
Orlando, Fla. : Harcourt, c2004.

Gifts, the first of the Annals of the Western Shore fantasy trilogy, follows the story of Young Orrec and his friend, Gry. They are Uplanders, differentiated from the Lowlanders by their supernatural gifts. Gry, whose power is to speak to beasts, refuses to use her gift to call them to the hunt. Orrec’s gift is terrible, the power to ‘unmake’. After he is shown the extent of this ‘gift’ from his father, he agrees to be blindfolded, as he can’t control it. It's a powerful question, what to do with the gifts we have, and Le Guin’s story is masterful and utterly haunting.

May the odds be ever in your favour

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
New York : Scholastic Press, 2008.

15 year-old Katniss has grown up in a brutally poor district in the rigidly totalitarian Panem, a dystopian USA. When she volunteers in place of her sister to participate in the almost certainly fatal “Hunger Games’, she makes what might be the ultimate sacrifice for those she loves. Fortunately for Katniss, she is unimpeachably tough and has phenomenal skills with a bow and arrow. She’s a calm, cool heroine for her times.

Fast-paced and unrelentingly tense, this book (and the two that follow in the trilogy) will keep you reading far into the night.