Thankful for...Shiver

You guys, of course, know that Beth Revis is the giveaway queen. You (hopefully) also know that she’s, if not the queen, one of the princesses of dystopia (I'm just going to drop this royalty metaphor right here). Her debut, Across The Universe, was an exciting and very well thought-out sci-fi adventure.

Her latest exercise of her giveaway prowess is in honour of Thanksgiving, and it asks us to share a book we're thankful for. It's got me thinking, which is good on its own, but in her usual style, she's offering a monster prize pack as well. You'd best check that our over at her blog, lest the list of prizes ends up being longer than my part and showing me up.

So, me, I’m thankful for Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater.

When I first got into reading – it must have been around three years ago now – it was after I’d read through the Twilight books over and over again. One day I began rereading them for the umpteenth time, and faults became clear and it lost the magic. But reading felt like my thing by then and I had no idea what else to try, and I had no idea how to find things to try, so it was flipping through featured books at the library or bookstore (R.I.P. local Angus & Robertson. It's a thirty minute train trip to the bookstore now). I was reading because it was just what I did, not because I was enjoying it.


I can't remember how it was that I found Shiver, but I remember that it changed books for me. It was engrossing like the books I was reading before weren't. It was a book to like, rather than just read. I just wanted more like it.

So the next year was spent reading all the books Amazon listed as what customers buying Shiver also bought, hoping that they were a) published here, and b) stocked by my library (though I eventually got to pestering them for the ones they didn't). Thankfully, I now have all of you guys for recommendation needs.

Short story: Everything I read while I was fleshing out my own reading tastes came from searches for similar titles to Shiver. It isn’t one of my favourites anymore, though I still love it, but it helped me settle into my genre and made reading fun again.

So what books are you guys grateful for? Have you already made a post about it like this one? If so, link it to me -- I'd love to read it!