My 3 All Time Favorite Books

So I need to bolster my online presence and someone suggested blogging more.  Well, duh.  The problem is that I am not the best at coming up with topics.  So I Googled it.  It’s what I do, when in doubt, Google.  It suggest some things and I decided to share with you my three most favorite books and why.

• “Alanna: The First Adventure” by Tamera Pierce.  I’d actually recommend the entire quartet but I said book so we’ll go with the first one.  This book was the first fantasy novel I ever picked up and finished.  It’s young adult with magic and action, a little bit of mystery…  It’s about a young woman who wants to be a knight but society says she can’t, so she does it anyway.  A woman after my own heart.  I view this novel as one of the big reasons I write now.  I want to write a story so compelling that the reader can’t put the book down until it’s done.
• “The Last Unicorn” by Peter S. Beagle.  This book is beautiful.  And it has unicorns.  I LOVE unicorns.  I actually saw the movie first in the 80’s but I loved it so much I eventually got a copy of the book.  I like to consider it the last great fairy tale ever written.  It’s the story of a unicorn who searches for the other unicorns that disappeared.  I loved this book so much that I wrote a paper about it in college.  I aspire for my fantasy fiction to have such lovely imagery, like watching a tapestry tell a tale.
• “A Hunger Like No Other” by Kresley Cole.  This was the first paranormal romance novel that I picked up and the cover, of all things, kept drawing me back to it in the book store.  Once I finally had the balls to buy it I was hooked on all of Kresley’s books.  Her prose actually helped me with my POV usage and gave me ideas on how to handle sequels in romance novels.  This book follows a werewolf clan leader who finally finds his fated mate but she is a vampire and his enemy.

Now this is a very short list.  There are a lot of books that I loved and liked and recommend to others.  These three, however, have somehow changed my life.

What are some books that you hold dear to your heart and why?