One of those perpetually true things about life is that younger siblings never stop being little siblings, regardless of age. For example, my sister and I are five years apart, both very much adults in every sense of the word, but I still catch myself calling her my little sister.
I think she’s mostly resigned to it, at this point. She’s also celebrating a birthday this week, and in honor of the fact that she’s never going to catch up no matter how old we get, I’m going to talk about a few of her favorite books today.
Although we share quite a few favorites, my sister’s tastes in literature are significantly different from mine. For example, she willingly read and enjoyed all of the Twilight books, where I had the reading equivalent of a massive allergic reaction to those things.
Recently, she brought home another vampire series, though, the first of which is “Nightwatch.” This book and its sequels were originally written in Russian by Sergey Lukyanenko and Vladimir Vasilyev. I haven’t read them yet and I’m so obsessive over style that I tend to have an extremely hard time with translated literature, but I have it on good authority that these are worth reading. They’re on my list, and if you’re looking for the Next Fantasy Horror Thing, I suspect that these are a good bet.
My sister isn’t only interested in blood-sucking horror, though. Some of her favorite books from a while ago are Louise Rennison’s “Confessions of Georgia Nicolson” young adult series, the first of which is “Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging.” The books are presented as the diary entries of a dry-witted young British school girl, but don’t be discouraged from reading if you’re not a “young adult” anymore: their charm extends well beyond their original target age group.
I haven’t read all of them, but I’ve got great memories of them anyway, because occasionally my sister would fall off the couch laughing at them and, when I ran into the living room to see if she was OK, she would usually read me the funny parts.
I’m obviously running out of room here to talk about all of my sister’s favorite books (she’s got as many if not more than I do, after all, and these two series are a very limited sampling) but I guess I can summarize her tastes as being both more diverse and more mainstream than mine.
She’s introduced me to a lot of new things to read, and she’s tolerated a lot of my own wacky recommendations over the years. No matter how competitive we are in other ways, I will always be impressed that my sister is kind of a better book nerd than I am (which I mean in the very best way, I can assure you.)
Happy birthday, Meg. I love you!
