The first book I ever remember reading is Looking for Alaska by John Green. As a teenager who was just getting into young adult fiction in the 2010s, your options were slim. You could either read dystopia/fantasy like Harry Potter (I actually never read it) and The Hunger Games (this one’s actually amazing); or you could go the vampire route and read the Twilight series (meh, the movies are better). 

The minute I put down Looking for Alaska, I read every other book that Green had written. He wrote about everyday teenagers just like me, and although I’m not exactly a white American teenager, I found myself engrossed in their lives. And even though he wrote for children, he never treated his audience as such. He touched on themes like death, belonging, mental illness, love, and what it means to be alive.