Ik vind het leuk om boeken van anybooks te lezen zo leer ik het Engels te begrijpen.

There is only one "book" monster that scared me and that is The Judge from Blood Meridian. I read the book because somone told me it's an "anti-western" which sounded intriguing, but Judge Holden is the scariest antagonist I've ever encountered in literature.

For fantasy it would obviously have to be The Witcher saga which is written by a Polish author. Sapkowski has also written other fantasy novels that have yet to receive translations. I’m from Poland so I have read all of his books as well as some of the science fiction stuff by Stanislaw Lem. His sci-fi books have a bit of a philosophical bend to them, so I don’t know how well they translate to English.

Cthulhu from The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft. Imagine a combination of a dragon and octopus with a humanoid shape and you have some inkling of an idea what Cthulhu looks like. You wouldn't actually want to see this monster, though, as according to Lovecraft, it can drive people insane merely by them seeing how it looks. Fortunately for humanity, Cthulhu remained trapped in the book, but if he were ever to return, then our planet would be in deep, deep trouble.

The Triffids from The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. Menacing, human eating monster plants are not new in literature, they've been around for years and years, but there's just something about the Triffids that terrifies me. Not only can they grow up to ten feet tall, but unlike other plants, these freaking things are mobile, so they can basically chase you down and kill you. Then there's their stingers, which can be up to ten feet long and is used to lash a person in the face to kill them. These plants also don't devour you like the one in Little Shop of Horrors, but simply take root besides your decaying corpse to feast.

The Woman in Black from The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. A lot of people will disagree with me here, but in my opinion, ghosts are monsters, especially the malevolent ones. The Woman in Black is one of my favorite ghosts as you can understand why she is haunting the Eel Marsh House. However, she also causes a lot of pain and suffering for many people, which makes her a monster. The book was written by Susan Hill in 1983, but ignore the sequel that came out in 2014 as it from a completely different author and comes nowhere close to the original.

The Horla from The Horla by Guy de Maupassant. I'll end things off with a bit of an obscure one, but it is an important one nonetheless. It first came out in 1887 and even managed to intrigue Lovecraft, with many claiming that it served as inspiration for his own book, The Call of Cthulhu. The Horla is basically a type of psychic vampire that drains the life force from its victims while they are sleeping. This obviously has an impact on their sanity as they can feel this malevolent presence around them dominating them.

I cannot speak for all readers obviously, but I'll share the books that have been the most meaningful for me so far. Granted, I'm still in my early twenties, so I have a lot of living and a lot of reading left to do, but these are the books that are near and dear to me.

- El amor en los tiempos del cólera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - English readers will know this one as Love in the Time of Cholera and it is an absolutely beautiful book. It is about two people who fall in love during their youth, but after a lot of drama the girl breaks up with the guy. She ends up getting engaged to another guy (who has the approval of her dad, which the other guy didn't), marrying him and living quite an ordinary life. The guy she originally broke up with still loves her deeply, though and still thinks that he has a shot at her heart. To me this book is about true love and it moved me deeply enough that I cried in public while reading it. If this isn't meaningful, then I don't know what is.

- La sombra del viento by Carlos Ruiz Zafón - English readers will know this one as The Shadow of the Wind. This is another book that really moved me and I can heartily recommend it along with it's prequel, El juego del ángel, which was published after it. It is about a boy who learns about the secret cemetery of forgotten books from his father. The catch is that everyone who knows about must choose one of the books to preserve for the rest of their life. After choosing his book, the boy tries to find more by the same author, but without any luck. This is a very simplified description as the book actually also features a story within the story, but read the book to see why it is so meaningful, you won't be disappointed. Suffice to say that it stayed with me so much that I actually saved up to visit Barcelona myself.

- The Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling - Ok, so this one is a bit of a cheat as it is an entire series instead of a single book, but come on, who can pick! This is a series that I think a lot of kids grew up with and it holds special meaning because it teaches you to cope with being an outcast, which is also something all kids deal with.