the lovely bones

I am extremely susceptible to raves from other readers. If someone I like says a certain book is amazing, I have to read it.

I read "The Lovely Bones" when it first came out in 2002. I had just graduated from college. I remember being appalled at the mother leaving the kids and the dead person having sex via another body a la Ghost. I'm not very lenient when it comes to fantastic elements in books, I value realism.

In a discussion about books that make you weep, "The Lovely Bones" came up. And I decided to give it another chance. The first chapter made me weep about the beauty of family love - flashing between the rape and the hum-drum details of the mother waiting for her kids to come home. How humble our greatest desire is - a regular afternoon at home. It's an amazingly affecting novel.

This is the killer passage:
"These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life." (p320)

That passage is so amazing because it turns death into an act of love for the living. Death is not the end as we understand it, it's a catalyst for the loved ones on earth.

I also looked up the movie trailer at http://www.lovelybones.com/ The heaven as CGI madness is tired - wasn't there a Robin Williams movie where he hunted through CGI landscapes of bright colors for his dead wife? But it has lots of good actors so I hope it's a good movie.

I also read "The Impostor's Daughter" by Laurie Sandell, a memoir in graphic novel form about a young girl discovering that her father was not the man he claimed to be. I found it quite gripping when I read it - eager to learn what the truth was.

I also read "Best Friends Forever" by Jennifer Weiner. I like her books, her wry observations and comic characters. "Good in Bed" is such a comforting read, it's like sinking into a bed with fluffy covers. BFF has a lot of the same characteristics - it seems like life is over for the lovable shlump but then... I won't spoil it since it's a new book.



Up next: The Brothers K. I have tried to read this book in the past but was put off by the copious amounts of baseball. But everyone says it's the most amazing book so I want to give it another try.