A beautiful mess…a review of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Sometimes when I sit down to write my blog posts, my book reviews, I find it really tricky to begin…to know where it is that I should start – today is one of those days. I’ve spent the last twenty minutes faffing around googling quotations from The Book Thief (which I’m supposed to be reviewing). It’s helped in a way, the spirit of the book which I finished a couple of weeks ago now has returned to me somewhat. It has also hindered, for it has confirmed to me the enormity of the task I’m trying to complete. I think it’s far, far easier to review a book which you dislike, a book which angers you or a book which you consider poor. To review a book you rate and esteem, that’s a weightier task altogether. And so it is that I find myself struggling for an adequate beginning, an opening if you like. Where to begin?

“Even death has a heart.”  

As you may have already gleaned, I was very impressed by Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, it’s one of those books that you know will stay with you all your life. Aptly, it will haunt you. I say ‘aptly’ because this book is a story about death, and consequently life. It is narrated by the most omnipotent of all narrators, death himself. It opens,

“HERE IS A SMALL FACT

You are going to die.” and then,

“…does this worry you?”

Family, the eternal city and a dollop of Jane Austen for good measure.

I’ve read my way to this latest blog post in rather a roundabout way. A few weeks ago now I read Nicky Pellegrino’s When In Rome and have been mulling it over whilst trying to find time to sit down and blog about it. In the meantime, I’ve busied my reading moments with a book that my Dad got out of the library for me, a collection of essays entitled A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Reasons Why We Can’t Stop Reading Jane Austen. I also decided to simultaneously re-read Pride and Prejudice in order to make my perspective on the essays more fresh. So, as you can see, although absent from the blog-o-sphere, I have been busily reading behind the scenes.

I enjoyed When In Rome, initially I presumed it was going to be the typical boy-meets-girl fodder of your average chick-lit novel, however, this turned out not to be the case. Set in 1950s Rome, the novel is much more about families and the tangled webs that bind them together. Our narrator is a young girl called Serafina who lives in a small apartment with her mother and two younger sisters. Serafina is very much at a crossroads in her life, at nineteen, she cannot continue playing ‘little-mama’ at home bringing up her younger sisters; but must decide upon her place within the world. Does she want to follow in her mother’s footsteps and dress up for an evening’s work, meeting wealthy men in hotel rooms across the city; if not, what course will she take?

New job. New book. New mantra…

Firsty, for those of you looking in for a review of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters as promised at the end of my last post, well, there has been a change of plan. Rather than a review, this post is more of an update about what’s been going on with my reading life over the past few weeks.

A little over a month ago I began a new job and happily anticipated poring over the pages of Wives and Daughters during my new rather heftier commute. My intentions were good. After the first couple of weeks of work, it became abundantly clear to me that Wives and Daughters  was not a book I was going to especially enjoy reading. Within two chapters I was forced to acknowledge to myself that I was, well…bored. Never mind, I thought, I’ll soldier on, I’ve done it before with other books. Then my attitude began to shift. This, I think, is where I began to draw a distinction between reading at home in my armchair, and reading at bus stops and on buses.

Still sitting on the fence…a review of Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.

Well, I’ve finished reading Sense and Sensibility – it’s been an interesting read this one. As I mentioned at the end of my last post I hadn’t read Sense and Sensibility since I was a teenager and back then I wasn’t especially keen on the book. Confusingly, over ten years later, I still find myself sitting on the fence with regards to this book. While I most definitely enjoyed reading it more this time around, I can’t say that it’s ever going to be a book I love. It seems to me that Sense and Sensibility is something of a solid, middle-of-the-road kind of classic novel. It’s well written and plotted and its characters are well-developed, and yet, for me, there is still something a little lacking. There is far less humour to be found in Sense and Sensibility compared to some of Austen’s other works and her satirisation of characters is not as cleverly done as in some of her other writing.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not saying that I found reading Sense and Sensibility unenjoyable, far from it.