Sharkboy

Man, the iPod touch is a lot of work. It took me days to update my iTunes and download all the cd covers missing so I could have the pleasure of displaying them when choosing or listening to my music. Of course, being a moron, I took 2 evenings to download over 760 covers missing by copying thumbnails pictures from Amazon, and then was stunned to see how blurry every picture was once on iTunes. One half look from DR told me I was supposed to open the larger pictures first then download them, so there went another 2 evening and part of yesterday. Now that it’s all done and look really good, I can resume my time online.

In between all this misery, I also finished this amazing book:

Apparently, I was the last person on earth to have heard of this book. We were at a dinner talking about Christmas gift lists when a good friend mentioned that Lovely Bones was one of the best book she had ever read but didn’t own, so she has put in on her list for this year. The day after I found myself at World’s Biggest Bookstore and saw it on a display. I picked it up, curious, and read the description: A 14 year old girl gets raped and murdered and watches the aftermath from “her” heaven. Not the kind of chicklit she normally reads, so I decided to give it a try. The first few pages really drew me in and I was hooked. Alice Sebold is a gifted writer, she cleverly let’s us in her world.

I also was quite surprised to read of the author’s own personal history. Beaten, raped and almost killed in her late teens. A few years later, by pure chance, she sees the man that got away, reports his whereabouts, gets him arrested and tried. The man is found guilty of this crime as well as of other rapes and murders/dismemberments that had been left unsolved. She is now married to Glen David Gold, the author of Carter Beats The Devil, about illusionists at the turn of the century.

I’m glad I read this book. A good chunk of the story takes place in heaven, but not your regular God and Angels heaven which would’ve put me off, it’s more like a place where you can spend as much time as you need/want to understand what has happened, be mad, be angry, watch over your loved ones, try to guide them (in her case, she tries to guide them towards her murderer). As she is more ready and willing to accept her sad fate, little by little she gets to visit larger spaces of her heaven and discover other related people to visit with. There is a heartbreaking/heartwarming scene when she is given directions to a meeting through a field in the middle of her heaven she never thought of walking through before. Obvisously our heroine has never played Xbox games where you don’t leave any area unvisited, but then again, the action takes place in 1973, years before video games warped our minds.

Although dealing with teenage rape and murder and anger and revenge and the destruction of families, this book is surprisingly uplifting at times and is certainly full of hope. A difficult task when dealing with a subject better left to Stephen King.

It made me feel like I wasn’t alone thinking departed loved ones might be watching over me.

I first heard of this author and this book from a Top 10 Best of the Year list by Stephen King a couple of years back. I was definitely intrigued as he mentioned that it was so well written that he had to re-read it all over again when he finished. So I kept in on my list of books to buy everytime I found myself at the bookstore.

2 years later, I finally bought it… and read it.

I can’t say that I had the same enthusiasm as Stephen King, I didn’t have the need to jump back to the beginning and go at it all over again, but then again, I have NEVER re-read a novel twice. I’ve read Tintin books more than once, but never a novel. I’ve often seen movies more than once, but never had the need to do it with a book. Although, in 10 or 15 years, I might read the Shopoholic or the Harry Potter collection again.

Case Histories was like nothing I had ever read before. It takes 4 different crime stories, from different decades, in different parts of Cambridge and little by little bring them together by meshing a member of one family with one from another, and so on. All the stories are told through Jackson Brodie, a retired policeman, now a private investigator with a sordid past of his own. I can tell you there are not many happy moments in this novel, but it certainly never is boring. Case Histories is structurally similar to the movie CRASH, sometimes the main character in one storyline will make a cameo appearance in parts of another story.

I found this book to be an amazing study of how lives are destroyed by crimes left unsolved for years, for decades, mainly due to botched investigation, tiny little errors of judgement that could’ve put an end to the sorrow and misery of those left behind by finding the answer right there and then. And how, as humans, we have the need for closure, the need to know what has happened, who is guilty, where missing people have dissapeared to, and just how it consumes us.

The characters keep you interested, but it is really her writing style that captured my attention more. As I was reading, I kept trying to figure out how she did it and kept coming to the same solution everytime, that she must have written it backwards, starting with the end and then decomposing it into 4 different stories… I loved this book.

I just finished reading No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, and Wow! I have never read a book like this before where rules really don’t apply… there are good people, there are bad people, but at the end of the day, none of them matters. All the action, the gore, the reasoning behind the entire story ends anti-climacticly, but then again, perfectly, and we’re left with a grave american lesson. It didn’t bring me to tears or anything, on the contrary, I turned the last page and smiled, I was so happy I had had this reading experience.

From all the previews that I have seen on the upcoming movie by the Coen brothers, it looks like they have litterally taken the pages and turned them into images, there is nothing in the previews that is not in the book, I can’t wait to see it. I found so much pleasure in reading this novel, I really hope the film does it justice. But then again, it’s the Coen brothers, what could go wrong…

…huh… wow!

Yeah, that’s right. I got it. DR and I stood in line for 1.5 hr and bought it for $36.
I’m gonna go to bed now and read a bit… but here’s a taste, if you haven’t gotten it yet:

Chapter One
The Dark Lord Ascending

The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane. For a second they stood quite still, wands directed at each other’s chests, then, recognising each other, they stowed their wands beneath their cloaks and started walking briskly in the same direction.
‘News?’ asked the taller of the two.
‘The best,’ replied Severus Snape.

Now go get your own and enjoy the last of the series.