Day Ten of the Ten Day Quick Recommendations: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

It's the final day of our "Ten Day Quick Recommendations"!  While that doesn't mean I won't still be recommending books this summer, it does mean that I won't necessarily post every day as I will be READING!!! READING!!! and READING!!!

For my final recommendation on this mini-tour I want to recommend The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

If there are three books that have had an impact on my life, the first two being Judy Blume's Are You There God, It's Me Margaret and Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, Markus Zusak's The Book Thief is the one that rounds out that trifecta. 

In all of history, WWII and the holocaust are the two major events that regularly influence the world around us ... from political and social comparisons that are often  made to lessons (we hope have been) learned to story lines for books and movies ...  the lives that were lived and lost during the second world war are never far from people's minds.

The Book Thief is unique in that the narrator, the "person" telling the tale, is Death himself.  Death follows the life of a young girl living and surviving during the years of WWII in war-torn Europe.  He offers her story as a gift to the reader, pulling the reader into her life, her decisions, her fate. The "it" factor of this book is that while sharing her life, he also offers insight into the lives of those around her -- other victims, other survivors, other people who are simply trying to live in a world that is changing no matter what their personal, political, or religious beliefs or convictions. 

Usually I read a book in one setting.  I sit down and read - from beginning to end - from the first word to the last.  I couldn't do that with this book.   I HAD to take breaks.  I HAD to stop reading to process the images and thoughts this story provoked.  I HAD to think and live my life beyond the book before returning to the characters and their lives.  Never before, and I truly mean NEVER, has a book had such a profound and powerful pull on me.  And at the end of the book?  I sobbed ...body-shaking-tears-pouring-crying-out-loud sobbed for twenty minutes or more.  And then, after I pulled myself together, I called a friend to tell her about the book and sobbed again.  

THIS BOOK is one book you must read at some point in your life.  Whether today or tomorrow ... whether when you are in high school, college, or beyond ... just remember to put it on your list of "must reads" and read it.  It may very well join the list of books that influence your own life.