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Mar. 19th, 2009 10:18 amI've been meaning to read Markus Zusak's The Book Thief since ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lunamystic mentioned it on her reading list last year, and . . . man. I don't generally cry over books, but I don't think a book has brought me this close to tears (in the good way) since I read Octavian Nothing.
And yes, when I started it, a part of me was thinking "not another Holocaust book, I have read how many of these in my life?" but. But. Yes, in one sense it is a Holocaust book, with many of the staples - a Jew hiding in the basement, fear of the Nazis, 'Heil Hitlers' everywhere - but it also has a number of things that are not staples in the least. It's about words and what they can and can't do. It's about Death (personified, although not at all Pratchettian, which I will admit threw me at first) and death (in general). It's about a girl who sometimes saves books and sometimes destroys them, and her foster mother who teaches her profanity and her foster father who plays the accordion, and a German boy who wants to be Jesse Owens and a Jewish man who boxes with the Fuhrer every night in his head and bonds with the girl over nightmares and fistfights.
I promote this book through multimedia:
( Quotes! )
( An image! )
And, last, a video:
(Hilariously, while I was looking for the semi-official video, I also found a vid made using footage from Harry Potter, starring Hermione as the heroine, Ron as her best friend, and Harry as the Jewish fistfighter. OH INTERNET.)
lunamystic mentioned it on her reading list last year, and . . . man. I don't generally cry over books, but I don't think a book has brought me this close to tears (in the good way) since I read Octavian Nothing.And yes, when I started it, a part of me was thinking "not another Holocaust book, I have read how many of these in my life?" but. But. Yes, in one sense it is a Holocaust book, with many of the staples - a Jew hiding in the basement, fear of the Nazis, 'Heil Hitlers' everywhere - but it also has a number of things that are not staples in the least. It's about words and what they can and can't do. It's about Death (personified, although not at all Pratchettian, which I will admit threw me at first) and death (in general). It's about a girl who sometimes saves books and sometimes destroys them, and her foster mother who teaches her profanity and her foster father who plays the accordion, and a German boy who wants to be Jesse Owens and a Jewish man who boxes with the Fuhrer every night in his head and bonds with the girl over nightmares and fistfights.
I promote this book through multimedia:
( Quotes! )( An image! )And, last, a video:
(Hilariously, while I was looking for the semi-official video, I also found a vid made using footage from Harry Potter, starring Hermione as the heroine, Ron as her best friend, and Harry as the Jewish fistfighter. OH INTERNET.)
