Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Happy I stuck with it!

I admit it I really struggled to get into Extremely Loud & Incredible Close. I put the NOOK down 100 times and had no desire to pick it back up. If it was not for the fact that I was blogging about this book and that I had preached how you should not give up on a book, I would have given up.

It took me a long time to start to really like this book. For one thing it is written in the first person and the young boy who is narrating the book does so in a very confusing manor. It is like everything that he is thinking he writes down. You are left wondering why are you telling me this? I don't understand why it is important. But at the end of the book everything makes sense. The author does an amazing job explaining how everything falls into place. I would have missed the deeply moving ending if I had given up on the book.

The book is about a journey that the young boy, Oskar, takes to find a lock to go along with a key he find in his fathers closet after the father dies in the World Trade Center on 9/11.  Along the way he discovers so many different things and you learn so much about not only Oskar's life but the life of his Grandmother, Grandfather, and Mom and Dad.

This book is a really hard to read as a person who lived through 9/11. I worried about my husband who was in the city that day and had friends who worked in the buildings and thankfully made it out alive. It is one of the first books I have read that centered on the topic and it is at times extremely emotional. On more then one occasion I shed a tear.

It is also at the heart of it a love story. And as a person who has loved deeply and had their heart broken it brought back a lot of emotions that I thought I had gotten over. That is the mark of a good book, in my opinion, it makes you remember your past, relate to what the characters are going through and be thinking about it even you have finished it.

And I will be thinking about this book for a while now that I am done. So thank you everyone for making me finish it. I am happy I did.

3 comments:

  1. Hi, Ms. Malespina. It's Hadriana here. I really love your blog –- both your design and your posts -- but I especially love this post. I know exactly what you mean when you feel like you want to put a book/Nook down -- whether it is because you don't like where the book is heading or you don't understand the message that the author is trying to get across to you. I really liked how you started your post, by telling the readers that you had a problem of abandoning the book. I find your connection to the 9/11 time very deep, touching and sad (as 9/11 was a sad time). I can connect to when a character in the story had his/her heart broken too, because I used to have a godmother. She was like my second mother, and I really loved her. She was always nice and she really loved me and bought me things that I wanted. However, one day, she got breast cancer. She went to the hospital and was able to fight it, but then her cancer spread … and she died. I was really upset and heartbroken. I also liked how you ended your post, with a short sentence. It really stops the readers and leaves them asking questions. Since I was a reader of your blog, I have a question to ask, too! About how often do you feel like you need to abandon a book and about how often do you actually do it? Thanks; I'm just wondering. Again, your blog post was great!

    -- Hadriana

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  2. Great question. I have abandoned books before. I hate when I do that but there are just some times that I can not get through the book. Recently I read about hundred pages of Discovery of Witches and just could not read any more. I did not like the characters, hated the plot and thought the topic was not great. But there have been times when I have come really close to abandoning a book and come back to it and loved it. For example I love love love the books by Wally Lamb. I started all three of his books and hated them but continued and ended up loving them.

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