Here it is, finally: a book club post.

Despite my lack of blogging about it, the book club has been going strong all this time.  We are now into our fourth season of reading!

Over the summer our task was to read The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak.  Have you read it?  I highly recommend that you do.  It received our highest ever rating: 8.7/10!  That’s pretty remarkable, considering most of the books we read chime in somewhere between 6.5 and 7.5.  One member even gave the book a 10!  Unheard of in our stingy little group!  I gave it a 9.5/10.

This book is rated as Young Adult Fiction, which to me seems to mean a book is so good, adults should read them too.

The book is set in WWII Germany and is told by Death.  While Death makes his rounds amongst the millions of souls he must carry away, he is captivated by the story of Liesel Meminger–a young German girl who finds solace in stealing books.  I found the story very slow at first–I couldn’t quite figure out why I was reading it, why the story was being told.  Then, somehow, somewhere, I was drawn in.  It was partly Zusak’s incredibly visual language, partly his turns of phrase that are innovative and catchy but not alienating, and partly the character of Liesel and her foster parents who turn out to be so much more than typical foster parents.  It’s the relationships Liesel has and the love that grows in them, despite what this skeptical reader expects, that brought me so far into this book.

My absolutely favourite bits: Death describing the souls he carries from one place to the next.  “[T]he boy’s spirit was soft and cold, like ice cream” (pg 21); “Five hundred souls.  I carried them in my fingers, like suitcases.  Or I’d throw them over my shoulder.  It was only the children I carried in my arms” (pg 336); “All of them were light, like the cases of empty walnuts. Smoky sky in those places.  The smell like a stove, but still so cold” (pg 349).

The Book Thief was unlike any book I’ve ever read.  I bet it will be for you too.

*p.s. I like how the title of this post lines up.  One could read it as “Book Book Book: Club the Thief.”*

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