Hooked on the Book

Sometimes when I finish a book I become a little obsessed with it. That's what's happened to me and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. As I type, I'm listening to an archived radio interview with Zusak from 2006, and he is reading an excerpt from the book. I have goosebumps.

Yesterday, I looked up the Geneva Conventions and laws governing civilian targets during war; next I found a hamlet named Olching (but not Molching) on the Amper river, outside of Munich, near Dachau. I learned that 22 civilians were killed there in a stray Allied bombing near the end of the World War II. On another website, I saw postcards of the town-- images that span the 20th century. So that's what it looked like, I thought. Or did it? Zusack's description is never very literal.

Last night, I paused the television show we were watching right in the middle. "I want to talk about The Book Thief," I said, and so we did: About how the reader comes to love the characters not in spite of their flaws, but because of them. About how although you know you will lose them by the end of the novel, you love them anyway. About how this book addresses the questions of why German citizens did not do more to oppose Hitler and the Nazi party-- in this way, it stands out against other WWII literature, especially for kids.

But what haunts me most about The Book Thief, even as humans haunt Death within its pages, is the figurative language. The colors, the smells, the words, the narrator himself-- from the first page I was a vagabond aboard an express train, dusty and sweet. There was no stopping until we got to the end of the line.