The Graveyard Book- Nobody's story

Neil Gaiman won out last weekend. I knew I could count on him to provide me with a real story that would feed my need for story. So I picked up the copy of The Graveyard Book that Aaron and Abby gave me for Christmas.

It is designated "juvenile fiction," but I find that some works in this genre are more compelling than a lot of adult fiction. What matters to me is that is an enjoyable story with interesting characters and both depths and surprises to it. It follows a toddler who escapes death at the hands of a determined killer when the ghostly inhabitants of a graveyard take him in. A couple who never had a child become his parents and a non-living, non-dead gentleman takes the role of guardian.

The book is episodic, looking in on the child at different ages as he learns from the dead around him as well as an occasional living person. The ghosts are varied as they come from different eras of history. Nobody is an appealing child, vulnerable, curious, daring, sweet, and rebellious. How he is at various ages is consistent with children of those ages. He is quite a typical child, if you leave aside that he lives in a graveyard and learns from ghosts and other mystical creatures. But you can't leave that aside and that is what makes the story intriguing. This is a coming of age tale with a definite fantastic bent. It has suspense, horror, yearning, mystery, and a bittersweet ending. Or is it an end? I would love to see the adventures of Nobody Owens as he explores the wider world.

Eat, Pray, Love- Finale (possible spoilers)

I finished Eat, Pray, Love recently. Overall I enjoyed the book and found things in it worth considering. The last section on her time in Indonesia was involving. I was looking forward to it especially after reading the title for that section: "36 Tales about the Pursuit of Balance." Balance is something that I am focusing on in my own life: balance between school life and personal life, balance in where I put my energies at school, balance in terms of being centered and thoughtful in my life. The balance the author is seeking is between pleasure and spirit, or as she put it "what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God." While she seems to find some sense of this by the end of the book, I found a sense of let down as I finished it. In part I found the focus of her quest distracted by romantic developments (will she or won't she), though that is certainly one form of enjoying the world's delights. I also would have enjoyed more at the end about her return to her "regular" life. Pursuing pleasure in Italy and God in an ashram in India are one thing (or two?), but bringing what she learns back to modern day life in our culture would be quite another.

Eat, Pray, Love-Italy & India

I'm two-thirds through the book now. The first section was enjoyable as it was centered on her time in Italy. It also was the part in which she outlined the struggles she was having before she began her quest/journey. That part was more painful. Her tales of Italy spoke of incredibly delicious food prepared with love and deep care. It made my mouth water.

For a fiction book to work for me, I have to buy into it through the often referred to "suspension of disbelief." If you can't suspend the disbelief, you keep pulling yourself out of the story and thus the story does not really work. It loses its power, it casts no spell. With memoirs it seems something else has to suspended. Cynicism and/or being judgemental perhaps? To embrace a memoir fully I have to be open to how the author is experiencing things. I mention this as I process the section about India in the book. Her experiences in the ashram are different in many ways from my life, just as she, as a person, is different in many ways from me. Yet as the book progresses, I find myself noticing more and more the connections between the author and me rather than the differences that I focused on earlier in the book. While her journey is not mine, I am drawn into her experiences and her revelations. I use them as a lens through which to view my own experiences.