Surprise!
On the books that have exceeded my expectations this year.
Somehow, it has taken me sixteen years to pick up The Book Thief.
Perhaps things got in the way. There were stories to write, Arabic verbs to conjugate, a plethora of math problems to work through. Over the years, as I amassed incense sticks and gilded poetry collections and a bookish wish list and cats, time slipped through my fingers (to use a familiar turn of phrase) and Markus Zusak’s crowning achievement sat in a corner of my bookcase for years. I had doubts lacking in a definable origin: For some reason unbeknownst to me, I assumed I would find it…not boring, say, but far removed from my reading tastes.
Life did as it is wont to do, and The Book Thief left its dusty corner on the shelf and positioned itself squarely in my hands, all because my aunt and I agreed to read it together. Situating myself in my home’s lovely library, I began. And by eighty pages in, I knew those doubts were pointless, that the narrator of Death could spin a lyrical and witty sentence like no other, and that this book was a surprise of epic proportions.
I am loving it.
What a colorful flock of words! What a battering ram of descriptions! Lo and behold, The Book Thief is, far from a piece of indifference, a spectacular read that has announced itself as a book of import and one that I am struggling to put down. I think that, as a reader and writer, there are some elements I find myself drawn to more than others, and for me nothing coils more tightly around my heart than theme and language. This is not to say that other elements – character, story – do not matter, but it is to say that when a book sculpts unorthodox language with this level of skill, I am intrigued almost by default.
And this is not the first surprise I have had this year. Stepping up early in the year was Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, which I assumed I would find generic and, well, Midwestern. Like a bop on the head, Ng wove a powerful tale of a family shattering and then reuniting, as though gravity pulled their shattered selves and pummeled dreams back together. At the center of this book is the death of favorite child Lydia under contested circumstances. Ng constructed her novel of mirrors, and all light reflects from one mirror to another, beautifully illuminating a family in crisis from many angles. Lydia herself shifts depending on whose memories she inhabits. The horror of her death, and the agony of those she leaves behind, was palpable and skillfully conveyed with lyrical prose.
All this being said, there have been negative surprises this year, too (I found the pacing of Midnight’s Children to flicker like a guttering candle and then peter out), but these books that come into one’s life with the force of their unexpected power are memorable and crack open the boundaries of my reading horizon, almost like smashing the shell off of a walnut so that the seed within can be consumed and do the body some good. After sixteen years, The Book Thief has finally been given a chance to rainbow my world, and I cannot recommend it enough. There is nothing better than a fine surprise.
